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Exploring flying faculty teachingexperiences: motivations, challengesand opportunitiesKaren Smitha
a Educational Development Unit, University of Greenwich, AveryHill Campus, Avery Hill Road, London, UKPublished online: 01 Feb 2012.
To cite this article: Karen Smith (2014) Exploring flying faculty teaching experiences:motivations, challenges and opportunities, Studies in Higher Education, 39:1, 117-134, DOI:10.1080/03075079.2011.646259
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.646259
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Exploring flying faculty teaching experiences: motivations,challenges and opportunities
Karen Smith*
Educational Development Unit, University of Greenwich, Avery Hill Campus, Avery HillRoad, London, UK
‘Flying faculty’ models of teaching represent an important aspect of theinternationalisation agenda. As short-term sojourners, these overseas visits provideacademics with disorientating dilemmas that can stimulate transformational learning.This study explored the impact of flying faculty teachers’ experiences on their work,lives and identities and used the Biographical, Narrative, Interpretive Method(BNIM) for both data collection and analysis. The findings provide rich, colourfulpen portraits of the motivations for, experiences of, and benefits from teachingoverseas. Cross-case analysis highlighted the physical impact of overseas visits; thesearch for equivalence; relationships with local staff and students; and concernsabout internationalisation as a means of income generation as important to theinterviewees.
Keywords: transnational education; internationalisation; short-term sojourner;Biographical, Narrative, Interpretive Method; transformational learning
Transnational education
Over recent years, the scale of cross-border education has increased substantially(Naidoo 2009). This increase stems from a global environment defined by the massifi-cation of higher education and an increased demand for and supply of education as atradeable commodity; an economic climate operating through internationalisedlabour markets and highly skilled knowledge workers; and falling costs of transport,information and communications technologies (Organisation for EconomicCooperation and Development [OECD] 2004). Concurrently, some countries, includ-ing the United Kingdom (UK), saw public funding per tertiary-level student fall,making international student fees an attractive means of compensating for a loss ofrevenue (Enslin and Hedge 2008; OECD 2004). For a long time, the dominant formof cross-border education has been through student mobility, with an estimated threemillion students studying outside of their home country in 2007 (OECD 2009, 309).As trade in higher education develops, it is likely that cross-border education willbroaden from a focus on the mobility of students to the mobility of programmes andinstitutions (Naidoo 2009). There is already evidence of the growing prevalence ofsuch transnational education, which relates to ‘all types of higher education study pro-grammes or set of courses of study, or educational services… in which the learners arelocated in a different country from the one where the awarding institution is based’
© 2012 Society for Research into Higher Education
*Email: [email protected]
Studies in Higher Education, 2014Vol. 39, No. 1, 117–134, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.646259
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(UNESCO / Council of Europe 2000, 2). Transnational education, which can encom-pass validation, progression and retention, franchising, distance learning, flyingfaculty, joint/dual awards and research degrees (Drew et al. 2006, 9–12), has ‘grownexponentially’ (Naidoo 2009, 326). In the UK, the British Council estimated thatthere were ‘more than 250,000 people studying for UK degrees outside of the UK’(Doorbar and Bateman 2008, 15). The ‘flying faculty’ mode of transnational educationis one of the most prevalent modes of delivery in the UK (Doorbar and Bateman 2008).Flying faculty ‘typically combines intensive sessions of block teaching from offshoreacademics, who fly-in from the “home” country and are supported by local tutorseminars and offshore tutors through the virtual learning environment’ (Smith 2009,112). It is the flying faculty form of transnational education that is the focus of thisarticle.
As the prevalence of flying faculty modes of transnational education hasincreased, so too has research into this area. This research can be grouped into fourkey themes. One significant theme is around quality assurance of transnational ven-tures (for example McBurnie 2008; Stella 2006; Woodhouse 2006). Much of thiswork focuses on the specific challenges of assuring quality across borders, ensuringequivalence and maintaining standards (for example Blickem and Shackleford 2008;Castle and Kelly 2004; Gift, Leo-Rhynie, and Monquette 2006; Pyvis 2008). Anothermajor theme is around flying faculty teaching and learning practices, and the adap-tations that flying faculty teachers have to make when teaching transnationally.These adaptations relate to different understandings of power and distance (Bodycottand Walker 2000; Crabtree and Sapp 2004; Prowse and Goddard 2010); time (Crab-tree and Sapp 2004; Prowse and Goddard 2010); familiarity with particular teachingand learning approaches (Bodycott and Walker 2000; Dunn and Wallace 2006; Evansand Tregenza 2002); teaching through an interpreter (Debowski 2005) and assess-ment issues (Evans and Tregenza 2002). A further body of research focuses onhow academics are (or are not) developed to teach transnationally (Dunn andWallace 2008; Gribble and Ziguras 2003; Hicks and Jarrett 2008). The final themeexplores the challenges of being a transnational teacher. These include the physicalimpact of lengthy international travel (Gribble and Ziguras 2003); heavy workloads(Debowski 2003; Evans and Tregenza 2002); potential health risks (Feast andBretag 2005); and relationships with local tutors (Bodycott and Walker 2000;Dobos 2011; Leask 2004). Taken as a whole, the research indicates that, whereasthe challenges of flying faculty provision are undoubtedly great, the experience canbe both professionally and personally fulfilling. In this article, I seek to exploreflying faculty teachers’ personal and professional learning through in-depth narrativeinterviewing.
