Developing the global graduate: First year university students' conceptualisations of culture

Developing global graduates or global citizens is a goal often expressed in university mission statements or strategies and is associated with qualities such as the ability to take an ethnorelative view, to challenge... [ view full abstract ]

Developing global graduates or global citizens is a goal often expressed in university mission statements or strategies and is associated with qualities such as the ability to take an ethnorelative view, to challenge stereotypes and to embrace multiple perspectives.

This study will consider how first year undergraduate students from four disciplinary areas conceptualise culture in the context of a research interview and in doing so, display the qualities associated with being a global graduate or a global citizen. The study draws on Holliday’s (2011) distinction of essentialist, non-essentialist and critical cosmopolitan views of culture and his proposed elements of an interpretivist agenda.

Data show evidence of essentialist as well as non-essentialist conceptualisations of culture. The latter are displayed through active resistance to essentialist discourses and the techniques of thick description and bracketing. This suggests that some of the qualities associated with the global graduate or global citizenship are evident from the start of students’ university careers.

References

Holliday, A. (2011). Intercultural Communication and ideology. Los Angeles: Sage.

Dippold, D. (2015) Classroom Interaction: The Internationalised Anglophone University. Basingstoke: Palgrave.