Joellen E. Coryell1, Maria Cinque2, Monica Fedeli3, Angelina Lapina-Salazar1, Concetta Tino3
1Texas State University (USA)
2Libera Università Maria Santissima Assunta (ITALY)
3Università degli Studi di Padova (ITALY)
Abstract
Europe’s higher education (HE) systems are seeking to improve university education and addressing the needs for learning in an ever-increasing international diversity of student populations. Likewise, Italian university faculty, with their increasing numbers of international graduate programs offered fully in English, are reflecting on their pedagogical strengths and needs. This research was funded by the Fulbright Commission to investigate the perspectives of Italian university faculty who teach international graduate students in English about their experiences and the instructional professional development in which they have engaged and desire more of to teach internationally diverse student populations.
Keywords: internationalization of higher education; instructional professional development, international graduate programs, English as the language of instruction
The European Commission asserted that internationalization “must move into the very centre of the university or college strategy and development” (2013, p. 50). Green and Whitsed (2013), however, found that faculty often “feel informed, supported, underprepared, and under-confident when it comes to internationalisation” (p. 2). One approach for European university
internationalization where English is not the native language is to provide graduate programs with English as the medium of instruction (EMI). In fact, in Italy, Broggini and Costa (2017) found that 85% of universities offer courses and/or full programs in English to improve institutional reputation, recruit international students, and prepare domestic Italian students for the competitive global market.
These offerings attract national and international students who enroll with various cultural influences along with academic preparation and life experiences that can enrich both teaching and learning. Yet, both domestic and international students in these programs often lack sufficient academic proficiency in English, and faculty often struggle without training and support for teaching international students and for teaching in a foreign language (Aguilar & Rodríguez, 2011; Pulcini, 2015). Unfortunately, there are few organizational and instructional professional development (IPD) opportunities in Italy to support teaching internationally-diverse students and to guide EMI teaching and learning (Broggini & Costa, 2017; Costa, 2017; Campagna & Pulcini, 2014).
This paper offers research that was conducted to learn more about the experiences,
knowledge, culture, and needs for teaching in Italian EMI graduate programs that attract international learners. We first provide the context of the study, and briefly introduce the cross-national team of researchers. We then provide the theoretical framework, research design, and the findings from three
146 subsequent publications that focused on various components of the research. Finally, we offer
resultant implications for practice and future research.
Study Context
In 2018-2019, Coryell was awarded a US-Italy Fulbright Core Scholar Grant to work in Rome on a project titled, Transnational, Cross-Cultural Learning and Instruction: The Investment in the Professional Development of University Educators and Students. The research component of this award included working with Italian adult education faculty members to design the study including Cinque (LUMSA), Fedeli and Tino (UNIPD), as well as a doctoral candidate at TXST, Lapina-Salazar.
We created an online survey to query Italian professors about their experiences of teaching international graduate students in EMI courses and programs, as well as their engagement in and desire for future IPD to learn about teaching internationally diverse students.
Theoretical Framework and Research Design
Situated cognition framed the study. As such, we recognize that participants, values, beliefs, behaviors, resources, and other contextual factors of educational communities greatly influence learning and development (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Situated cognition is comprised of four elements: the content, the context, the community of practice, and participation.
Briefly, the content in this study involved the knowledge, skills, and thinking that occurs within
disciplines and in university learning processes. The context included the instructional environments in Italian university graduate courses where English is the medium of instruction and which includes often competing priorities, values, culture, politics, and instructional traditions within academic disciplines.
The community of practice (CoP) is comprised of the participants (faculty, students, administrators) who interact with reflection on their practice and communicate co-constructed understandings and knowledge during learning opportunities. Finally, participation includes the interactive engagement among instructors with each other, students, and instructional materials within the socio-cultural settings of Italian universities, departments, and faculties. Here, we focused closely on faculty experiences, learning, and IPD - viewed as functions of the context, actions, behaviors, and culture in which they occurred.
A mixed-method research design was employed and included an online survey. The link to the survey was sent to five Italian universities to forward to any faculty who were teaching graduate courses in English in which international students were enrolled. The survey comprised Likert-type, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions informed by IPD literature.
Research questions included:
1. What attitudes, behaviors, values, and teaching skills do faculty believe are needed to teach today’s diverse learners in HE?