Short-term sojourners and disorientating dilemmas
As short-term sojourners (Pitts 2009), flying faculty teachers find themselves living andworking (albeit temporarily) within environments that are culturally different to theirown. Their initial interactions are likely to engender ‘culture shock’ (Oberg 1960),which manifests itself as ‘a set of emotional reactions to the loss of perceptual reinforce-ments from one’s own culture to new stimuli, which have little or no meaning, and tothe misunderstanding of new and diverse experiences’ (Adler 1975, 13). ‘Cultureshock’ was initially deemed overly stressful, with its emphasis on the perceivedthreat of novel situations, and requiring of medical attention (for an overview of the
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history of culture shock see Bochner 2003; Zhou et al. 2008). In more recent studies, thefocus has shifted from the negative experience that the word ‘shock’ evokes, towards anunderstanding that exposure to a second culture can be a positive learning experience,where sojourners acquire culture-specific skills to allow them to operate within a newculture (Bochner 1986). The sojourner goes through a period of adjustment and adap-tation which has classically been described by the ‘u-curve’ adjustment hypothesis,whereby sojourners experience a peak honeymoon period, a trough of disillusionment(or culture shock) followed by a the gradual adaptation into a new culture (Gullahornand Gullahorn 1963).
More recently, Kim (2001) has described adaptation more cyclically and continu-ally through her stress-adaptation-growth model, where the inevitable stresses ofcontact with a new culture act as an opportunity to ‘draw-back-to-leap’ forward inorder to grow (56). The acquisition of further experience and cultural knowledgecan result in personal growth, self-development and identity transformation (Kim2008; Lyons 2001; Milstein 2005; Pitts 2009). Culture shock or stress results fromthe confrontation with ‘an unexpected phenomenon’ (Lyons 2001), what transforma-tional learning theory calls a ‘disorientating dilemma’ (Mezirow 1991). Ordinarily,the social norms and cultural codes which shape life are taken for granted(Mezirow 1991, 131); these accepted perspectives inform how we make sense ofthe world and our place within it. Confrontation with a challenge against an estab-lished perspective creates a disorientating dilemma, which can trigger transforma-tional learning through critically reflecting on the ‘sets of fixed assumptions andexpectations’ (Mezirow 2003, 58) which act as a frame of reference for how wemake sense of the world. The research reported here viewed the flying faculty over-seas experiences as disorientating dilemmas, due to the shock of the confrontationwith a new culture. The research sought, through narrative interviewing, to explorethe impact these disorientating dilemmas had on the work, lives and identities ofshort-term sojourners.
Approach to the study
The study used the Biographical, Narrative, Interpretive Method (BNIM) (Wengraf2001) for both data collection and interpretation. BNIM focuses on the ‘particularityof individual experiencing and mutating subjectivity in unique historical and societallocations and processes’ (Wengraf 2009, 36), facilitating understanding of ‘inner’and the ‘outer’ worlds of ‘historically-evolving persons-in-historically-evolving situ-ations’ (33). BNIM, which has to date been little used in higher education research,is a powerful methodology for capturing lived situations and experiences through nar-rative interviewing, and could potentially illuminate higher education experiences, pro-viding a basis for the development of better policy and practice. Five British malelecturers from engineering and business departments within one institution wereinvited to take part in the study. They were all relatively senior (including threesenior lecturers, a professor and a head of department), and had worked withinhigher education for some time. They were selected through ‘typical case sampling’(Wengraf 2001, 102): chosen because they illustrate a typical ‘flying faculty’ teacherwithin the case institution.
The case institution is a post-1992 UK university with a focus on widening partici-pation and access. The university has a growing overseas presence, with a strategy togrow international business in the short-term. Its transnational teaching activity is
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notably in the Middle and Far East, which is where the participants in this study hadgained their overseas experience.
BNIM captures data through three iterative interviews. The first interview sessionbegins with a very open question intended to open the narrative. The question usedin this study was: ‘can you please tell me the story of your work life since you firstheard about and became involved in transnational teaching? All those events andexperiences that were important to you personally’. The interviewees spokeunprompted and uninterrupted for between 13 and 21 minutes. Such non-interruptionis important as it ensures that the interviewee’s gestalt, in this context meaning the con-structed shape of the story, remains intact (Jones 2003, 62). Following a short break, thesession two interviews began. In the second session, topics raised by the interviewee inthe ordering of their raising in session one were explored further, through questionsaimed to induce narratives around particular incidents. These interviews were longer,lasting between 51 and 96 minutes. The open narrative structure of these interviewsallowed the interviewees to choose the form and sequence of what they chose to tell.This means that the researcher gains not only the detail of important events in the inter-viewees’ lives, but also the added value that comes from exploring how they chose tostructure the stories they told. The final semi-structured interviews, which are optionalin BNIM, were used as a means of gaining further contextual detail in order to betterunderstand the narratives provided in sessions one and two. They were conductedafter initial data analysis of sessions one and two had been carried out. Session threeinterviews lasted between 46 and 89 minutes. The movement from very open narrativeto semi-structured interviews is in recognition of the fact that: ‘what interviewees haveto say about their lives is more illuminating than any specific research questions orassumptions might be’ (Jones 2003, 61), and thus ‘creates a space in which the partici-pant’s voice can be privileged’ (Snelling 2005, 134). The subsequent approach to theanalysis of the data is two-fold: exploring the ‘lived life’ and the ‘told story’ (seeFigure 1).
