International social work students in Australia have reported difficulties in finding quality placement opportunities and dealing with issues such as language and cultural barriers. While placement issues have been mostly investigated... more
International social work students in Australia have reported difficulties in finding quality placement opportunities and dealing with issues such as language and cultural barriers. While placement issues have been mostly investigated from a student perspective, this study explores the experiences and perspectives of placement educators towards supervising international social work students. It draws on an online survey of 83 placement educators working for an Australian university. The majority of placement educators reported that they supervised international students differently to domestic students. These differences were negatively framed as challenges involving students’ language competence, their understanding of cultural norms, and knowledge of Australian welfare systems. This framing implies that cultural and linguistic differences between international students and placement educators are viewed in terms of student deficiency rather than as a positive opportunity for mutual learning and professional development.
Undertaking independent project work in overseas locations, and especially in developing countries, can be both a rewarding and challenging experience. Challenges encountered by students in their host country will include: adapting to an... more
Undertaking independent project work in overseas locations, and
especially in developing countries, can be both a rewarding and challenging experience. Challenges encountered by students in their host country will include: adapting to an unfamiliar physical, cultural and social environment; designing and undertaking informative field research; and having limited communications with family, friends and supervisory staff in the UK. When introducing individual overseas fieldwork into academic programmes, close consideration needs to be given to both logistical and academic issues.
The Geography Department at Bath Spa University (BSU) runs a Foundation Degree in Development Geography, which is designed to increase student employability within the field of development on completion of the degree. A pivotal aspect of this programme is an extended field visit to a developing country, where students undertake a work-related placement and design and implement their own small-scale research project. In 2005-06 the department received GEES Subject Centre Small-Scale Learning & Teaching Project Funding to undertake research into supporting remote learning and assessment, in relation to our
overseas placement module. Based on recent experiences of
staff and students, this article reviews aspects of communication,
student support and assessment that should
The paper studies racial and gender homophily in student supervision relationships in a developing context of social transformations and reforms of the higher education system, South Africa academia. We develop a technique which separates... more
The paper studies racial and gender homophily in student supervision relationships in a developing context of social transformations and reforms of the higher education system, South Africa academia. We develop a technique which separates choice homophily from that induced by the system and use it to examine student-advisor data in South Africa from 1973 to 2014. The method uses permutation tests repeated at two levels of aggregation, system and departments, to create null models of random and unbiased ties formation that control for supervision capacity and small sample bias. We find clear evidence of homophily in student supervision, both along racial lines and along gender lines. Roughly half of the observed homophily is induced by department composition and stays constant over time. Overall, choice homophily observed in racial and gender dimensions have similar magnitudes. Further, we ask where choice homophily originates in the demographic groups of students and professors. We develop a simple model with 4 interacting sub-populations of students and advisors. We use the model to estimate homophilous preferences using aggregate department level data of student, supervisor, and tie composition. The methodology is promising for monitoring social transformations within organizations in the presence of sparse register data. We find that white (male) students have high tendency to form same-type relations, while among professors it is black (female) who display the higher frequency. Group differences show that choice homophily is likely to originate from white (male) students. Finally, we show that under some conditions homophily can mechanically increase during the transition phase of integration simply due to changes in the relative sizes of the different sub-groups.
