Chinese international students’ silence in collaborative group work at a UK university: a sociomaterial perspective

• In Event: Rethinking Higher Education Curriculum, Learning Spaces and Practices

Proposal

Abstract:
Chinese international students’ (CISs’) prevailing silence in collaborative group work (CGW) in UK higher education has been widely reported, and problematised, as academic deficits. Employing notions of ‘symmetry’ and ‘distributive agency’ in Actor-Network Theory as the theoretical foundation, this research perceived the practice of CISs’ silence in CGW is not fully made under their conscious decision but is shaped by the sociomaterial assemblage where both human (e.g. group dynamic) and non-human actors (e.g. digital technology) have the equal potential in exerting force. To explore how CISs’ silence is constructed with relevant actors in CGW, two-round individual semi-structured interviews with 25 CISs from 4 subjects (i.e. Art, Data Science, Education, Engineering) and with 7 of their instructors at a UK university were conducted. Using mostly inductive reflective thematic analysis, the preliminary finding showed that non-human actors including time, space, digital technology, and the course handbook play key roles in fluidly constructing CISs’ silence together with the core human actors including group dynamic and instructor teaching practice in CGW. Embodying the fluid-construct nature of CISs’ silence, the research extended the dominant narrow understanding of CISs’ silence from cultural and linguistic explanation, pointed out the necessity of including nonhuman actors in the contextual-oriented investigation, and called for giving silence a deserved place in pedagogy.

Introduction
Collaborative group work (CGW), as a widely used form of instruction in UK higher education (de Hei et al., 2020), makes students jointly engage with the substance of the learning task towards the common goal (Roschelle &Teasley, 1995) and helps develop a range of soft skills - including communication, empathy, conflict resolution, leadership and self-management (Clarke, 2017). Along with the strong call for comprehensive internationalization which shifts the economic and recruitment-driven focus to ‘enhance the quality of education and research’ (De Wit, 2020: 540), more university strategies have been placed towards intercultural learning (De Wit et al., 2015), with ‘an appreciation of cultural diversity, the development of cross-cultural communication skills and the fostering of a global perspective across all subject areas (Harrison & Peacock, 2009: 125)’. Therefore, CGW is perceived as one of the ideal vehicles for fostering intercultural learning (de Hei, 2020).

However, the implementation of CGW is challenging (Sridharan & Boud 2019). The unsatisfactory and frustrating group working experience for many students is continually reported (Medaille & Usinger 2020), especially social loafing, free riding (El Massah, 2018) and ‘sucker’ effects (Sridharan et al., 2018). Since the Western orientation values talking much more than listening and tightly connects talking to thinking, CISs’ silence is often assumed equal to disengagement (Kim et al., 2016) and thus has frequently been perceived as one sign of the relevant passivity in CGW (Wang et al., 2022). However, the interpretation of CISs’ silence tends to be more controversial. Some academics highlight that neither talking nor silence is a proxy of engagement or disengagement and CISs’ silence can also mean engagement in thought sometimes (Mclean & Ranson, 2005). While the dominant cultural and linguistic explanation of CISs’ silence has been critiqued as over-generalized and too decisive in that there is no guarantee that Confucian value still affects contemporary CISs studying in Western contexts in the same manner and CISs' linguistic proficiency is not always poor or static, more recent studies propose to view silence from a contextual-orientated analysis. Meanwhile, as group work is sometimes digitally mediated through, for example, Google Docs and WeChat, silence can also occur in online communication rather than being unique to face-to-face contexts (Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2005). Thus, the non-human actors should also be regarded as elements in the group context but are largely neglected in the relevant literature.

To better understand CISs’ silence in CGW and to offer suggestions for pedagogical practice, this research focuses on addressing the research question:
How is Chinese international students’ silence constructed with relevant human and non-human actors in collaborative group work?

Theoretical foundation and Methodology
To take a holistic view of CISs’ silence construction, theoretically this research was guided by the central notions of symmetry and distributive agency of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). From the symmetry principle, in the analytic but not an ethical position (Law, 1992), it is through humans and things being together that actions become possible where ‘things are not secondary to the human’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010: 41). Thus, the agency is not a privilege of humans but can also be elicited by non-humans though not necessarily in the same way (MacLeod et al., 2019). Following these two notions, this research perceives both relevant human and non-human actors of the CGW are equally important in and capable of exerting force to the practice of CISs’ silence.
Methodologically, the focus of this research is on tracing the interactions among both humans and non-humans relevant to CGW rather than merely the internalized meaning and feelings of CISs themselves. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 CISs from 4 subjects (i.e. Art, Data Science, Education, Engineering) who enrolled in courses with a summative collaborative group assignment in MA Education programmes at a UK university and with 7 of their CGW instructors. The individual CISs’ silent practice was as the unit of analysis and reflexive thematic analysis was adopted which was mostly inductive.

Preliminary findings and implications
At the early data analysis stage, this study found that silence can be employed as strategies for negotiating participants’ engagement in CGW for respect and protection, pragmatism, and the tradeoff of self- and group interests. Besides, it was identified that the non-human actors including time, space, digital technology, and the course handbook play key roles in fluidly constructing CISs’ silence together with the core human actors including group dynamic and instructor teaching practice in CGW. However, due to the uncompleted data analysis, the dynamic interaction between and possible synergistic effects of the identified human and non-human actors need to be further explored. The implication is likely to imply ways of approaching CISs’ silence to maximize their learning capacity and further develop ethical pedagogy by considering silence and the relevant non-human actors.

Author

• Yilan Guo, The University of Manchester