Academic practice as explanatory framework: reconceptualising international student academic engagement and university teaching
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: This paper joins growing interest in the concept of practice, and uses it to reconceptualise international student engagement with the demands of study at an Australian university. Practice foregrounds institutional structures and student agency and brings together psychologically- and socially-oriented perspectives on international student learning approaches. Utilising discourse theory, practice is defined as habitual and individual instances of socially-contextualised configurations of elements such as actions and interactions, roles and relations, identities, objects, values, and language. In the university context, academic practice highlights the institutionally-sanctioned ways of knowing, doing and being that constitute academic tasks. The concept is applied here to six international students' ‘readings’ of and strategic responses to academic work in a Master of Education course. It is argued that academic practice provides a comprehensive framework for explaining the interface between university academic requirements and international student learning, and the crucial role that teaching has in facilitating the experience.
Author: Margaret Kettle
Institution: Queensland University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W165393403