‘Lived life’ analysis involves the ordering of the ‘objectifiable’ facts from the inter-views in chronological order to produce ‘biographical data chronologies’ (BDC). TheBDC forms the basis of biographical data analysis (BDA). ‘Told story’ analysis aims toexplore how the same interviewees present their life in the interview. A three-point ‘text
Figure 1. Data analysis in BNIM (simplified from Wengraf 2001, 237).
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structure sequinization’ (TSS) is carried out, identifying: (1) change of speaker; (2)change of topic; (3) change of textsort, the way a topic is being treated by a speaker,through description, evaluation, report or argumentation (Wengraf 2001, 243–244).The TSS forms the basis of the thematic field analysis (TFA).
Data analysis (both BDA and TFA) is conducted through data analysis panels, orreflecting teams (Jones 2003), involving people external to the research project.Collaborative data analysis is not uncommon in the social sciences (see O’Sullivan2004, for example); what is relatively more unusual is that BNIM panels trigger thedata analysis process and challenge the researcher’s assumptions of the ‘best’ interpret-ation of the data (Wengraf 2009). Lasting three hours, the panels (two externals and anote-taker) interpreted data chunks future blind. Like the lived experiences of theinterviewees themselves, the panel members did not know what was going tohappen in the future. They produced hypotheses relating to the significance of thedata to the interviewee and about what might follow next or later in the series if thatwere true. The panel continued and subsequent data chunks were presented. Pasthypothesising was reviewed and new hypotheses generated. At the end of the panelsession, the panel members wrote their own summary of the interviewee’s lived lifeand told story, based on their discussions. The rationale for the panel is to overcomethe distorting effects of ‘the defended subjectivity, of you as individual researcher …and to widen your imagination irreversibly for post-panel work’ (Wengraf 2009,242). Something that Wengraf (2009) sees as particularly important for a researcherworking alone.
The final stage of data analysis examines how the ‘lived history’ informs the ‘toldstory’, in order to identify case structure and attempts to make the best sense of thecomplex detail of the two data analysis tracks (see Jones 2003; Wengraf 2001,2009). The case structure aims to make sense of the ‘whole’ and was constructedthrough the consideration of inconsistencies, key moments and story protagonists.These case structures are presented below in the form of individual accounts, labelledwith interviewee pseudonyms. These cases have been constructed from the in-depthand collaborative approach to analysis, which is a strong feature of this method. A com-parison of the five cases, which draws together the emergent themes, completes thefindings section.
Case structures
Dr Robertson
Dr Robertson sees the role of a modern academic as a combination of teaching,research, scholarship and consultancy. Following a career change, he has learnt toplay the academic game, and is gaining legitimacy and credibility through becominga fellow of the Higher Education Academy (a UK organisation which supports learningand teaching within higher education), gaining a doctorate, earning money from con-sultancy, research grants and publishing. His transnational teaching experiences arejust another facet of his academic role that ‘gave me variety in an otherwise quitedull existence’.
On his flying faculty visits, Dr Robertson teaches ‘the cohort’, irrespective of wherethey are in the world – ‘it’s irrelevant my geographical location’. He has found the stu-dents he taught overseas to be ‘much of a muchness’. He does, however, ‘readjust andreconfigure’ his practice where necessary – adding local colour: ‘I looked at what waslocal to the thing, for example, that was the racecourse so I used that as a lot of
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examples, when I was in the Middle East it became camel racing, rather than horses’, ordrawing in the female students:
you had to silence the boys or the men… but you had to silence them deliberately to allowthe girls to have a voice… what you might then do is you might then pick up, somethinglike Aisha what would you say about this’, and you would deliberately finger point.
He recognises the staff development potential of these visits, but sees their impact pri-marily on other people in his department rather than himself. The visits enable staff ‘tothink in a different, cultural-friendly way and, to be brutally honest, to get them to thinkabout their practice back here’.
Dr Robertson is committed to his version of education and wants to do the rightthing by his students, but is frustrated by the failure of the higher education systemto deliver what he deems appropriate: ‘are all students able to cope with the accelerationbecause I don’t believe they are… whoever’s paying the bill just crams the class ratherthan cramming it with people whose learning styles may benefit from it or not’. He feelslet down by his institution: ‘due to the naivety of the university, somehow your normaljob still had to be done even though you weren’t actually there’; insufficient infrastruc-ture: ‘most of my cohort struggled behind the scenes for things like access, the VLE[virtual learning environment] and access to e-journals off campus’; and support fortransnational teachers: ‘the development of the flying faculty academy was neverthere, we were just told to do it and somehow you magically learnt it on the 14-hourflight over’. He feels uncomfortable with the commodification of higher education,which sees international students as an additional funding stream: ‘it’s getting drivenby economics’. He tries to show the Middle Eastern students who come to graduationin the UK the same welcome he receives when he travels there, and is disappointed thatthose in more senior positions do not do the same: ‘it’s like there are your graduationtickets, now piss off’.
He blames the institution and its short-termism for the demise of all the overseasventures that he has been involved in: ‘if we are good at teaching, or claim to getgood at teaching, then we should be capitalising on this franchising of teaching pro-grammes elsewhere – but I don’t see much evidence of it’. To Dr Robertson’s mind,the university is too quick to pull out of overseas ventures giving no time forconsolidation.
