Abstract
Although the Higher Education market is a global one, there are marked differences in the quality and challenges of migration. Being a global scholar but remaining inside the global English speaking tertiary education system can be challenging but it seems even more difficult when changing countries and Universities also means teaching and publishing in a different language. This chapter will explore such challenges by looking at the different perceptions (Continental European versus British influenced education system) of what University is and should be. The shift towards seeing higher education as a tradable commodity is an international phenomena, but the actual processes of re-structuring are going on at very different paces. Therefore academic migrants will almost certainly not just change countries and campuses but also enter a new version of the ‘modern’ University. Accordingly I will discuss issues around questions migrants and Universities should have in mind but often do not. Examples of such questions are the notions to which degree students are seen as clients, the tension between the locality of campus life and the multinational academic faculty, the variations in the concept of research-lead teaching, different national school systems, different ways of learning. Most examples will be drawn from migrant academics working at New Zealand Universities; New Zealand has one of the highest percentages of multinational faculty in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Each time a person moves, the new informal culture needs to be confronted, fragmenting what has been learned previously. This fact is often overlooked: indeed the assumption that one “knows” the job because of previous experience … results in a curious but conspicuous absence of institutional rites of passage’ (Oliver 2004, p. 79).
- 2.
The project has been granted ethics approval by the Victoria University of Wellington ethics committee.
- 3.
I am in the process of doing or planning fieldwork in universities in Denmark, New Zealand and Austria. These are all countries with a reasonably small population, a limited number of universities and intensive restructuring activities at those universities. All three countries also have or aim to have a high or constantly increasing number of foreign academics (see also Bönisch-Brednich forthcoming).
- 4.
Different styles of knowledge delivery in lectures can lead to significant culture clash; students and lecturers alike only notice how much about teaching they are taking for granted when confronted with very unusual, demanding or even autocratic/egalitarian methods of knowledge delivery (Szerdahelyi 2009; Jiménez 2004; Texter 2007).
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Bönisch-Brednich, B. (2014). Cultural Transfer in University Teaching: Academic Migrant Perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand. In: Mason, C., Rawlings-Sanaei, F. (eds) Academic Migration, Discipline Knowledge and Pedagogical Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-88-8_2
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