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Moving campuses is part of an academic career; it is surprising, then, how little attention has been paid to such mobilities in the past. It is only with the increasing tendency for academic mobility to become international that such processes have become a topic of scholarly research (Kolapo 2009). The positive glow projected on to an increasingly global knowledge economy has tended to disguise the realities of an academic mobility which is presented as part adventure, part positive career move. The fact that migration is always unsettling and hardly ever easy tends to be underestimated by academic migrants and their new universities alike. Academic migration is often based on the assumption that moving campuses and departments is happening in a safe realm of disciplinary attachment and a universal academic culture that works on a pan-university level (Bönisch-Brednich 2010, p. 172).

The unexpected differences, however, are often most acutely felt when the migrant encounters his or her first class of local students. As David Mills and Mark Harris have pointed out, ‘teaching is not just a dialogical relationship between pedagogue and pupil. It is a social process occurring within institutions, each with their own unique histories and pedagogic cultures’ (2004, p. 3). And, in an auto-ethnographic analysis of her first career moves as a young lecturer, Caroline Oliver describes moving campuses within England as a process of ‘constant and sustained re-evaluation, particularly when working in different institutions’ (2004, p. 75; see also Wilmore 2004). She and others in the same volume reflect on regional differences, specific local condition and intrinsic rituals of (non)communication that, despite the general restructuring of the British higher-education system, have made shifting within their home countries a testing experience.Footnote 1 Migrating to another country and university multiplies the feelings of fragmentation; moving to New Zealand also often means a move from a university system that is dominated by locally born and bred academics to a university with a highly international mix of faculty.

In the process of settling in at Victoria University in Wellington 10 years ago, I – at first – did not notice that I had arrived, in terms of its academic faculty, at a multi-national campus. Too busy negotiating my own way into the new and unfamiliar systems I did not notice that, in some departments, Kiwis were in the minority. Until very recently, however, we had only one New Zealander in our own department. Everybody else was Australian, North American/Canadian or British. The percentage of international academic staff at my university, was nearly 50 %, and according to the international statistics of Times Higher Education it is still rising. Otago University has nearly 70 % foreign academics, Auckland University 60 %. It was fascinating to discover that, though New Zealand has the highest proportion of international faculty in the world, this fact was not discussed; indeed, some universities do not even have reliable data concerning their migrant academics. Neither were there special mentoring programmes; nor any significant reflection on what that actually means in terms of the functioning of the university; nor any reflection on the question of how foreign academics deal with the settling in process, of retention rates (with many leaving after 2 years) nor of the integration of these ‘strangers’ into the administrative levels of the university.

I began my own work in this area using two methods of fieldwork. First, I started an auto-ethnographic project, keeping a diary on my own life as a migrant academic, my impressions and my experiences of culture clash and discovery; to a certain extent that can also be seen as participant observation. Second, I started a series of conversations on the subject with my academic colleagues in New Zealand.Footnote 2 In addition, I asked universities to supply me with statistical data about their multi-national mix of faculty. My aim was to use a mix of methods: to look at migrant narratives, the stories scholars use to make sense of their migration experience; and to look at cultural difference in bureaucratic procedures and possible responses to foreign staff by local academics, (for example gossip, accounts of actual meetings and conflicts or supportive and helpful actions).

Investigation into the field of academic migration requires us not only to look at research, teaching and administration but also at the fields of engaged contact with local people such as students, academic colleagues and administrators. If the global transfer and trading of knowledge in the tertiary-education sector is the central focus of this volume, looking at the interaction between faculty and students forms a vital part of such an investigation. Teaching is only one of the various realms that can change significantly when moving not just campuses but also countries. Teaching is a vital part of our working life and is often an arena in which the conflict of cultures plays out in the open. That can be painful in itself but can also accelerate the settling and unsettling of foreign academics. This is also an area which lends itself to the forming of key narratives by academic migrants and many stories, some funny, some deeply reflective, some resentful in tone, and some joyous, are centred on the migration experience in the classroom. I shall discuss several such narratives in this chapter as they illustrate some of the central themes in what it means to be a teaching migrant academic. I shall address those themes by re-telling four topical stories that will open up areas of contention, of (mis)understanding and of projection and comprehension in faculty-student interaction.

