The New Professional Emigrant Complexities and cultural challenges

The ‘New’ Professional Emigrant: Complexities and cultural challenges of Cross Border transitions as a university lecturer from Cameroon to Scotland England. Henry Kum Liverpool Hope University Liverpool.

Teaching Vision in a Cameroonian University ❑Cameroon is former French colony with 1/3 of English colonial rule ❑Up till 1991: One University for 11 million Cameroonians. The University of Yaounde. ❑Majority of French speaking Students/ 1/6 English speaking. ❑‘Official State Bilingualism’ at university. ❑Education organised like in France.

Pedagogic Realities in Cameroon. ❑Teacher Centred Teaching: due to large class sizes tutor/pupil ratio 1: 1000. ❑Language of Instruction is French and in theory – English. Code switching (French/English) ❑Research devolved to research institutes affiliated to university: Emphasis on teaching. ❑ICT and Libraries under resourced. Students rely on monographs and senior students for support. Teacher’s role is central.

Pedagogic Realities in Cameroon ❑Assessments of learning is regular practice. Students take assessments seriously. ❑Teachers are well respected by the public. ❑Feedback is ‘vertical’ than ‘horizontal’ and normally intended to justify the grade. ❑Discipline in the classroom/campus is very high. Students assist teachers to maintain discipline. Little or no disruptions.

How HE minister sums up teaching in HE in Cameroon. ❑‘You are the envy of the country in this noble profession; and millions depend on you, the country depends on you and the future depends on you. Embrace teaching as a calling whose rewards are to be gained through your place in society and not from material benefits. By enriching others, you make yourself richer. You lead where others are unwilling to lead and you have the power of intellectual wealth’ (Joseph O: 2002)

Pedagogic Realities in the UK ❑Taught at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and Liverpool Hope University. ❑Smaller class sizes and low teacher-student ratio : 1; 15 (different in lectures) ❑Student led teaching ❑Assessments for, of and as learning and high focus on feedback ❑Teacher as a facilitator ❑Teacher as an administrator ❑Teacher as a carer: Student’s satisfaction is paramount (NSS)

Pedagogic Realities in the UK ❑ Teacher as a Researcher: REF. (Time Management) ❑ Students are ‘hardly wrong’. Effort to accommodate students. (Political Correctness? ) ❑ Huge reliance on ICT – Information surplus. Ease of delivery but hindrance on creativity) ❑ Research informed Teaching. (Struggle to reconcile course programmes with own research) ❑ Course Evaluations by students and peer observations. (Negotiated teaching and learning practices) ❑ Teaching in non specialist areas and teaching materials planned by other tutors (shift from a specialist to a generalist)

IMPLICATIONS ON (OWN) PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY ❑ Transition from Cameroon to the UK led to some professional marginalisation. The Cameroonian experience is devalued. But useful in developing own professional practices. ❑ Difficulties challenging students: The teacher is more of a learner and power is with the student. ❑ The spaces being a good teacher and a good researcher need to be well mediated in order to please management and also please the students (Jump, 2013) ❑ Cultural dissonance among colleagues: cultural distance between the home tutors and international peers: - (Harrison et al. 2010) ❑ Diversity of the population might not mean diversity of views and interaction. Assimilation and Conforming become the norm: Haines (2007).

Gidden’s Protective Cocoon • They are moments when the individual must launch out into something new, knowing that a decision made, or a specific course of action followed, has an irreversible quality, or at least that it will be difficult thereafter to revert to the old paths (Giddens: 114) • ‘Cultural and personal transformations involved in becoming a ‘cultural alien’ in the new university setting (Lee 2009) • ‘New’ becomes and unending story in my life as a migrant academic where I have to constantly find spaces of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’: - finding myself in the space outside myself (See Deleuze & Guattari 1987)

CONCLUSION • Discourse: Migrant; Immigrant and Expatriate • international academics and in this paper ‘professional emigrant’, in a foreign country have various prior personal understandings and concerns that are being enacted in multiple, often, conflicting representations of ‘Otherness’. As a result, they find themselves questioning several core values resulting from differentiated subjectivity, agency and power (Walker, 2001)

REFERENCES • • Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis; University of Minessota Press. Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haines, C. (2004) Assessing Students’ written work: marking essays and reports. London: Routledge. Harrison, N. & Peacock, N. (2010) Cultural distance, mindfulness and passive xenophobia: using Integrated Threat Theory to explore home higher education students’ perspectives on ‘internationalisation at home’ British Educational Research Journal Vol. 36 (6) 877 -902. Jump, P. (2013) “Ding Dong: Impact ‘Chaos’ Lurks on the Doorstep. ” Studies in Higher Education vol. 4 (2): 199 -214 Reference incomplete Lee, S. (2009) ‘Becoming an alien’ Iowa Journal of communication 41 (1) 31 -51 Walker, M. (2001). Engineering Identities. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22, 75 -89