A major theme that has emerged from many recent student surveys (e.g. UKCOSA 2004; Middlehurst and Woodfield 2007) is the lack of integration between home and international students. Universities have been developing a number of strategies to try to address this one of which is international/diversity weeks.
The University of Warwick’s Students’ Union claims that its One World Week is the “World’s largest student run international event” and says that its aim is to “stimulate personal development and inspire a view based on acceptance and appreciation of the World's mosaic of cultures.” However questions exist over the real value of such events for promoting intercultural competence and encouraging integration. One recent report for example warns that “the danger with such events is that they can promote a notion of fixed identity of the ‘saris samosas and steel bands’ model of multiculturalism’” (Equality Challenge Unit 2009: 47). Facebook feedback after Warwick’s 2010 One World Week suggested that home students did not participate sufficiently in it and that the event did not meet its objectives.
This paper reports a study that explored these issues. We devised two versions of a questionnaire using the Global People (http://www.globalpeople.org.uk/ conceptual framework as the basis for the design. This framework identifies four clusters of competencies: Openness to new ideas Communication Relationships and Personal qualities. One version of the questionnaire the basic version probed these four behavioural clusters quantitatively by asking a number of Likert-type rating questions. A second version of the questionnaire completed by those willing to provide more detail added qualitative questions: respondents were asked to reflect on their experiences and describe some of them. Three groups of participants were targeted: the core planning team (68 students) the helper team (215 students) and attendees. This paper reports findings from both questionnaires.
