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Ethics committees have an important role to play in ensuring ethical standards (e.g. BERA, ESRC, RCUK recommendations) are met by educational researchers. Balancing obligations to participants, society, institutions and the researchers themselves is not, however, easy. Researchers often experience the ethics committee as unsympathetic to their research endeavour, whilst ethics committees find some research approaches do not make ethical implications sufficiently explicit. This potential for misunderstanding is evident in the literature, but studies investigating how participants perceive this relationship are missing. This research comprises a novel empirical study which explores researcher perceptions of research ethics committees. Fifty-five participants in higher education departments of education responded to an online survey. Open and closed-ended questions were used to collect data on roles, methodological stance, experiences of the research ethics committee, perceived tensions and examples of good practice. The results indicated that contemporary educational researchers regard research ethics committees as friends when researcher and reviewer are transparently engaged in a shared endeavour. When this shared endeavour breaks down, for a variety of reasons--including apparently unreasonable demands or mutual misunderstanding--the research ethics committees can become foes. The difference between foe and friend lies in the quality of communication, clear systems and a culture of respectful mutual learning. The contributions of this study have practical implications for the ways that education researchers and research ethics committees relate to one another within university settings, both to alleviate areas of tension and to arrive at a shared understanding which will enable best ethical research practice.

This study explores the view that student engagement with one another is critical in the internationalisation mission. Although universities make powerful claims regarding their international mission and goals, international and home students report isolation from one another. Whilst the literature is rich in its discussion of policy, institutional meanings and student voice, it offers us less insight into how internationalisation might be translated into classroom practice. The study shares examples of four small-scale projects in which students engage with one another across cultural boundaries in practical and problem-solving activities. What students value in the approach is explored through interview, focus groups, diary reflections and evaluations. The findings suggest that students who engage with one another across cultural boundaries in practical and pragmatic ways, experience significant change in their assumptions and feel more readily able to view themselves as members of an international learning community. The study arrives at the view that the evolution of communities of practice, based on principles of equality, shared goals and guided reciprocity can bring international and home students together in a process of effective mutual learning that meets some of the goals of the internationalisation.

This paper contrasts the notion of "independent learning" as perceived by two informant groups at a UK institution of higher education: (1) teachers, educators and providers of education and (2) their students or "consumers" of education. Both informant groups are staff and students studying in a culture different to that of their first education. They are identified in their receiving institution as "international", or have identified themselves as such. The experience of transition into a UK University was explored with both informant groups, through interviews and focus groups, over a cycle of two years. "Independent learning" as rhetoric and practice emerged for both groups as an issue in their transition from familiar to unfamiliar learning culture. Three key insights emerged. Firstly, a mismatch is identified between teacher perceptions and student interpretation of "independent learning" expectations and practice. Secondly, it emerges that student experience of the learning culture is in a state of continuous flux, evolving between first arrival and end of programme through cycles of bafflement and empowerment. Finally, both students and teachers identify a number of strategies for dealing with this experience of "transitional" independence. The paper concludes by recommending a notion of "phased scaffolding" that might inform educational practice and by reflecting on the implications for the educator in revisiting received educational discourse from the perspective of participants negotiating a second learning culture.

In this paper the process of building an international student community is explored. Strategies discussed include guided interaction within a virtual environment between home students studying in their own culture and international students studying at a distance. The context includes both the state and private sector in South East Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. The subject is a Master of Arts in Education for practising in-service teachers of English. Through exchanging teacher narratives, students identify shared concerns and values about their profession and recognise connections with their peers in apparently widely different cultural settings. Student and tutor evaluations suggest that participants developed the competence of recognising connections between their own meanings and behaviours and those of others. They also deconstructed their assumptions and unexamined beliefs through engagement with others. The paper concludes by analysing how these competences impacted on the self-knowledge and practice of the participants, and suggests the generative principles which made this learning effective. (Contains 1 table.)