Dr Stewart
Dr Stewart is no stranger to overseas experiences. He spent his childhood outside theUK and travelled the world before he went to university. He is a dynamic academic,who rose quickly to a senior management position. He sees the transformative potentialof living and working in another country, and seeks to enable others to have thoseexperiences. As a manager he saw flying faculty visits as a means of developing hisstaff, who had rarely travelled outside of the UK. Recognising that fresh ideas couldbe found elsewhere, he sought out partner colleges where he and his staff wouldgain first-hand experience of new technologies that would shape a suite of postgraduatecourses that were being developed.
For Dr Stewart, flying faculty visits were an important form of staff development;staff were exposed to new worlds. On their return: ‘they had new ideas, new develop-ments, new technologies’, that could be brought back to the students in the UK. The
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visits provided rich personal experiences; talking of the Far East he said: ‘it’s incred-ibly, incredibly busy, it’s all huge apartments, you know, skyscrapers all over theplace, washing hanging out 50 floors up … the smells, the sights, the dynamism, thewhole thing’.
Dr Stewart has also been actively involved in overseas teaching visits. He hasexperienced the intensity of teaching and maintaining work in the UK: ‘you’re literallyflying in, your eyes are shutting and then you’re having to teach’, the ‘cattle-class’travel, the exhaustion of a new culture and climate. He sought to contextualise histeaching – ‘we don’t want a student in the Middle East writing about Ryanair’ – andto adapt the usual lecture-format to workshops to suit the intensive mode of delivery.Despite teaching long hours, he also found opportunities to make contacts, visit com-panies, see the sights and eat out with staff and students. He was touched by the stu-dents’ hospitality: ‘I don’t think we’d ever dream of doing that kind of thing here’.He seeks to involve the local tutors within the module team – marking scripts and pro-viding content: ‘these guys are your colleagues, we’ll treat them as if they were just partof the module team … it’s basically just a case of treating them with respect’.
Such is his belief in the benefits of overseas ventures that he has explored opportu-nities across the world, but these have not been fruitful due to lack of institutionalsupport: ‘they just fizzled away’. Dr Stewart has been frustrated by the university’sremoval of support for such work, with courses closed down due to insufficientstudent numbers or centralised decisions outside of his control – the ventures mademoney ‘but it wasn’t enough money’. Such closures, he believes, show little appreci-ation of the added value that these ventures have on professional and personal devel-opment: ‘any form of travel is the best form of education. It broadens your horizons,it gives you more interesting examples, it gives you different perspectives and waysto look at things.’
Dr Mackenzie
Dr Mackenzie’s transnational teaching experiences are part of a life story where adap-tation to culture exchange is prominent. Born in a remote part of the UK, he had anexpectation of travel for study and jobs, a love of music and an empathy with otherpeople. He sees his transnational teaching experiences as a way of meeting newpeople and experiencing new cultures. He embraces the cultures he visits: eatingwith students and local staff, visiting landmarks, and wandering around to immersehimself in the cultural difference. He experienced the strains of combining the overseasteaching with his work in the UK: ‘you’ve got all the monolithic stuff that you’re doinghere and then you’ve got this that’s in parallel’.
Dr Mackenzie shows great respect for other cultures. In the Middle East, his tripcoincided with Ramadan, so he rearranged his class hours so the students could goto the mosque and he did not eat or drink in public: ‘I have to say, being honest,some days I really could have done with a bit more liquid’; he did, however, taketea with the Indian members of staff in their own staff room: ‘I was adopting theculture of our hosts in terms of the staff’.
He cares about his students: while in the Middle East he gave up his free time to sortout information technology problems so the students had access to the materials theyneeded for their course: ‘I’m there in the Business Centre at the bottom of the hotelemailing folks here to try and get it sorted’. He is also concerned about assessmentpractices. He wants his students to have equivalent experiences to those in the UK,
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and spends time justifying approaches to teaching and assessment. He sought toincorporate the female students in the Middle East into discussions: ‘kind of forcetheir hand a wee bit’ in order to ensure that ‘everyone was getting the same kind oflearning experience’. The transnational teaching has given him more confidence inhis teaching: while in the Far East, for example, he taught other people’s material aswell as his own, which was particularly useful when he later covered a UK colleague’smaternity leave.
When in the UK, Dr Mackenzie also uses music as a means of connecting with hisinternational master’s students during a residential weekend. He makes an effort to getto know these students as he understands them as subjects of travel, something he hasbeen himself. Dr Mackenzie is proudly Scottish and uses his Scottishness to connectwith international students in the UK and overseas. For him, the flying faculty experi-ences add to the ‘cumulative building up of layers of experience’ and make him a morerounded teacher: ‘having gone abroad and taught them where, if you like, I’m the fishout of water, as it were, I can be hopefully more sensitive and empathetic’.
Dr Fergusson
Dr Fergusson has found a position of respect within the overseas venture that heappears not to have in the UK. For eleven years he has been travelling regularly tothe Middle East, and feels confident and comfortable within his working and socialenvironment. He has made strong relationships: ‘I treat some of these colleagues asclose friends, long-standing friends’.
