Maintaining competence: a grounded theory explaining the response of university lecturers to the mix of local and international students

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.