Successes, issues and coping mechanisms: Learning from ‘non-traditional’ Indian students in UK institutions – What seems to work? – Isabelle Perez-Gore (University of Reading) – 8 May 2012

As part of the University of Greenwich’s Barefoot Leadership seminar series, I attended Isabelle Perez-Gore’s seminar on ‘non-traditional’ Indian students at UK higher education institutions. Isabelle has been working with these non-traditional students since 2006. The students are all recipients of a Ford Foundation scholarship that enables them to study overseas. As part of the project, the students were given pre-departure training to develop their language skills and to begin to understand more about the expectations of study outside of India. Isabelle interviewed the students who chose to come to the UK about their experiences. She found that they students’ motivations and personality played an important role in student success. At an institutional level, the students benefitted greatly from supplementary face-to-face courses, scaffolding, consistent approaches, detailed feedback, and the valuing of professional/international experience. What challenged the students were the formality and bureaucracy of UK higher education, an emphasis on internationalisation (which they perceived as having to understand not only UK practices, but those from all over the world), the dependence on technology, different pedagogic approaches, assignments, the competitive environment, Euro-centric course content and the assumptions that were made about what they already did or did not know. Isabelle’s findings chimed with my own research into international students experiences of exams in the UK and highlighted some of the challenges faced by international postgraduate taught students, often termed the ‘forgotten sector’ in higher education. I will be interested to hear about the final stage of the project, when questionnaires, delivered at the end of the programmes, will ask students to reflect on their initial apprehensions, their issues, and their coping mechanisms.