International students' learning practices are an asset, not a deficit
Updated Apr 22, 2026
International student feedback is easy to misread when institutions only look for gaps, barriers, or problems to fix. Andrew Deuchar's recent Teaching in Higher Education paper, "Tracing pedagogy from below: an affirmative account of international students' learning practices in higher education", starts in a more useful place: the practices students already use to make university work. For UK institutions trying to strengthen the student voice evidence behind international student support, that shift matters because open comments often reveal capability, judgement, and care as clearly as they reveal frustration.
Context and research question
Many university discussions about international students still start from a deficit frame. The focus falls on adaptation problems, language concerns, or classroom reticence, and the student can quietly become a problem case. Deuchar pushes against that habit by bringing critical internationalisation studies into conversation with asset-based pedagogies.
The study draws on semi-structured interviews about international students' learning practices at an Australian university. The central question is simple but important: what do international students actively do, within and beyond the classroom, to learn, participate, and sustain themselves in higher education? For UK teams, that is a useful reframing because it shifts attention from "what is missing?" to "what is already happening, and how can the institution recognise, support, and learn from it?"
Key findings
The paper challenges the idea that international students are passive participants in university learning. Instead, Deuchar shows students actively developing and mobilising forms of knowledge, judgement, and adaptation that are often missed when institutions read their experience only through risk, transition, or support deficits. For UK readers, the takeaway is practical: if your coding frame only looks for problems, it will miss evidence of how students are already making learning work.
Those practices are intellectual as well as social. The paper highlights how students draw on transnational academic knowledges and adapt them to new settings, rather than leaving prior ways of thinking behind when they enter a new system. For UK universities, that means feedback about confusion or adjustment should not be read as evidence of absent capability. It often sits alongside considerable agency, resourcefulness, and academic judgement.
The findings also underline the importance of inclusive learning communities. International students describe building peer support, shared understanding, and mutual help that sustain learning inside and outside formal teaching spaces. That sits closely with recent evidence that belonging is not fixed for ethnic-minority students, but is made and remade through everyday relationships, interpretation, and support. The benefit for institutions is clear: comments about friendship, group work, and informal support are not background detail, they are evidence about how belonging is being built.
Deuchar captures the shift neatly:
"not as a problem to be solved but as problem solving"
Care is part of the pedagogy here, not a soft extra. Deuchar's account points to relational competencies and practices of care as part of how students learn and help others learn. That is an important distinction for UK institutions. The message is not that universities can rely on student resilience. It is that good analysis should show where students are already doing significant work to keep themselves and their peers connected, and where institutional systems are making that harder than it needs to be.
Practical implications
Universities should review how they code and discuss international student feedback. If comment analysis only searches for barriers such as language difficulty, homesickness, or unclear expectations, it will miss the practical and relational strategies students are already using to succeed. Adding asset-oriented codes, and learning from appreciative inquiry in student voice work, alongside challenge-oriented ones gives international offices, programme teams, and student experience leaders a fuller basis for action, which leads to more precise support instead of broader assumptions.
Survey design matters too. Open-text prompts that ask what helped students learn, settle, or navigate expectations can surface usable evidence that a standard satisfaction item will never capture. For teams building a broader term-time pulse survey feedback loop or revising free-text analysis, our guide to NSS open-text analysis methodology shows how to turn narrative comments into evidence that is structured enough for quality work and committee reporting.
UK teams should also be careful about segmentation. Analysing international student comments separately can be useful, but only when governance is sound and interpretation is thoughtful. The aim is to identify patterns, not flatten students into one category or overread small numbers. A clear student comment analysis governance checklist helps keep that work defensible, especially when findings may inform support, induction, or committee reporting.
The wider lesson is that international student support should not be designed only around remediation. Peer mentoring, induction, personal tutoring, and academic skills work are stronger when they recognise international students as contributors to the learning environment, not simply recipients of help. That gives staff a clearer route to belonging, participation, and retention, especially when they are listening across the key moments that shape first-semester belonging, and it gives students support that reflects what they are already doing well.
FAQ
Q: How can universities apply this paper when analysing international student feedback?
A: Start by reading for both barriers and strengths. When comments mention uncertainty, group work, assessment expectations, or settling in, ask what practices students are using to respond, who is helping, whether personal tutoring is creating a safe route for students to speak up, and which institutional conditions are making those practices easier or harder. That produces a more useful analysis than a simple deficit list and gives teams a better starting point for support design.
Q: What should we be careful about when applying a qualitative interview study from one Australian university to UK higher education?
A: The study is not estimating how common each experience is across the sector. Its value lies in surfacing mechanisms and overlooked dimensions of student experience. UK institutions should use it to sharpen what they listen for in their own evidence, then test those patterns against local surveys, comments, and conversations before making broad claims about prevalence.
Q: What does this change about how we think about student voice in international education?
A: It suggests that student voice should capture capability as well as difficulty. If universities only ask where students struggle, they will miss how students build community, translate expectations, and care for one another in ways that sustain learning. Better listening improves both inclusion and action, especially when open comments are treated as more than anecdote.
References
[Paper Source]: Andrew Deuchar "Tracing pedagogy from below: an affirmative account of international students' learning practices in higher education" DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2026.2630380
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