African Students in the United Kingdom and their Experiences

African Students in the United Kingdom and their Experiences

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

This qualitative study explores the critical thinking experiences of African international students enrolled in several universities in the United Kingdom. Three major frameworks guided the study including van Manen's interpretive hermeneutical approach to qualitative research, the conceptual models of critical thinking described by Sheffer and Rubenfeld's (2000) educational consensus statement and Barnett's (1997) description of criticality, and the African concept of Ubuntu. Seven themes and a variety of subthemes emerged including learning experiences in Africa, using new learning tools to adapt to critical thinking, fear, desire for faculty interaction, cultural factors impeding critical thinking, evolving self-awareness, and the voice of those afraid to speak. The themes suggest that the majority of students interviewed experienced significant differences in educational styles and environments between Africa and the United Kingdom; and that these differences, in concert with their own cultural assumptions, created challenges for being successful in their educational program. While faced with these challenges, the students strongly desired to become academically successful and to utilize a variety of adaptive tools for learning critical thinking from a western perspective. Implications for both educational institutions and further research were discussed that may help educators better understand the African student experience and assist the students successfully complete their academic education (Allnutt, 2006, 22).

Here policy is about identifying emergent patterns and the means of stabilizing desirable ones. Existing expertise is insufficient - new information channels and methods of knowledge creation are needed. Finally, in the 'chaotic' domain there is turbulence and little hope of observable cause effect relationships. The options here are experimentation or luck (and measurement of effects), or alternatively the adoption of an authoritarian approach creating order by imposing it. Cynefin is useful because it links understanding with praxis: the way that something is framed (through narrative) places it within a particular domain which then connects with certain actions. Moreover, there is also a dynamic dimension because those actions are linked with movement to another domain - that is, pushing the issue towards the most desirable domain and away from the least desirable. A key insight of the Cynefin framework is the dynamic nature of issue-framing actors will generally have an interest in pushing problems towards the 'known' domain, but how this is done will depend on the nature of the system as they perceive it. In the case of immigration we might hypothetically expect experts to locate the issue in the 'complex' domain, where there are limits to knowledge, but through observation of previous patterns and innovative new research techniques it could be moved towards the 'knowable' domain (Fiss & Hirsch, 2005, 29).

The political context of this article and the debate over free movement and the 2007 EU enlargement is the narrative of 'managed migration' as introduced by New Labour post-2000. This was an attempt to re-position the policy system and depoliticize immigration: through a clarification of policy objectives (maximization of domestic output growth); and ...