New International Academics’ Narratives of Cross-Cultural Transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing numbers of academics world-wide are migrating as higher education institutions internationalise. Yet academics’ experiences of cross-cultural transition remain under-explored, especially in comparison with students. This small-scale narrative study, employing focus group interviews, aimed to explore the cross-cultural transition experiences of international academics at one multi-campus university in regional Australia. This research was not institutionally-driven. Rather, it was instigated by the researchers out of concern for the welfare of new international academics at their institution. The findings are compelling, some of which underscore existing research findings of other migrating groups – for example, the complex, challenging, highly individualised nature of cross-cultural transition experiences. Some findings, however, are unique to this group of academics – for example, the ‘culture of silence’ that permeated most aspects of their professional lives as well as the challenges inherent in developing a professional identity in a small, isolated, parochial community. These latter findings are disquieting as they highlight a gap between policy and practice within the university. More disturbingly, they are resonant of the neoliberalist ideology currently dominating higher education where hyperindividualism and survival-of-the-fittest mentalities erode collegiality. There are salutary messages for the myriad groups who work in higher education institutions about the ‘cost’ associated with an absence of comprehensive, systematic institutional transition support for international academics. Recommendations specifically aimed at new international academics include: a revision of workload models; general and pedagogically-specific induction workshops; professional learning (cross-cultural transition) workshops for support staff and senior management; and the establishment of support groups for the academics and their families.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".