Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemJourneys of adaptation of Chinese and Vietnamese international students to academic writing practices in higher education( 2007)The study reported in this thesis explores how Chinese and Vietnamese international students exercise personal agency and mediate their academic writing to adapt to disciplinary practices at an Australian university. It also examines academics' attitudes toward student writing. The study employs a trans-disciplinary framework for interpreting student writing practices and lecturers' views within the institutional structure. This framework has been developed by infusing a modified version of Lillis' heuristic for exploring students' meaning making in higher education with positioning theory. The study documents the complexities and multi-layered nature of the adaptation processes that the students go through in their attempts to mediate their academic writing. A prominent finding of the study indicates the emergence of three main patterns of adaptation, committed adaptation, surface adaptation and hybrid adaptation, that the students employ to gain access to their disciplinary writing practices. The students' process of adaptation arises from their intrinsic motivations to be successful in their courses and to participate in their disciplinary community. However, where they differ is in their internal struggle related to what they really value amongst the possible disciplinary writing requirements they adopt in constructing their texts. The findings of the study show that the students' journeys of adaptation appear to be much more complex than what is often described in the current literature as being largely related to language and cultural factors. The analysis or the students' practices shows that they exercise personal agency by drawing on various strategies to facilitate their understandings of disciplinary expectations. In particular, the students have transformed their own practices through seeking ways to contact their lecturers to deepen their understandings of the disciplinary expectations, ask for feedback on draft versions of writing assignments and go through the redrafting process. The students are quite successful in using different ways to increase their understandings of the disciplinary expectations and even find the process rewarding. This shows that contrary to popular belief, international students in this study are able to demonstrate initiative and problem-solving skills. They actively exercise their own power as students, which allows them to participate in their disciplinary written discourse. The findings also indicate that what is of paramount importance to students' success is the interaction and dialogues they establish with their lecturers. The students' varying practices in spelling out what is expected of them establish a case for the importance of individual factors of each student and that success or failure is likely to relate to the possession of certain dispositions, regardless of one's ethnic background. The positioning analysis of the four lecturers involved in the study shows that they appear to be aware of the needs of international students and are determined to accommodate them in many ways. There are however a number of mismatches in the display of disciplinary knowledge among the academics themselves and between the academics and the students. Yet, in the relevant literature, what challenges international students is often attributed to such factors as English language, study skills and cultural adaptation, which arise from international students themselves. The study reported in this thesis reveals that the inconsistency and subtlety of the lecturers' explanations of the academic expectations makes it more challenging for international students to make sense of what is required of them in specific disciplines. Even though the lecturers attempt to find ways to facilitate students' understandings of the conventions, there is little mutual transformation occurring in terms of negotiating different ways of constructing knowledge. The findings of the study give insights into ways that a dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation can be developed between international students and academics rather than the onus being on exclusive adaptation from the students. The model offers concrete steps towards developing mutual relationships and changes of international students and staff to each other within the overarching institutional realities of the university. Such a dialogical model is put forward as a tool to enhance the education of international students in this increasingly internationalized environment.
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ItemNational policy for research and research training: the case of the Philippines( 2009)Over the past two decades, considerable investigation has been undertaken into the research training of higher degree research students in many parts of the world. However, in developing nations the exploration has been far more limited, particularly concerning the kinds of issues and challenges their higher education systems face. This makes the Philippines an important case, where it is a national priority to develop university research and improve research training practices. This study examined research training in the Philippines from a policy perspective. The study sheds light on the nature of research training of developing nations by (1) describing the context in which it is situated, (2) identifying and examining the issues, challenges that confront government and universities, (3) evaluating the implications of these issues and challenges, and (4) providing recommendations to improve university research and research training in the country. The study’s findings confirm that public and private higher education institutions in the Philippines are largely engaged in teaching while research is a less intense university activity. The current context of university research and research training indicates that the structure of graduate education and training needs improvement in policy and practice domains. The government and universities need to develop new policies and improve practices regarding both staff research training and professional development, and student research education and training. A range of issues and challenges confronting the government and universities have been identified by this study concerning funding, infrastructure, academic staff development, research supervision, student support, quality assurance in research, collaboration and partnerships, research ethics, intellectual property, and research priorities. The most important challenges for government and universities relate to effectively meeting the dual demands of teaching and research, building a critical mass of researchers, and developing excellent research skills and competences among staff and students. The findings from this study have also informed the creation of a timeline that depicts key points in the candidature of masters and doctorate students, particularly identifying coursework, research, and supervision phases, and has identified contributors to the development of student and staff research skills. Together, these provide a basis for considering current and potential research training initiatives. Overall, the study provides a new and comprehensive analysis of the policy issues in research and research training and offering suggestions for advancing policy and practice.