Although my project was comparative in its original design,Footnote 3 this chapter will focus on academics who moved to New Zealand and/or Australian universities. Because New Zealand has only eight universities and, therefore, a comparatively small number of academics in any given discipline, I have decided not only to use pseudonyms but to present my ethnographic data in a way that protects the colleagues and students who agreed to work with me. The ethnographic data in this chapter will be presented in ways that will make it impossible to identify individuals while still presenting accurate accounts of their experiences and narratives. To achieve this I have merged my sample of academic migrants into an imaginary Aotearoa Campus and avoided linking them to their disciplines. Some academic participants have been ‘re-located’ into an imaginary department (cf. Sparkes 2007), while several conversations with postgraduate students represent an actual focus group discussion. To do justice to myself being an academic migrant, auto-ethnographic methodology is applied in order to integrate some of my own experiences.

1 On Binding Legal Issues and Being a Service Provider

Gabriele, an Austrian migrant, arrived at the Aotearoa Campus with good English, a good PhD, some experience in teaching and an eager intention to make a good start in her new job as a lecturer. Four weeks into her first teaching term, she began to feel that the students in one of her courses did not seem to work hard enough. She told them quite firmly that she expected them to come to class well-prepared, with questions in mind and good notes and to show ambition. When she took the class again, a week later, hardly any difference in attitude was discernable. Determined that her students achieve the course learning targets, she did what seemed to her the only logical solution: she gave them a surprise test in week 6 and marked it – hard. That wake-up call, she was sure, would get them going. In week 7 she was summoned by the dean of her faculty. A significant number of students had laid an official complaint against her. She had broken several written and unwritten rules of the university’s teaching code. She could have lost her job as she was still on probation, but she was lucky enough to be dealing with a dean who could analyse the conflict for what it actually was: a clash of cultures in teaching and learning.

She had not been aware that, when offering a course of study, there are several legal agreements which bind the university, the lecturer and the student in a contractual relationship. The course outline is a legal document stating clearly what the learning objectives are, when assessments are happening and which forms of assessment will be set, and the lecturer is totally bound by it. The students, for their part, have to meet the course requirements in administration and assessment. Such legal contracts are common in universities which have been cut off from secure state funding and reflect universities’ need for legal security: they are contracts with paying students, reflecting the realities of the contemporary knowledge economy.

Migrants recruited from an environment that still works on the principles of freedom of research and teaching will be forced to acknowledge and accept a shift in power balance, where the lecturer is a service provider and the student a customer who potentially ‘buys a degree’. When significant amounts of money are changing hands, students are moved into the role of customers/clients who are entitled to receive service value for their fees. Contractual documents such as a course outline are therefore structured to meet the perceived needs of students rather than making room for the kind of authority and expertise of the academic teacher which defines the student’s status as that of an apprentice. The academic then ceases to be a professor and becomes the course coordinator, bound also by the unwritten code of ‘no surprises’, of valuing the student as a paying customer. Such legal arrangements have led to low expectations of the responsibility that students themselves have to take for their learning experience and correspondingly high expectations of ‘spoon feeding’ students at undergraduate level.

All these binding legal issues and the underlying consequences of neo-liberal restructuring can strike an academic migrant unawares. As the global trade in degrees intensifies, stories such as Gabriele’s are rapidly turning into narratives from a glorious but nearly forgotten past. Younger academic migrants have mostly been educated into the new academic persona of a self-managing, self-auditing milestone-aware employee. Brett de Bary, using Cris Shore’s and Susan Wright’s terming of academics as ‘self-actualizing agents’ (2000, p. 61), has pointed out how ‘the ideals of accountability and self-management prescribed by the university as an institution register in the individual conduct of university employees’ (2010, p. 7). So, the incongruent combination of an academic migrant identity as a self-directed scholar with the neo-liberal principles that govern New Zealand (Peters 1997; Malcolm and Tarling 2007) universities is one that applies mainly to mid-career and senior scholars; for them, it has often resulted in feelings of disempowerment and even in the loss of the framework of assured academic leadership appropriate to their level of scholarly expertise.