2. In what ways, using which resources, and from whom do faculty learn about teaching international students?
3. How might these experiences inform future IPD during globalization and HE internationalization?
Data were gathered from 195 participants who had university teaching experience spanning 0 to 20+ years. Participants included 52 professors, 80 associate professors, 52 assistant professors, and 11 other teaching professionals. Males comprised 65.5%, 33.3% were females, and 1.0%
unspecified. Academic sectors varied with 46.2% from the social sciences and humanities, 34.4%
from physical sciences and engineering, and 19.5% from the life sciences. Participants reported that their students came from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Micronesia, Australia, and New Zealand.
147 Over half (67%) of the respondents taught in full graduate programs delivered in English. Quantitative data were analyzed with descriptive statistics and the open-ended question data were analyzed
utilizing qualitative thematic methods.
Selected Findings
Findings offer culturally nuanced insights about the contexts, perspectives, attitudes, values, resources, and IPD participants indicated were important for teaching international graduate students.
Insights into values-driven instructional practices, culturally responsive teaching, linguistic support, and active teaching and learning techniques are provided to inform future IPD. Here we provide an overview of the findings from recent publications of the project.
UNIPD Case Study
The first article (Coryell et al., 2019) was centered on our largest sub-sample of faculty respondents. Respondents from UNIPD equaled 131, and demographic data mirrored that from the larger survey participants. In this report, we analyzed the quantitative data gathered to identify faculty perceptions of attitudes and values needed to teach international students, ways respondents learned about teaching these students in their courses, and future IPD to which these participants wanted access.
When asked to identify attitudes/values necessary for successfully teaching international graduate students, the top responses included openness (81 respondents), inclusiveness (93), flexibility (71), and intercultural awareness (70), followed by curiosity (48), cultural adaptability (44), and adaptability to change (41). Findings “help us to understand that these instructors believe teaching is values-driven, and faculty who are teaching diverse students likely need to reflect deeply on their own personal values, theories, and goals as they engage and improve their practice” (p. 37).
We found that UNIPD respondents had learned about teaching international students in
workshops/seminars offered by UNIPD (47 respondents), through international travel (37), books (23), academic conferences (22), mentors (18), and videos (17).
Notably, 39 of these faculty acknowledged they had not learned about teaching international students prior to the survey. When asked to choose from a list of IPD topics they would like to know more about, active learning strategies, building critical thinking skills, teaching in English, and collaborative learning or groups/team-based learning were the topics most often selected. Over eighty-five percent of the participants were interested in learning more to improve their teaching practices. Of the modalities listed for which they preferred to engage in IPD, 60% chose workshops or seminars offered by UNIPD, with additional opportunities through websites, international travel, workshops offered by outside organizations, conferences, and videos.
Italian Faculty Perspectives on University Teaching in Global Times
A subsequent article (Coryell et al., 2021) was published in the Journal for Studies in
International Education. The data analyzed included the full respondent pool (N=195) and reported findings regarding the differences Italian faculty perceived between international graduate students compared with domestic students, the IPD respondents had engaged and that which was desired in future to teach international learners, and finally their recommendations for others interested in teaching international students in future.
Sixty-four percent of faculty respondents believed teaching international graduate students was different from teaching Italian students. Analysis showed that linguistic and cultural differences underpinned respondent perspectives. “Teaching in a non-native language” with foreign participants was found to be time-consuming in lesson preparations, identifying resources, and in-class
communications (p. 7).
Additionally, participants highlighted different cultural perspectives on teaching and learning
148 that influenced faculty’s instructional approaches and interactions in class. Respondents shared that international students’ diverse cultural backgrounds, academic preparations, and examination
expectations required cultural adaptability in teaching and interacting, incorporation of cross-cultural disciplinary examples and materials, adjustments for contextualization and varied explanations of new content, modifications in teaching strategies, and explanations about or changes to assessments.
Participants, however, also emphasized that having international graduate students in their courses provided rich opportunities for building meaningful interactions and relationships across cultures – both with other students and with instructors – and promoted exchange of ideas and perspectives about the discipline, communications, learning, and work. Faculty also provided important data about how they had learned about teaching international students and about additional IPD they desired.
The top-rated professional development modalities included international travel (n=71), IPD workshops/seminars at their own institutions (53), conferences (47), and books (45). Similar to the findings from the UNIPD case study, participants (53) from the larger sample acknowledged they had not learned about teaching international students. For future IPD, contributors overwhelmingly chose workshops and seminars at their institutions (n=110). They also selected international travel (51), conferences (44), and websites (42) as the topmost viable formats. When asked about
recommendations for others who may teach international graduate students, participants stressed the importance of building relationships and getting to know their students, inclusion of active learning and teaching strategies into their lessons, acquiring formal and informal IPD, increasing English proficiency, engaging in international experiences to improve teaching and intercultural interactions, and networking with faculty members about teaching.
