In the year before she went to teach in China, Laura Getty, head of the department of English at North Georgia State College and University, USA, made sure she was well prepared for the trip. The professor of literary studies studied the language, read relevant books and developed plans for the course she would be teaching.
What she hadn’t prepared for was the culture shock she experienced during her five months in the world’s most populous country. Writing about her experiences in a paper for the latest edition of the journal Teaching in Higher Education, Prof. Getty highlights a “blind spot” over the impact of cultural differences on the globalisation of higher education. “Lip service to the concept is not the same thing as understanding the challenges involved,” she writes.
Speaking to Times Higher Education later, Getty said administrators with little or no experience of teaching are unlikely to understand the challenges academics face when adapting their teaching methods to the demands of international partner institutions. “For example, I found out at the end of the semester that all my grading had been for very little, because the university didn’t allow anything other than As or Bs for most students,” she says.
But not all her experiences were negative. “The students were in many ways more prepared, more cheerful and more enthusiastic than a lot of my American classes. But the administration side of things, on the other hand, was a bit of a shock,” she adds.
The problems were exacerbated, she said, by the mistrust of e-mail by many of her Chinese colleagues, a stance that proved warranted. Getty says her own e-mails sometimes took more than eight hours to be delivered because they were read by the authorities before being sent on.
She also faced frustrations upon her return to the US, writing in her paper that she was “surprised (and occasionally offended) by the flat rejection” of some of her descriptions of life at the Chinese university. “I felt that (my American colleagues) were looking at my experience as being related to me, that in some way I had not done well enough. When the second person went and encountered some of the same difficulties, it became clear this was not the case; it was a cultural difference.”
Nevertheless despite many differences and difficulties she encountered, Getty says that lecturers thinking of taking up academic exchanges in China or elsewhere should not be deterred. “It was worthwhile, but in the sense that sometimes growth requires a certain amount of discomfort,” she says. “Anyone going on an experience like this, needs to understand that growth can be difficult.”
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)