2 Student Perceptions of Migrant Academics: A Storytelling Session

When I last paid Aotearoa Campus one of my visits, some locally born and bred graduate students offered to participate in a focus group to discuss their undergraduate and graduate experience at their university. They remarked that a bit of informed and entertaining reflexivity is always a welcome opportunity for intellectual procrastination. Their department is a fairly typical one in their faculty in terms of international mix of staff : of the 10 permanent staff members, only three were Pakeha (white New Zealanders of European ancestry), two were from Britain, three North American/Canadian, one Chinese, one Australian and one Dutch; there were no academics with a Maori or Pacific background. As the students were well aware of the nature of my research project, I encouraged them to discuss their learning experiences with the different members of staff in an international context. To my surprise they charged into half an hour of very entertaining reminiscences about the personalities of their lecturers and supervisors. Adam, the Australian lecturer, was funny and lighthearted and always happy to side with student concerns; Annabelle, English, was strict, young, a fantastic scholar, a bit elitist and unable to listen; Marc, from Canada, was incredibly helpful, always there for the students, personable but quite controlling as a supervisor; Geert, Dutch, was ambitious, highly internationally active and demanding as a lecturer; Lucy, from Hongkong, was a great teacher, although her accent was hard to understand; she was always well prepared for lectures, worked hard and if you played by the rules you could do very well indeed.

When I asked the students how they had actually dealt with presumably very different styles of teaching and even beliefs of what good teaching entails, since they had been taught by such an international group of scholars, they fell silent. One of them said, ‘it always comes down to personalities doesn’t it? I mean you either get on with someone or you don’t’. And the others more or less agreed, slightly puzzled about what I was driving at.

I then tried a different approach and asked them to discuss the teaching styles of their lecturers. How many readings did they give? How did they check whether students had actually done them? What lecturing style did they have? Socratic, straight teaching, how much technology did they use and offer? How did they use Blackboard? How did they communicate with students? Which readings did they set and did they prefer certain schools of thought?Footnote 4

The lecturers differed in age and therefore their use of new computer systems or media seemed mostly to reflect their ability and willingness to adapt to the new technologies. In terms of teaching styles, however, the setting of readings and the teaching of tutorials, clear differences emerged which, to me, seemed quite clearly linked to their own student experience in their home countries and their varying degrees of success in accommodating a New Zealand culture of teaching. And these differences were noticed and somehow accepted by the students, albeit not actively reflected upon. For them such cultural and social differences were linked to their lecturers’ personalities.

I will recount only two striking examples here, which are both obvious and simple. When discussing Annabelle, the young lecturer from Great Britain, who had left New Zealand some time ago to take up a position overseas, the students remarked that she very much favoured readings from Britain, that she was very much ‘British School’ and that she had acute reservations about the quality of scholarship in the ‘colonies’ (this was handled as an ongoing joke with funny anecdotes attached). The students also recalled that she had strong reservations about the New Zealand policy of open entry to universities and about ‘mollycoddling’ Maori and Pacific students, but put great emphasis on supporting the bright and promising students and pushing them to do their postgraduate work overseas.

Then the students discussed Marc from Canada who was generally very much liked but seen as slightly eccentric. They recounted that he set many more readings than his Kiwi colleagues and had wide-ranging and precise assessment systems which forced the students to work hard but also pressed them into a very restricted and guided learning environment. He had a tendency to favour North American literature, something the students perceived as a good way of balancing out other more British-orientated scholars in the department. When they discussed his tendency to micromanage the students, they called it ‘spoon feeding’, one of the graduate students remarked, somewhat dryly, that there surely was nothing special about this seeing that Marc was from Canada?

Incidentally, their stories about Geert, the Dutch lecturer, seemed to mirror my own pathway of teaching and relating to New Zealand campus culture to such a degree that I asked him for a meeting to discuss these issues in more detail. I will return to this conversation in the third part of this chapter.

So what are the issues that emerge from my meeting with the students?

