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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ItemOn being an academic: a study of lived experience( 2003)To be an academic and work in an Australian university at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to be caught in a web of change, contradiction and turmoil. Amidst this tumult, academics are experiencing increased pressure to maintain high levels of performance, and university life is expected to continue as normal. However, to describe what normal means for higher education today (indeed for any age) would be to answer a great vexed question. As Australia awaits the blueprint for reform of higher education that is to be released with the May 2003 budget there is much hope that things in the future will be different, that the pressures on the higher education system will lessen, and that academics will be able to focus on the core elements of being an academic. Regardless of the outcome of this or any reform there is inevitability that life for the academic will continue to follow paths that are coloured by traditional understandings of what constitutes the life and work of the academic. Admittedly, the time and place where academics live and enact their academic work will influence the lived experience of each academic thus rendering it extremely difficult if not impossible to offer a simple or unified description of what it is to experience life as an academic. However, understanding the meaning of such experiences is important to shaping the future directions in academic life. One vehicle to achieve this understanding is through researching lived experience. This study seeks to uncover the points of unity that academics experience in their daily work, to identify the similarities and differences amongst academics as they face the challenge of working in a university at this period of time, and to provide academics with the voice to define and describe what rests at the core of their professional being. Ultimately, this study provides the opportunity for academics to comment on the uniqueness of their lived experience of academic life and to move towards defining the essential nature of being an academic. This study is located in a large, established university in a metropolitan capital in Australia. Academics from varying disciplines and at different levels of academic appointment participated in the interviews for the study conducted in the closing years of the twentieth century. Fifteen academics were interviewed on a bimestrial basis over a sustained period of time (over two years for most participants) and three academic managers from the university chancellery participated in a single interview. The focus of each of these interviews was to describe the lived experience of being an academic and to determine the meaning of what it is to be an academic in today's world. The theoretical framework for structuring this study is that of hermeneutic phenomenology and the guiding objectives for the study were to identify meaning in the lived experience of being an academic and to understand how being an academic is experienced today. The study draws heavily on the existing knowledge of higher education and academic life. The literature review addresses the phenomena influencing higher education and examines the responses of higher education to accommodate such globalising trends. Policy decisions in Australia that have shaped higher education and influenced the direction of academic life and work are also explored in this review. Clear from this review is that the extant body of knowledge reports strongly and offers significant commentary on the influences shaping academic life. What is missing in this body of knowledge is clarification of the meaning of what it is to be an academic living and working in today's world. Accordingly, in identifying the essential elements of what is required for an academic to be an academic, this study attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by presenting and re-presenting that matter that constitutes the phenomenon of being an academic. The analysis of data and findings of this research utilise strongly the voices of the participants in this study. The integrative themes of the Boyer scholarships (1990) have been employed to present the elements identified as essential to the phenomenon of being an academic. A phenomenological narrative is included to capture the lived experience of the participants in the study and to describe the phenomenon of being an academic. The study concludes with an overview of the significant outcomes of the study presented as challenges to the key stakeholders influencing academic life and also includes suggestions for further research.