A decade of internationalisation : has it influenced students' views of cross-cultural groupwork at university?

This article considers how student views of collaborative study in a diverse international academic context may have changed in the past decade. A retrospective is provided on a research project carried out in 1998 that investigated students' views of working in international groups; this is linked with research carried out by the author in 2008. Despite the fact that examples of ethnic reductionism remain, there appeared to be a more positive social atmosphere in the 2008 data; students perceived cross-cultural interaction as valuable. Where there were conflicts within groups, these stemmed from clashes over disciplinary variation and differences in ideas about how to get things done. This article provides some suggestions for why there was a more positive working atmosphere between students