Lecturers are primarily seen as having different personalities; the marked cultural differences in their approaches to teaching and learning are noticed but subsumed into a more holistic take on them as ‘characters’. New Zealand students seem to take the international mix of staff for granted. They do not seem to have serious issues with the very different teaching styles despite experiencing them as quite contradictory at times. Because they accept these differences as attached to the personalities of their teachers they try and adapt their learning styles to the staff in the department, and also sign up for courses that are taught by their favourites. They seemed to appreciate the choice of international mix on offer, even when the underlying reasons for the huge variety in teaching methods had not been reflected upon in terms of cultures of teaching.

Lecturers with non-English-speaking backgrounds, who therefore had strong ‘foreign’ accents and displayed some grammatical oddities, were viewed as more foreign than the academics from the English-speaking world, and they were sometimes avoided or commented on in a slightly despairing way (‘I just could not get what he/she was trying to say, it was too hard’). Such remarks are mirrored by accounts of university lecturers who remember struggling with the language and feeling challenged by the students, challenges that can contain racist elements. In her analysis of her own academic-migration experience, Theresa Man Ling Lee recalled a student evaluation demanding ‘Learn English!’; when recounting her feelings of foreignness, she concluded that ‘although I have encountered sexist remarks over the years, on balance, my ethnicity appears to be more vulnerable than my gender as a target of discrimination’ (2009, p. 123f.; see also Lippi-Green 1997; Bönisch-Brednich 2010, p. 175f.). However, autobiographical analysis by migrant academics also often shows a deep understanding of the problems of students who have to adapt to their often different styles of teaching and speaking English. This is neatly summarised in Lynne Texter’s reflections: ‘The students are, literally and figuratively, in a different place, and I need to figure out how to meet them there’ (2007, p. 354; Neilsen 2009, p. 71f.)

Given that I had specifically asked the students to discuss their ‘foreign’ lecturers, the New Zealanders in the department were much less commented on than were their migrant counterparts. When prompted to discuss their teaching styles and scholarly orientations, it happened mostly on the basis of theoretical preferences in their field of study. Only one of the students referred to one of the New Zealand scholars as ‘a bit provincial’, as she had done all degrees at the Aotearoa Campus and had issues with air travel. This remark points to another aspect of the integration of international faculty in New Zealand: New Zealand scholars are very much seen as part of an English-speaking international knowledge network and are therefore expected to spend time overseas and ideally get one of their postgraduate degrees at a non-New Zealand university before returning home.

3 Coming from a Monocultural Framework of Academic Excellence to a Framework of Historically Embedded Bi-culturalism and a Multi-cultural Presence

When I finally met with Geert, my Dutch colleague, we ended up in a long discussion on the difficulties of truly understanding and supporting a university environment that has to be locally grounded, serve the local student body and is committed to New Zealand principles of equity, open access and enhancing the learning experiences for students from a huge variety of backgrounds: high- and low-decile schools, academically ambitious family backgrounds, mature students with no academic past and, especially, students with Maori and Pacific backgrounds. Both of us admitted to having gone through periods of incomprehension, of frustrations, of feeling alienated, of wading through a fog of mysterious misunderstandings and feelings of cultural anxiety. We had both changed from an educational system where we, due to the two and three-tier school system that disadvantages children from underprivileged backgrounds, hardly ever encountered students from low-decile schools, let alone multicultural student classes. At least German universities are yet again, after a period of social reform in the 1970s and 1980s, overwhelmingly monocultural and middle class in terms of both professoriate and students (Münch 2009, pp. 140–148). We both were blissfully unaware, therefore, of how badly prepared we were for our New Zealand migrant experience. Both of us would initially have agreed wholeheartedly with Annabelle’s attitude towards the supposedly indulging attitudes towards Maori and Pacific students. Both of us admitted to initial – unspoken thoughts like: if these students had difficulties with time management, with attending tutorials, doing the readings, sitting tests, comprehending teaching expectations, should they actually be here? It took both of us some years to agree with our Kiwi colleagues that, indeed, they should be here and have a right (and we have the responsibility) to be supported and guided in different and culturally sensitive ways. But despite having come to a better understanding, we both have had recurring doubts as to our ability to address such issues in our classes.

