The purpose of this research is to discover how university lecturers in management
subjects respond to the mix of local and international students in their classes. The
aim is to develop a substantive theory based on a conceptual understanding of the
main concern of lecturers working in a changing Higher Education context.
The aim of developing theory rather than providing rich description led to the choice
of Orthodox Grounded Theory as the methodology. Grounded Theory is an inductive
methodology that provides the methods to conceptually generate the patterns that
explain the behaviours of participants in the substantive area. This was relevant for
the current research as I commenced with no explicit hypotheses and there was
limited literature on the responses of university lecturers to teaching diverse groups of
students, particularly a mix of local and international students.
Interviews and observations were conducted with lecturers from both traditional and
newer universities in Melbourne, and data analysed using open coding, categorising,
constant comparison, theoretical sampling and coding, and frequent memoing. The
main concern of respondents emerged as balancing professional capability with the
requirements of a heterogeneous student population. The Basic Social Process and
Core Category that resolves this concern is Maintaining Competence. Maintaining
Competence is both a causal-consequence model, and a typology model consisting of
four strategies � Distancing, Adapting, Clarifying and Relating.
The emergent Grounded Theory of Maintaining Competence contributes to the extant
literature, in particular the literature on professional competence, and the literature on
teacher centred and student centred approaches and on contextual and contingency
models of teaching. It adds to the latter by demonstrating the importance of the
interplay of moderating variables, specifically Forces in the Lecturer and Forces in the
Environment. The thesis adds also to the Grounded Theory literature in its explicit
presentation of Orthodox Grounded Theory methods and its discussion of the research
journey of a novice grounded theorist.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216596 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Gregory, Janet Forbes, na. |
| Publisher | Swinburne University of Technology. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.swin.edu.au/), Copyright Janet Forbes Gregory |
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