‘Part of the Community?’ First Year International Students and Their Engineering Teams

Abstract

AbstractThe number of (non-European Union) international students in engineering has increased substantially over the past 10 years. In the School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering at Newcastle University first year students are organised into ‘Engineering Teams’ for two modules, in one of which they design and manufacture two small-scale wind turbines. Previous evaluation of the Engineering Team system showed a high level of appreciation although international students were more likely to experience it as challenging. To explore this in greater depth a mixed-method research design was used to obtain feedback from the entire first year international student group (N = 22) during 2012/2013. The study found that although many international students experienced no difficulties in working with team mates, where this did occur a pattern was recognisable. Some international students found it difficult to understand their peers' accented speech or dialect expressions, found it hard to integrate into their te...