Dr Fergusson extols the virtues of a UK education, which he provides students over-seas: ‘I took what I do here there and imposed my kind of regime, my standards, andfriendliness’. He sees their previous educational experiences as ‘closeted’ and explainsto the overseas students that what he is providing is international: ‘they should realisethat when they enter the gates of the college, they enter international education. Theyare leaving the Middle East and entering this new world which is international edu-cation, where UK education has a high standing in the world’. He spends a week teach-ing in the Middle East, usually arriving ‘tired and exhausted’ due to having to fly ‘plebclass’, but receiving good treatment and a stay ‘in a reasonably good hotel’. If the stu-dents’ behaviour is not to his liking, he reminds them that it would not be tolerated athome, he tells them: ‘in the UK, the students are not making a noise when I make anoise, they are quiet and listening’. He finds the students less mature and thereforein need of more discipline. He is suspicious of certain cultural practices: ‘some ofthem will use their religion as an excuse to miss class, or leave class, or leave classearly for prayers’, which he has been told by Islamic colleagues is not necessary. Hehas also experienced cultural misunderstandings, where, for example, he mistook theshaking of the head to mean lack of comprehension when in fact it meant the opposite.Many years on, he relates this story to break the ice with students.
Dr Fergusson strives to ensure that the students have equivalent experiences:
I’ve developed very strong links with the staff and I try to work very closely with them,what they’re doing there and what you’re doing here, so that the learning experience is thesame for students in the UK and for students in the Middle East.
He sees that the local tutors have sight of the examination papers before the examin-ation date:
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And I think that’s fair because in the UK when I’m teaching here, I know what’s comingup in the exam, I know which topics are being examined and I would imagine that, sub-consciously, I will focus on certain topics more than others.
He sees himself as a troubleshooter and has been to the Middle East to solve problems,head up assessment boards and lead quality reviews.
The flying faculty visits have taken him to a part of the world about which he knewlittle and his first trip was ‘an eye-opener, it was something different from what I’dexperienced in the past, but not in a threatening way, I just found it different’. Hefeels he has benefited immensely from the experiences: ‘I think I’ve become more cul-turally aware, more worldly wise as a result of my trips, I think I’m enriched by it’ andthe result is ‘a more or better all-rounded member of staff who sees, who sees his lecturefrom their eyes’. He does not think the university sees this: ‘I’m not sure the institutionrecognises there are any benefits in it … they should recognise the benefit, but theymake no attempt to do so’. Dr Fergusson recommends his colleagues go on teachingvisits, telling them: ‘you’ll be well treated, it’s secure and you are given respect’.
Dr Campbell
Dr Campbell became involved in transnational education to increase his institutionalexposure and promote his career. Just like the PhD he undertook, his involvement inthe institution’s overseas venture was a means of augmenting his profile and formedpart of his career development plan, which he hopes will gain him a professorship inthe near future.
He was part of a team tasked to develop overseas’ partnerships and was keen to par-ticipate, knowing this would raise his status with the senior management team: ‘I thinkit was good for my career you know, progression, showing a willingness to take part’.Dr Campbell demonstrated that he could make a contribution to the university throughhis work at an institutional level, and was duly rewarded with extended scale points, asenior lectureship, and subsequently a head of division role. Dr Campbell fell into theoverseas teaching aspect accidently: ‘I think I initially got involved, you know, becauseI wanted the profile. I didn’t envisage at the very beginning that I would be going outthere’. He is rather a reluctant traveller, struggling with food and the heat: ‘the food thatthey serve is obviously quite different to what I’m used to and what I can tolerate’. Hehas, however, been on nine teaching visits, which he finds demanding, noting that he is‘in a totally different climate, with a totally different set of students, with different ideason how to behave in class’.
He recounts his experience of flying faculty dispassionately, with neither culturalcolour nor emotion. His teaching materials and approach to teaching remain unchangedon overseas trips: ‘I used the same materials I used here because they were sitting thesame exam and really all students, I felt, had to have an equal experience’. While thematerials were equivalent, he found the student body different: ‘their attitude to appear-ing on time and their behaviour in class … and their general attendance’. This hascaused him to think carefully about returning: ‘that’s probably caused me not to goout as many times as I would have liked’. The teaching has not been fulfilling: ‘ithasn’t been a big success, the teaching part of it, it’s the liaison with the staff andthe future sort of research activities that I’m involved in’, and he has sought to makeconnections, visiting higher education institutions and companies for research and con-sultancy links. He has good relationships with the local tutors, and they take it in turns
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to write the examination papers. Dr Campbell’s involvement in overseas teaching hasreduced in recent years due to family commitments. He also believes it is time to handover to others who could potentially benefit, as he has, from the experience: ‘maybethere’s other staff, younger staff, who would be able to develop’. His career ismoving in a different direction; he is looking to develop his research portfolio. Hisexperiences in the Middle East have led to opportunities to review journal articles,and supervise and examine PhDs from the region and the Indian subcontinent.
Case comparisons
The pen portraits provided above show that the interviewees had quite different motiv-ations for their involvement in flying faculty teaching visits, had different experienceswhen teaching overseas, and gained different benefits from those experiences. Thereare, however, commonalities across the cases that are worthy of further discussion.Four broad themes have been identified: the physical impact of flying faculty visits;the search for equivalence; relationships with local staff and students; and internationa-lisation as income generation.
