Presentation Schedule
Fostering Mutual Acculturation and Creativity: From the Perspectives of Participation, & Ungrading (93731)
Session Chair: Siti Vibriyani
Thursday, 15 May 2025 13:15
Session: Session 3
Room: Room 608 (6F)
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
When international students go to university in a foreign country, one key issue is adjusting to the new academic culture. Beyond obvious linguistic issues, class participation can be challenging. For example, when students from high-power distance cultures (Ting-Toomey & Chung, 2020) like East Asian countries come to a country with a low-power distance culture like Canada, they might face various problems because Canadian universities require students to actively contribute to class discussions and can even include participation in the grading scheme. Thus it is significant for international students to adjust to this academic norm of speaking up in class. On the one hand, as Shafaei et al. (2015) point out, international students who adjust to local academic standards have more positive experiences through their academic life. That said, Kunst et al. (2021) argue that in the process of acculturation, it is important to emphasize “mutual acculturation” where both the majority groups and immigrants change. This begs the question: how can universities create an environment for international students to get acculturated more easily so they can benefit from better participation?
This paper proposes implementing the pedagogies of "ungrading" (Blum, 2020) and "creative expressive writing" (Irwin, 2022) as collaborative means to help students adjust to local academic standards, while simultaneously helping them better acculturate as well. Suggestions include students creating a participation portfolio as well as reflective and creative journaling. In this way, university classes become places for empowerment where international students can be knowledge creators rather than knowledge receivers.
Authors:
Ai Ishida, University of Toronto, Canada
Jonathan Mendelsohn, York University, Canada
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Ai Ishida is a University Postdoctoral Fellow or Instructor at University of Toronto in Canada
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