Session Outline

As UK HE institutions adapt to a post-Brexit and post-visa-restriction reality, personal tutors are operating within an environment of increasing cultural complexity and evolving support demands. While the number of EU students enrolling in UK universities has declined since 2020 (The Migration Observatory, 2025), British HE remains internationally oriented, with continued recruitment from non-EU countries, and especially India and Nigeria (House of Commons Library, 2025).

The persistent cultural, linguistic, and educational diversity among remaining international students — alongside a domestic student body ethnically and culturally heterogeneous — means that tutors are regularly engaging with tutees whose communication norms, prior educational experiences, and expectations for support vary significantly (Zelenková and Hanesová, 2019). Research demonstrates that intercultural communication competence in HE contexts is critical for building inclusive, supportive environments and helping students from diverse backgrounds adjust and succeed academically (Kuffuor et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2024).

This context underscores the need to equip personal tutors with refined intercultural communicative competence — enabling nuanced, empathic, and effective dialogue across cultural and linguistic boundaries (Kim, 2001; Arasaratnam-Smith, 2025).

To this end, the UKAT International Students SIG has developed a three-stage course that supports personal tutors and advisors in their practice. More specifically, by strengthening tutors' intercultural communicative competences, the course contributes to students' sense of belonging and mattering. Culturally responsive tutoring helps students feel recognised, understood and valued, mitigating the isolation that can arise when communication norms or expectations differ. Positioning intercultural awareness at the core of tutor-tutee interactions therefore supports the creation of relationships in which students experience greater connection, confidence and academic engagement.

The course consists of Workshop 1, a self-paced online module, and Workshop 2. The workshops can be delivered in person or online. This session provides a taster of that course, offering participants a glimpse of the reflective, conceptual, and applied elements that underpin the full course.

This conference taster will introduce each component and engage participants in short activities adapted from the full experience.

Workshop 1: Developing Self-Awareness and Challenging Assumptions

Workshop 1 invites tutors to examine their own cultural frameworks and assumptions. Through reflective exercises, tutors begin to understand how their own cultural starting points shape their perceptions of tutees and how these implicit assumptions may unintentionally create barriers to trust or communication.

In the taster session, participants will engage in a brief reflective task demonstrating how we stimulate recognition of cultural lenses and biases.

Self-Paced Module: Decoding Cross-Cultural Communication (by Xiaozhe Cai and Erica Payne)

The self-paced online module provides the theoretical foundation for the course and offer participants the opportunity to explore models of intercultural communication,

The taster will provide a short interactive demonstration from the module.

Workshop 2: Applying Knowledge in Practice

Workshop 2 enables tutors to apply their self-awareness and theoretical learning to real-world tutoring scenarios. The taster includes a concise group task to illustrate the applied aspect of the course.

By experiencing a condensed version of the learning course, conference participants will gain insight into how structured reflection, intercultural theory, and practical application combine in this course to support more effective tutor-tutee relationships to enhance tutors’ self-confidence and intercultural communication skills. The authors will also welcome participants’ feedback to further improve the activities.

Learning Outcomes

Bibliography