Values and Attitudes Needed for Success
The most recent publication is in-press and was authored by Coryell and Salcedo, a current doctoral student at TXST. In this chapter, we analyzed the data from four survey questions that resulted in both quantitative and qualitative data analysis on the values and attitudes respondents (N=195) believed were important for successfully teaching international graduate students. We also identified implications for IPD from these analyses.
Regarding perspectives about the values/attitudes necessary, participants were asked to choose as many as they felt applied from among 13 options that previous research had identified.
Similar to the UNIPD case study and without finding significant differences across rank, gender, or teaching experience, over half of the respondents chose openness (n=120), intercultural awareness (112), inclusiveness (111), and flexibility (100). As well, 69 participants chose cultural adaptability, and 66 chose both adaptability to change and curiosity. Continuous improvement garnered 54 clicks, and creativity was selected 54 times.
Finally, not quite a quarter of participants (23.5%) chose both commitment to individualized learning and students’ cross-cultural development, while social equity and a results orientation were selected by only 15.9% and 8.2%, respectively. When asked about their perceptions of their
colleagues’ attitudes toward international graduate students, 160 of the 195 believed attitudes were between slightly to moderately positive to extremely positive.
Positive attitudes derived from favorable perceptions of internationalization, cultural diversity, and global perspectives that resulted from interactions with international learners. However, while participants highlighted their own and their peers’ positive attitudes toward international students, respondents also offered insights into the challenges that were present in their courses including varying levels of academic preparation and expectations of international students, faculty’s negative attitudes about changes they needed to make when teaching diverse learners, and the difficulties of teaching in English.
149 Implications for Theory and Practice
The findings underscore the opportunities present when scholars, instructional designers, administrators, and faculty work to understand the context, content, and participation within
instructional CoPs. Within the community of teaching and learning practice of EMI graduate courses in Italian universities, our findings suggest there is attention and value placed on global perspectives and cultural diversity, as well as on instructional practice, efficacy, and IPD activities. Our findings
emphasize connections between effective teaching, student learning, learner satisfaction, and employability are underpinning HE’s organizational/ cultural contexts in Italian university CoPs. With regard to the context and content, we found that, similar to previous authors’ findings, Italian
graduate faculty members who teach in English find international learners to help in increasing global perspectives and in contributing culturally and socially to the university community (Jin & Schneider, 2019; Coates et al., 2014). As well, in alignment with previous research (Costa & Murphy, 2018), we found
approaches to addressing cultural differences (varying student backgrounds, attitudes, and educational preparations) required adaptation of content and instruction, including
internationalizing the curricula, providing examples and cases from outside the national or local context, and taking time to ensure international students understood the expectations of instructional formats and assessments [in Italy] (Coryell et al, 2021, p. 16).
The community in the current study included non-native English speakers, both faculty and students, as interactive participants in the EMI context, and this resulted in both benefits and challenges for teaching and learning. Similar to Fedeli and Taylor’s (2016) work, faculty participants valued
opportunities to participate within the CoP with others who teach international students, with faculty and programs in other countries, as well as with and among their diverse learners. Many (though not all) believed continued IPD about teaching and learning was essential.
Findings across the three articles offer ways of situating and informing IPD regarding Italian faculty motives, expectations, and needs directly, as well as within the larger IPD contexts of research and teaching around the world. Implications for professional development include designing
opportunities for faculty to reflect on their teaching philosophies, to learn about learning and teaching theories, and to develop knowledge and skills for interacting effectively with diverse learners. Content of future IPD should further include ways of supporting diverse students in-class and in the university context; active, collaborative, and comparative learning strategies; critical problem-solving;
connectedness; perspective taking; and English language proficiency for teaching.
Additionally, we found that faculty appreciate learning in both formal and informal ways, and value the opportunity to attend professional development offered through the home-university context. As analysis indicated many of our participants identified as members of a larger community of instructional practice across globalizing universities, we emphasize professional developers
acknowledge and design for a variety of learning modalities that include opportunities for networking, cross-national and cross-disciplinary collaboration, international experiences through travel and conference participation, and learning through videos, books, and websites.
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