The physical impact of flying faculty visits
The interviewees expressed positive personal responses to their overseas visits, whichenabled them to travel to parts of the world they would not ordinarily have visited, meetwith people from those regions, and experience the sights, foods and environments.Teaching visits overseas can and do provide academics with new and stimulatingexperiences, shaking established perspectives (Teichler 2004). The impact on the phys-ical body of such trips, however, was considerable. The flying faculty teachersrecounted dealing with differences in climate ‘you’re getting really hot, you know,and it just doesn’t agree with me’ (Dr Campbell); food; and jetlag ‘the four hourtime difference does impact in the first few days on your body clock’ (Dr Fergusson).There was a strong narrative of tiredness within the interviews: ‘it’s pretty knackering’,said Dr Stewart. This tiredness was often exacerbated by the intensity of the teachingexperiences they were involved in. The interviewees spoke of working long days, deli-vering many contact hours and meeting with students, for example: ‘normally deliver-ing about 16 hours, sometimes up to 20 hours of lecturing and tutorials, lab work, whichis quite a demand on you’ (Dr Campbell). The interviewees also spoke of using theirfree time to meet with staff and students, sightsee or catch up on other projects suchas books and research proposals: ‘actually I finished the book when I was last in theMiddle East’ (Dr Robertson). At the end of their visits, these lecturers would literallyfly out and return to work: ‘you would fly back on the Monday, you would be back inthe UK because the time difference is the other way so you’d be back on the Monday,and you’d be in class on Tuesday or you’d be in work on Tuesday’ (Dr Stewart). Thiscan be exhausting, as Dr Mackenzie recognised: ‘I was tired, I came in and I did thework, but I didn’t go out partying until 3am!’ The mental and physical challenges ofstepping off the plane; teaching intensively and filling their free time, and then resum-ing teaching at home immediately on their return were great, and arguably detrimentalto health and well-being; concerns that have been raised elsewhere (Debowski 2003;Gribble and Ziguras 2003).
These flying faculty teachers were pushed to their physical limits, and still had toenter an unknown classroom and perform professionally. In order to achieve this
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professionalism, some interviewees adjusted how they taught, or the process of theirteaching. For some, this was not always positive. Dr Mackenzie’s experiences of teach-ing in the Middle East during Ramadan left him with a sore throat caused by a lack offluid: ‘I don’t know whether there was an element of cumulative slight dehydration, thatI suppose my throat did kind of get a bit kind of sore, and I started to cough a wee bit’;while Dr Campbell found the repetitive nature of his ‘chalk and talk’ delivery of thesame material to different sets of students ‘just a bit tedious’. For others, the challengesof intensive teaching opened up new opportunities for making changes to how theytaught. Dr Stewart, for example, ran his course as workshop and not the lecture/seminar series he uses at home: ‘it’s very interactive’. This model meant that he wasnot ‘on show’ for hours on end, and that the students were pushed to work hard inthe sessions. For many flying faculty teachers, one major challenge is the necessityto manage their workloads at home as overseas visits are often conducted in parallelto ‘normal work’ (see Debowski 2005; Evans and Tregenza 2002). Dr Robertsonnotes that he had a ‘virtual presence’ with his students in the UK while overseas,and had to adopt more online means of supporting his students. The need to supportstudents at home and overseas led the interviewees to consider the notion of equival-ence in terms of students’ learning experiences.
The search for equivalence
A concern about what equivalence looks like in transnational education is somethingthat has been debated within the literature (see for example Campbell and van derWende 2000; McBurnie 2008; Smith 2010; Stella 2006), and was echoed in these inter-views, where equivalence appears somewhat elusive. Dr Robertson voiced his concernsthus: ‘I’m not so sure that we treated them in the same way that we treated our homestudents’. The interviewees shared some of the divergent understandings of equival-ence present in the literature. Decisions whether to adapt or not adapt materials fortransnational delivery, however, were not clear cut; there was a sense of the intervie-wees grappling to describe what equivalent experiences were.
For Dr Fergusson, equivalence means delivering a UK education, as that is what thestudents have signed up for. Similarly, Dr Campbell notes that ‘I just gave them thesame experience that I gave them here: same notes, same PowerPoint slides and theysat the same exam’. This is despite him struggling with behavioural issues whenworking with a different cohort in the Middle East, particularly their tardiness: ‘theyjust walk into a lecture at any time that they feel like walking in’. Dr Mackenziespent considerable time in the interviews justifying why he had felt it necessary to syn-chronise UK and Far Eastern assessment processes, negotiating to arrange suitabletimes for both sets of students to sit the examination simultaneously. Such strict man-agement of assessment by the home institution is common, though not always wel-comed by the local tutors, in transnational teaching ventures (Dobos 2011); thehome institution positions itself as superior, ‘bringing the best from the West to a devel-oping country’ (Bodycott and Walker 2000, 81) and using Western theories indiscrimi-nately (Wang 2008).
In contrast, when considering equivalence, some interviewees sought to delivercomparable experiences, imbibed with local colour: ‘Car registrations; I’d looked upon the Web what are the car registrations for the Far and Middle East’ (Dr Robertson).Such local adaptation and contextualisation have been recognised as important (seeGift, Leo-Rhynie, and Monquette 2006; Smith 2010). For Dr Stewart, the local
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tutors were best placed to do this contextualisation: ‘we were encouraging the localtutors to add a sort of local knowledge to that’; something that Cheung (2006)would support.
