title: Acculturation of immigrant students in a higher education learning environment: Assimilation as 'false consciousness'
Creators: name: Lewis, Lynette
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2020

description: Acculturation is the process of immigrant adaptation when a minority culture comes into contact with the dominant majority culture in a host society. While changes in values, beliefs and behaviours occur in both groups as a result of contact, these changes are more prominent in the minority group. The thesis explores the process of acculturation of a group of New Zealand higher education immigrant students from their initial learning environment to their current university learning environment. Acculturation theory is led by John Berry, whose 1997 model proposes that immigrants will select one of four adaptation strategies. These include assimilation into the mainstream with a loss of one’s own culture, and integration involving retention of one’s own culture (in the private domain) and adoption of mainstream culture (in the public domain, which includes the education sector). Extending this concept to its logical conclusion, integration in education contexts involves a process of assimilation into the mainstream education system. The purpose of this study was to explore and explain the nature of participants’ education acculturation in a higher education learning environment, drawing on the concept of assimilation as ‘false consciousness’. This key concept is used to uncover the acculturation belief that assimilation into the mainstream learning environment is required by the dominant group, expected by the immigrant group and then normalised through the socialisation process of education for social reproduction rather than social transformation. The contextual influences in New Zealand of a political commitment to biculturalism (dating from 1840 when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between indigenous Māori tribes and the British Crown) within a multicultural (multi-ethnic) society add complexity to the nature of the education system and the immigrant acculturation experience. The qualitative research approach was constructionist and interpretive, using two main theoretical lenses: Bronfenbrenner’s (1993) socio-ecological theory as a structuring and contextualising model; and Berry’s (1997) acculturation theory, against which the participant experiences were scrutinised and critiqued with a particular focus on the integration strategy. A rich data set was collected from eight immigrant student participants using a bricolage of four methods: rich pictures, questionnaire, interview and card sort. Data were analysed using Maxwell’s (2012) complementary contiguity-based and similarity-based analyses approaches. Findings revealed a set of contradictions between preferences and practices associated with acculturation in the higher education learning environment. While assimilation marked the participants’ experience, and assimilation as ‘false consciousness’ had been strongly internalised to the extent that participants had no expectations beyond the status quo, I make an argument for a multicultural and intercultural approach to replace the assimilationist approach within Berry’s (1997) integration strategy. A theoretical model of broader historico-political and sociocultural contexts is presented to reflect influences on the immigrant student in the learning environment. When applied to the New Zealand context, further contradictions and disconnections are revealed. The main contribution to practice centres on an argument to internationalise the curriculum at home. This would benefit immigrant students as well as all students in a higher education learning environment. At my university, such a proposal is well aligned with the strategic goal that all graduates will have an international experience. Through an internationalised curriculum, the university can provide multicultural practice and intercultural opportunities while also acknowledging the value of the currently invisible immigrant group.