The Macdonald and Sundararajan article discusses how international students aim to learn new material in the same manner as domestic students. The instructors tend to adopt an assimilationist approach in order to level the playing field in terms of the students’ understanding of the course material and how it is presented to them.
Something very surprising from the article is that students are segmented and viewed as belonging to two different groups: international students and domestic (Canadian) students. However, this can be problematic because domestic students is not a homogenous group; it consists of many different sub-groups, based on differences in demographics and diversity markers within the larger group, such as race, religion, gender, etc. So it is very likely that all domestic students do not have the same experiences and view the world the same.
The expectation is that the students will all share aspects of their cultural heritages, but the reality is that international students are being persuaded to assimilate and adapt into the new culture.