Relationships with local staff and students
Good relationships with local tutors were deemed important by the interviewees toensure that collaborations were successful. There were, however, differing understand-ings as to how a good relationship manifested itself. These differences reflected theextent to which the local tutor was seen as being on an equal footing with academicsback in the UK. Dunn and Wallace (2006) advocate a module team where overseasand home staff work together, and this is something that Dr Stewart encourages: ‘the[local] staff have to feel that they are part of the module team’. For other interviewees,the power lies with the flying faculty teacher. With Dr Campbell, local tutor input isclearly defined: ‘alternate years I allow the chap in Oman to make up the exam ques-tions and we use them here as well’ (Dr Campbell); note his use of the word ‘allow’,which situates the locus of power very much in the home country. Dr Fergusson letshis local tutors see draft examination papers, but not have their own copies in casethe students get sight of them. Such a division of work, weighted in terms of powertowards the home country, is not uncommon in transnational teaching ventures(Dobos 2011; Leask 2004).
Local tutors were seen as ‘not motivated’ for the transnational teaching ventures.This was because the teaching was ‘additionality’ (Dr Robertson) to their ‘highcontact hours already’ (Dr Mackenzie). The teaching was often outside of their areaof expertise and ‘they are told “you’re doing it”’ (Dr Mackenzie). Ongoing relation-ships tended to be with more senior staff (Dr Fergusson) or with students (DrsStewart and Robertson). Dr Robertson expressed his frustration that there was notmore collaborative work between home and host staff: ‘we weren’t encouraged to doresearch with them, which is just bizarre’.
Relationships with local students were generally described favourably. The over-seas students were regarded as more ‘respectful’ (Drs Campbell, Stewart and Macken-zie), more motivated (Dr Stewart) and less likely to plagiarise (Drs Robertson andStewart) than students in the UK. Other research supports the findings here in termsof respect for flying faculty teachers (see Bodycott and Walker 2000; Prowse andGoddard 2010), but counters findings around plagiarism (Dunn and Wallace 2004;Evans and Tregenza 2002). While both Dr Campbell and Dr Fergusson struggledwith the classroom attitudes of their Middle Eastern students, Dr Campbell found thestudents more likely to ask questions than his UK students, and Dr Fergusson,feeling that the students were less mature than the equivalent in the UK, spoke to hisMiddle Eastern students ‘kind of differently, as a parent rather than a teacher’. DrMackenzie felt that his experience of working with international students helped inhis role as a flying faculty teacher, and this in turn had helped him back in the UK:‘these things [cultural differences] that you may have read about, thought about, startto make more sense because everybody’s kind of that way in a class’ and ‘you’rekinda then put into an international student’s position when they’re here’(Dr Stewart). Dr Robertson was less convinced about the benefits of flying facultyteaching for home students: ‘I would like to think that they get a more global perspec-tive coming back – but I can’t guarantee that’. In fact Dr Robertson was not even surethat the local-to-travel students benefitted either: ‘it would be better if they… do some
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kind of video conferencing group work stuff using the Web 2.0’, an emerging model oftransnational education. He was not alone in questioning the rationale for transnationalteaching.
Internationalisation as income generation
Through their involvement in transnational education, these academics found them-selves enacting institutional internationalisation strategies and subsequently question-ing the premise of the internationalisation of higher education. While mostrecognised the need to enter overseas markets in order to gain revenue and counterreductions in government funding (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Devel-opment [OECD] 2004; Ziguras and McBurnie 2008), many felt this focus on incomegeneration was at the expense of the less tangible benefits of internationalisation forstaff and students (Altbach and Knight 2007). Dr Robertson talks of planning being‘driven by economics’, Dr Stewart notes the focus on ‘money’ and Dr Campbell‘income generation’. When internationalisation is seen a commercial venture, manyuniversities are quick to pull out if they do not feel that they are financially viable(Debowski 2008). Both Drs Robertson and Stewart showed frustration at the quicknessof their institutions to shut down collaborative provision without allowing sufficienttime for consolidation. The focus was solely on the amount of revenue the coursewas bringing in:
we were trying to say, ‘we have to, you know we have to break ground, then the conso-lidation’… that’s when they killed off a lot of these saying ‘we don’t have enough stu-dents’. We didn’t actually do it for students in the first place. (Dr Stewart).
With such a keen focus on income, other benefits are lost: ‘it was a short-term return forthem rather than what may be academically useful or viable for me or my own pro-grammes, or my own students or even a long-term relationship’ (Dr Robertson).
There was also a feeling that the internationalisation agenda was designed and ledby business managers who operate far from the realities of practice. Dr Campbell states:‘international developments are taken forward at a higher level, not necessarily thepeople who are involved in teaching’; he wants to see these senior managers ‘go outthere and do their teaching because there’s far too many of them don’t’. The commer-cial element is also apparent in the approaches to recruitment and admission of students.Dr Robertson believes that staff in recruitment roles ‘needed to fill the class … there’smaybe an element of rack them, pack them and stack them’. Institutions, then, are moreinterested in having a full class than ensuring that the students are sufficiently able tocomplete the course, the intensity of which makes it potentially very different to thestudents’ previous learning experiences.
