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Internationalisation
The temporary migration of postgraduate students largely, but not exclusively, from developing
countries to universities in the developed world is a well-documented phenomenon.
The UK government has recently estimated that total global demand for international student
places at the tertiary level could rise from 2.1 million to as much as 5.8 million between
2003 and 2020 (Tysome, 2004). Tourism studies, precisely because of the arguments made
above in respect of tourism’s importance to economic development in many nations, is an
area of a university’s portfolio where such expansion is likely to be felt. In this context the
implications of further growth in postgraduate tourism studies is beginning to be assessed.
Lengkeek and Platenkamp (2004) have coined the term the ‘International Classroom of
Tourism Studies” and Botterill and Platenkamp (2004) have developed the idea further in
what they call Pandora’s box of hope and despair. Pandora’s box is chosen as an analogy
for the practically adequate, critical realist account of the international classroom they have
developed that exposes “the tensions at the intersections between structures and agency
[that] create a dualism of emergent possibilities and dilemmas in the international classroom”
(Botterill and Platenkamp, 2004, p. 3). Perhaps the most significant and hopeful possibility
relates to a radical reform of the orthodoxy of tourism knowledge.
The orthodoxy of tourism (and very often management) studies lies at the centre of the
postgraduate curriculum. A community of mainly white, middle class, male, Anglophone,
western academics, have been the architects of tourism knowledge. It is ‘situated’ knowledge
but is rarely, if ever, acknowledged as such. In the international classroom it is laid
out before an audience of students in which such characteristics are marginally represented.
The possibility here is that tourism knowledge can be reformulated to encompass
a more diverse ‘situatedness’ and that previously silent voices contribute to create ‘new’
tourism knowledge. The dilemma is that the student body largely expects to receive the
orthodox, not to challenge it, exactly because it is the currency that has drawn them thousands
of miles from their homes and supposedly will form the future of their professional
careers and provide the pay back for their own, their families or even sponsoring government’s
investment.
The international classroom challenges the core processes that underlie postgraduate
teaching, learning and assessment. The term postgraduate infers a simplistic coming after
a graduate stage but the multitude of possible experiences of ‘graduateness’ that is
imported into the international classroom confounds such simplicities. The complexity
might be displayed in the differences of previous experience of what makes a ‘good’ student
or tutor, what are acceptable conventions in assessment (i.e. citation and plagiarism),
and discipline-informed or culturally founded learning styles (i.e. rote learning as contrasted
against problem-based critical learning). The differences are not confined to the
international dimension of our postgraduate classrooms particularly when ‘graduateness’
is substituted with relevant industry experience in our ‘local’ mature students but this complexity
can create enormous tensions between possibility and dilemma. How should tutors
‘be’? What should students ‘do’? What outcomes are expected from teaching and learning?
Whose standards should be applied to the outcomes to judge quality? This is a long
list of pressing questions about the implications of the internationalisation of postgraduate
tourism studies for the international students. To it we should add ‘What are the implications
for home students and the development of tourism studies worldwide’? |
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Posted: 3-16-2009 22:13
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