Managing cross-cultural dysfunction in higher education – an exploratory study

In recent years, UK universities have followed a policy of recruiting extensively from overseas, in particular from Third World countries. This has been done without paying much regard to the cultural difficulties raised by imposing an essentially Western education onto students from very different backgrounds. This paper reports on a study undertaken with African students at a UK university, using a grounded theory approach to extract meanings about inclusion and exclusion, connectivity, practical barriers, and survival strategies from the reported experiences of the students. Evidence of social exclusion and of discrimination was found, but this was not as surprising as the evidence of poor connectivity between the students and the courses on which they found themselves.