International Students’ Practices in Digitally Mediated Multicultural Learning Environments at a UK University: Knowing, Languaging, and Caring

Abstract

Abstract
Internationalisation has become a prominent feature of UK higher education, in a context shaped by globalisation, marketisation, and digitalisation. In this landscape, international students are often discussed in relation to mobility, economic contribution, and intercultural exchange. Existing research has generated valuable insights into these areas, particularly processes of cultural adjustment. However, comparatively less attention has been paid to how international students organise their academic and social lives at the micro level, especially across physical and digital domains, without first framing these practices through economic motivations or cultural adjustment narratives. In other words, research often begins with questions of why students move or how well they adapt, which in turn feeds into how international students are understood and what is expected of them. By temporarily bracketing these explanatory frames, this study focuses on what students do in everyday situations. It foregrounds the practices through which participation is organised, opening space for a more agentic understanding of international students in university life.
This thesis examines international students’ everyday practices within a digitally mediated, multicultural learning environment at a UK university during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study is grounded in a practice-based perspective, informed by Schatzki’s theory of practices, and attends to students’ knowing, languaging, and caring as interrelated domains of activity.
Methodologically, it adopts a hybrid ethnographic approach, integrating online and offline methods over eleven months of fieldwork, including classroom observation, semi-structured interviews, reflective diaries, and document analysis. The pandemic context created empirical conditions in which the digital mediation of students’ practices became both intensified and sustained, allowing close attention to participation across settings.
The findings are presented across three papers. The first examines students’ knowing practices by focusing on how prior professional trajectories shaped their engagement with postgraduate study. Students drew on their tacit knowing to make sense of course material, adapt their learning approaches, and share relational knowledge within their groups. However, this valuable fund of knowledge was not always fully acknowledged, but sometimes ignored or, more often than not, went unsaid, suggesting that postgraduate classrooms are enriched, but also unsettled, by the tacit repertoires students carry with them, and that the recognition of such repertoires remains uneven.
The second paper turns to language practices, showing how multilingual students navigated English-dominant norms in both in-person and digital spaces. Students drew on translanguaging and multimodal resources to achieve communicative goals, sometimes positioning themselves as resourceful and agentive, while at other times encountering implicit norms of “competent” communication shaped by assessment practices, group dynamics, and the architectures of digital platforms.
The third paper explores caring practices, particularly as they circulate through digital mediation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings resonate with a growing body of research that moves beyond institutional-centric understandings of support by showing how care is sustained through ongoing relational work across transnational contexts. Students maintained financial, emotional, and communicative ties with their families, supported by digital platforms that facilitate co-presence and coordination. The study further shows how these practices extend beyond family-centred networks to broader constellations of actors in students’ everyday academic and social lives, where peer groups and digitally mediated exchanges enable the circulation of information and practical assistance. These practices remain less visible within institutional framings of support, which tend to foreground formal provision, and in doing so the analysis draws attention to the everyday infrastructures of care that underpin students’ participation and wellbeing.
This study contributes by offering new ways of understanding familiar aspects of international student life across three interrelated dimensions. Conceptually, it shifts attention to international students’ everyday practices as organised and socially shared doings, sayings, and relatings, making visible forms of tacit knowing and practical engagement that are often overlooked. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of a hybrid ethnographic approach for capturing practices across digitally mediated environments, particularly under the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. Empirically and analytically, it brings into view forms of knowing and caring that extend beyond institutional framings, including students’ prior professional experience and the relational, reciprocal practices through which support is enacted in everyday life. Overall, the study shows that internationalisation can be understood as a lived, practice-mediated process, driven by students’ everyday practices, while also reflecting the particular conditions of a pandemic-shaped, digitally intensive learning environment.

Date of Award	20 May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Nicola Savvides (Supervisor) & Reka Ratkaine Jablonkai (Supervisor)