In addition to the apparent insufficient consideration of student ability when recruit-ing students, there was also a lack of concern for the staff who were to fly out and workwith them. Many transnational teachers embark on their flying faculty visits withlimited pre-departure support (see Dunn and Wallace 2006; Gribble and Ziguras2003) and this was certainly the case for these interviewees. Not one of the intervieweeshad received any institutional support to prepare them for their overseas teaching visits.They would have liked to receive basic information about inoculations (Dr Mackenzie),generic information on the place they were visiting (Dr Stewart) and an introduction tothe country’s language (Dr Robertson). Such requests show that these intervieweeswanted to better understand the culture and the context of the students they would
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be teaching; acculturation deemed necessary for effective transnational teaching (Egegeand Kutieleh 2008; Ziguras 2008).
Conclusion
The research reported here aimed to capture the lived experiences of flying faculty tea-chers through the stories they told of their visits. The BNIM data collection approachallowed the interviewees to tell their stories in the way that they wanted to, and theresulting individual narratives provide useful case studies of the motivations, chal-lenges and benefits of teaching transnationally. The sample was small and, while itis representative of the types of people who engage in flying faculty teaching withinthe case institution, it cannot be seen as representative of the higher education sectormore generally, nor can the case institution be seen as representative of all UK insti-tutions that operate overseas. One feature of the study is that the interviewees wereall men; it is likely that women flying faculty teachers might have very differentstories to tell. An interesting further avenue of study would be to explore women’sshort-term sojourner experiences, as relatively little is known about how womenmake cross-cultural transitions (Lyons 2001).
While recognising the limitations of the study, the narratives do raise some seriousquestions about the role and nature of flying faculty models of transnational education.As short-term sojourners, these flying faculty teachers were thrown into culturallydifferent environments for brief, intense periods of time. The brevity of the experiencemeant that during their visits they were often captivated by the new culture, new sightsand new sounds – Gullahorn and Gullahorn’s (1963) ‘honeymoon period’. This mayexplain the evocative descriptions of places visited, foods eaten and the clothingworn by the local people within the narratives. The intensity of the visits, set amidstheavy workloads at home, proved physically demanding for flying faculty teachers.The impact on the physical body was often not recognised by their institution. Theinterviewees themselves made little attempt to deal with culture shock within theacademic environment by adapting either their teaching content in response tolearner needs (outside of the addition of some ‘local colour’ to teaching materials).The flying faculty teachers’ focus was mainly on surviving the intense delivery andmanaging workloads at home. Non-adaptation strategies were often justified throughdiscussions around equivalence, equity, quality assurance and the maintenance ofstandards. UK teaching materials, teaching approaches, assessment and standardsdominated. This was reflected in relations with the local tutors, who appeareddisempowered.
The narratives hinted that these teachers did not always feel that the flying facultymodel of transnational education was in the best interests of the flying faculty teachers,the overseas students, or those students back in the UK. The experience of teachingtransnationally led some of these interviewees to question universities’ motivationsfor engaging in internationalisation. The interviewees expressed frustration that inter-nationalisation was seen primarily as a means of making money. Such a narrowfocus excludes the potential impact that these visits can have in terms of both personaland professional development.
It is perhaps unrealistic to expect short, infrequent overseas visits to foster transfor-mational learning (either institutionally or individually); indeed such change is onlylikely to occur as a result of ‘an accumulation of transformations in meaningschemes’ (Mezirow 1995, 50) following multiple intercultural encounters over time
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(Kim 2008). For some of these interviewees, the repeated visits, that would enable thebuilding of cultural knowledge and experience, were not possible as the institution hadwithdrawn from ventures which were not deemed sufficiently profitable before suchconsolidation had occurred. One interviewee, however, had returned on numerousoccasions to the same place; his narrative suggests a certain comfortableness withinthe new culture and the establishment of enduring friendships. In terms of his approachto learning and teaching, his story suggests a belief in the superiority of the UK edu-cation system and hints at the colonial tendencies that have marred transnational edu-cation (Bodycott and Walker 2000; Leask 2004). Given these reservations, it isquestionable whether the flying faculty model of transnational teaching had a positiveimpact on the academic practices of these flying faculty teachers at all. There was,nevertheless, a strong narrative across the interviews that these interviewees felt thatthey had personally and professionally benefited from their overseas experiences,and that engagement with new cultures, people and places had enriched their livesand made them more empathetic teachers.
What was missing within this sample, however, was the institutional flying facultyteacher support necessary to maximise personal and professional learning. Suchsupport could focus on discussion, information sharing and storytelling, which havebeen used successfully to support short-term sojourning students (Pitts 2009). Intercul-tural adaptation can be fostered through ongoing intercultural exchanges between flyingfaculty teachers and local tutors, within intercultural communities of practice (Dunnand Wallace 2008) or truly collaborative transnational teaching teams (Leask 2004).Discussing, developing and making sense of experiences through dialogue wouldfoster the discovery of alternative lifeworld perspectives (Mezirow 1997), and helpto ensure that the snapshot learning from the brief, intense overseas visits was notlost, but built upon. This would enable not only the flying faculty teachers to grow per-sonally and professionally from their experiences, but that institutions would alsobenefit from the cumulative experiences of those who teach overseas.
AcknowledgementsThis study was possible due to the prize money from the Society for Research into Higher Edu-cation’s Newer Researcher Prize, 2009. I would like to thank the two anonymous referees fortheir comments, and the interviewees and panel members for their time engaging with thiswork. This article is dedicated to Panashe Mpamhanga, whose presence was felt at each stageof the research.
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