Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper explores the reception and analysis of different methodologies in an inter-disciplinary pedagogical collaboration involving Design and Business academics and their students. The authors examined the learning experiences of students (originally from China) studying in the UK and students (originally from the UK) studying in China by adopting an alternative approach: the “small-culture” approach (Holliday, 1999) in combination with creative tasks that sought to generate visual data.

The authors, consisting of international members, explored the students’ perceptions of the cultures of learning they experienced in both countries as they progressed through the study-abroad experience, how they understand their “home” and “host” cultures of learning and how these understandings might change over time.

Bringing academics together from two different faculties enabled us to share our existing knowledge and understandings but also enthused significant cross-learning. The study provides some methodological insights into joint research, which involves intercultural and multilingual collaboration.