Office:
Jacobs University Bremen
Campus Ring 1
28759 Bremen
Germany

Phone:  +49 (0)421-200-3953
Email:    mvegmondbigsss-bremen.de

Marieke van Egmond is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) and is working in the thematic field of Attitude Formation, Value Change and Intercultural Communication.

Dissertation topic: The meaning of learning across cultures.

Dissertation committee:

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kühnen (Jacobs University Bremen)
Dr. Song Yan (Jacobs University Bremen)
Prof. Dr. Jin Li (Brown University)

Outline

International mobility has become a central dimension of academic life. The numbers of students from diverse cultural backgrounds entering European institutions of higher edcuation are increasing by the year. As cultures differ on values in many domains of life, it is unlikely that education has escaped such a cultural influence. The current project aims at understanding the concepts of learning that students from different cultures endorse and how these values develop in an intercultural setting. The theory that forms the main base of the project is the Mind / Virtue theory (Li, 2003). She found that Western students have a ‘Mind oriented‘ approach to learning and Asian students have a ‘Virtue oriented’ approach. Both can be traced back to the philosophical heritages in the respective cultures. At the core of the Mind orientation is doubt towards pre-existing knowledge. Learning is primarily defined as a process of developing critical thinking skills. In the Virtue orientation, learning is the pursuit of moral and social development, with respect and diligence as guiding principles. This project aims to provide quantitative support for this qualitatively constructed theory.