There seems to be silent consent that bi-culturalism in New Zealand means that Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent) are hardly ever required to become and be bi-cultural; for Maori and Pacific people, on the other hand, being able to live and function bi-culturally is a basic essential for social and economic success. Most New Zealand academics are therefore only nominally bi-cultural, and do not, in fact, speak Maori and often feel a certain unease when attending Maori-led meetings or rituals (Metge and Kinloch 1978; Tuhiwai-Smith 1997). Encounters between Pakeha and Maori academics are sometimes perceived as unsettling or accompanied by feelings of foreignness. This seems to be even truer for migrant academics. As they have to learn to function in a campus culture that is dominated by Pakeha culture, they are twice removed from the multilayered cultural conditions of the real Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is hard work to adapt to a new country and to migrate actively to a new tertiary-education environment; well before newly arrived scholars start actively engaging with bi-cultural student bodies they often have acquired a migrant version of what Martin Tolich has defined as ‘Pakeha paralysis’ (2002).

Adapting to the non-Pakeha side of New Zealand universities requires a serious shift when coming from monocultural societies whose class systems often also detach scholars from the experience of stark social and ethnic differences in everyday life. Such a shift in perception of what tertiary education is and should be requires a multi-stage learning process on the part of academic migrants. Most academics, when asked, would always agree that they embrace equal opportunities, and that it is upsetting to see the effects of the widening social gap reflected in the student body. But most academic migrants are also unaware of the multiple difficulties local students are facing when trying to overcome such gaps, especially when these difficulties are deeply embedded in very different ways of living off-campus (MacPherson 2004, pp. 140–143). Academics from non-English-speaking countries often have not grown up with a living memory and consciousness of colonisation, its effects and the postcolonial ties that binds most of the Commonwealth world into networks of redress, mutual relationships of dependence, reciprocity and commitment (cf. Spoonley et al. 1984). The social, economic and cultural ties and histories of repression, as well as religious connections, seem to have formed a complex framework of a collectively known and inhabited world where migrants encounter multiple realities, existing alongside each other and invisible to the foreign eye mapping out the new terrain.

As I have explored elsewhere, academic migrants are in a constant process of referring their new experiences to their home country (Bönisch-Brednich 2010, p. 174). Often, bi-culturalism is not actively engaged with as there simply is no equivalent to which to relate it to when actively comparing campuses and cultures. With academic migrants’ lack of reference point and often no induction by their new universities, ethnic differences and issues of equity, but more importantly the developing of an understanding of the postcolonial condition in New Zealand, remain at best unrecognised (Spoonley 1997). At worst, these problems tend to be defined and framed in terms of the central European emphasis on meritocracy as the fairest system of acknowledging achievement. Therefore, students who are deemed not to be performing are sidelined and the issues of equity are quietly put into the too-hard basket. It often takes years for migrant academics to work through their own and their colleagues’ stereotypes and, more often than not, attitudes change only because of a chance encounter, a moment of sudden comprehension. Some academics tell me that their attitudes toward Maori and Pacific students changed when they got to know and talk to a student with non-Pakeha background; or when they chanced upon some dedicated staff member who was able to communicate different ways of engagement with a multicultural body of students on campus.

Identifying such problems is all the more difficult when issues of meritocracy and working towards equity are so highly contentious in the wider New Zealand society (Spoonley 1997, pp. 146–148). Universities, as a result, have developed ways of supporting equity in student bodies that are often not totally transparent, especially to foreign academics who lack the necessary background. Supporting weak students, then, is often seen as giving in to a consumer/client orientated system that commodifies education as a purchasable good rather than an attempt to address issues of equity.

4 Moments of Joy: A Story of Cultural Exchange and Understanding

In my tutorials, students have to give oral presentations; although I encourage the class to give feedback it often falls on me to summarise the discussion and the main points of the presentation. On one occasion I got truly stuck in my constant underlying awareness of the need to act and criticise in culturally sensitive ways. The student’s presentation was dismal: although she was clearly trying, the result was inadequate in so many ways that I did not know what to say, I remained speechless and helpless; I just wanted to enter into German mode and list what was wrong with it and what should have been done and ask why the most basic literature-search methods had not been attempted to enhance the analysis. A very good Kiwi student stepped into the silence, opening the discussion: ‘that was a great choice of topic; I was just wondering where it would have taken you if you would have followed a different approach, such as…’ She then intervened a second time, again uttering a gentle and polite introduction and then, equally gently, leading to the next major gap in the presentation. She did it beautifully, without causing offence, even getting the presenting student to agree that a different approach would have been interesting.

