International students often face unique challenges during their transition into UK higher education, including cultural adjustment, feelings of isolation, and navigating unfamiliar academic systems. This session explores how academic personal tutors can play a pivotal role in fostering belonging, participation, and success for these students. Drawing on principles of Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and experiential learning, we will discuss strategies for personalised, relational, and continuous tutoring support. Key themes include decolonising tutoring practices, building trust and rapport, and empowering students to adapt and thrive in diverse learning environments, inside and beyond classrooms. Attendees will gain practical insights into supporting international students’ academic, professional and personal development through culturally responsive approaches.
UKAT’s free monthly webinars, Tutoring Matters, are designed to support all those engaged with personal tutoring and advising, whether that be as a practitioner, leader or in a related support role. They will also act as key professional development for those undertaking tutoring and advising roles. Facilitated by various key professionals associated with UKAT and collaborative in nature, the webinars will cover important issues for academic advising.
If you would like to facilitate a webinar, please get in touch. We are also open to suggestions from members about topics they would like to see covered. To make a suggestion, or for any other queries regarding the webinars, please email webinar@ukat.uk.
You can book onto the webinars and find out further information by clicking on the webinar titles below (booking will go live approximately one month before the webinar is due to take place).
Supporting Multiculturalism in Group Tutorials through Language Portraits: Real Practices from International Collaborations - Thursday 15 January 2026, 14:00
Alison Raby, University of Lincoln
This webinar will feature real-world examples, challenges, and best practices from a recent British Council collaborative project with international universities in Central Asia.
The aims of this session are:
- to explore how language portraits can be used in group tutorials to promote multiculturalism and multilingualism.
- to consider barriers to multiculturalism and how these might be overcome.
Language portraits can be a useful tool for considering an individual’s identity (Mu et al., 2023) and have been used in classroom settings where students come from multilingual backgrounds (Siegman & Galloway, 2025). In our project, we introduced language portraits to student teachers to enable them to consider their multilingualism as part of their teacher identity. The student teachers were from multilingual backgrounds in Central Asia, collaborating with a UK university.
We then encouraged students to consider the key concepts of language competence for leaders: plurilingual competence, language repertoire, intercultural language skills, linking with the intercultural sensitivity index (lee Olsen & Kroeger, 2001). Students also explored barriers to multiculturalism such as language differences, cultural barriers, ethnocentrism, and I also discuss how these can be overcome.
Following the success of using this activity in the project, the approach has since been used it in the UK in small group sessions, and the webinar explores how it could be used in group tutorials.