I felt deeply impressed, felt that I too had been offered a very valuable learning experience. When walking out of the classroom, the Kiwi student and I happened to be on our own for a few seconds. I whispered a ‘thank you for your great contribution to the discussion’; she winked at me, smiled and whispered back, ‘Yes, I thought this one was a really tricky situation for you [being German]’. I have to admit that I truly enjoyed this little encounter, as it reflected a range of topics in terms of integration and the rules of personal and cultural interaction.

The greatest difficulty in student/migrant-academic interaction is often to find ways to converse and react in culturally acceptable ways; that is, avoiding knee-jerk reactions that take us back into our home country. This especially applies to giving critical feedback, to a certain degree to the art of praising, to listening carefully, holding back when needed, learning the ‘right’ humour (see also Ting & Watts 2009). It basically requires a constant process of shifting to an ‘emic’ perception of adequate response and address. For New Zealanders, the most pressing task when criticising tends to give room to avoid the loss of face, to assure dignity. Face/dignity-saving interactions in class include rituals of appeasement: they contain an introduction that offers light praise, non-threatening body language, tentative critique, maybe followed by some clear suggestions, often by finishing a statement with an open-ended sentence that leaves the critique hanging in the air (sandwich technique). Migrants often see such behaviour as ‘lying’, an avoidance of stating the truth, beating around the bush, as meaningless, time consuming and pedagogically unsound (Bönisch-Brednich 2002, 171–174). For many European, North American lecturers (and also often staff from Asian countries), such responses lack clarity and are seen as unhelpful to the student as it might not help her or him to really do better next time. For them the most important rule in personal interaction would often be to prioritise academic excellence therefore requiring clarity of feedback, being truthful and what they would consider, by extension, really trying to be helpful.

New Zealand students can feel deeply hurt, embarrassed and humiliated by such encounters: they feel they have not been allowed to save face and therefore often feel deeply uncomfortable about returning to class and facing the lecturer. The underlying social and cultural grammar of ‘ensuring dignity’, as well as ensuring the ongoing possibility of a stable future relationship seems to relate to New Zealand being a relatively small-scale society. It seems also to be related to Maori and Pacific codes of encounter, which put strong emphasis on formalised and therefore safe engagement with disagreement, with speaking between the lines; in New Zealand’s indigenous modes of encounter, the endurance of relationships is always ranked highly and expressed in mutual respect. Such deeply accepted cultural-grammatical habits must clash with cultures whose ethics demand honesty and truthfulness (outspokenness) as a priority for interaction (Giordano 1996).

5 Conclusion

Academic migrants often see teaching as a testing ground for settling in and ‘getting a feel for the place’. The overwhelming tendency is to try and settle in and as often as possible assume that there is such a thing as a cosmopolitan campus. Learning that changing countries and campuses entails a long and continuing process of adjustment is part of an active reflection upon and engagement with academic mobility. Successful migration requires a reciprocal process of intense and purposeful listening in which the migrants and the members of their new university should try and sustain a healthy professional curiosity; an awareness of difference and preparedness to accept and interrogate that difference; it also requires constant creative questioning, trying to extend this into areas where we assume cultural sameness in an academic knee-jerk reaction. Roderick Neilsen has produced a summary of what it takes an expatriate teacher to experience migration as enriching: ‘Skills needed are tolerance for ambiguity, low goal/task orientation, open-mindedness, non-judgmentalness, empathy, willingness to communicate, flexibility/adaptability, curiosity, warmth in human relationships, motivation, sense of humour, self-reliance, a strong sense of self, perceptiveness, tolerance of differences, and above all an ability to fail’ (2009, p. 71). For New Zealand’s internationalised campuses, these qualities would also have to be adopted by local students, academic colleagues and management. It will be essential to develop the ability to listen, to learn, to do research in intercultural communication and to reflect, critically and continuously, on what it means to be part of a global campus network. For academic migrants have always been a part of New Zealand’s higher education system and are likely to remain so.