4 June 2025
Promoting the student voice in TNE
Authors
Dr Washad Emambocus
Partnership Lead (Academic), De Montfort University
Dr Manjeet Ridon
Head of De Montfort University London and Associate Dean International, De Montfort University
One of the key priorities across all of our partnerships at De Montfort University has been embedding the student voice into strategic and academic decision-making. To achieve this, we've developed and introduced Student Voice Committees across each partnership site and these have generated valuable insights and continuous opportunities for learning and development.
In their current form, those Student Voice Committees represent a relatively recent development. We've previously promoted more traditional feedback mechanisms to support the enhancement of the student experience and the contextualisation of learning and teaching, but the development of Student Voice Committees has given those processes much greater impact and depth.
Universities today are quite rightly focused upon the work of continual enhancement – going above and beyond what we do – and to achieve that we need to ensure students are right at the heart of our enhancement strategies.
In transnational provision, it's even more essential that we learn about – and keep up to date with – the needs, interests, expectations and aspirations of our students, and we can only do so by promoting and empowering the student voice.
Transnational education isn't simply about transposing UK delivery onto different countries and cultures. It requires – working within frameworks which assure the parity of academic standards and a consistent quality of student experience – that national contexts are taken into account, and that cultural differences inform our approaches to learning and teaching.
That may relate to the content of lectures and learning materials, ensuring, say, that they're not steeped exclusively in the references and perspectives of the global north. It may relate to students' – and their families' – expectations of the outcomes of their studies. And it may also relate to how they expect those studies to be delivered.
Let's take a look at two examples from our own experience. In both Dubai and Kazakhstan, we've found (as we find in many parts of the world) that students' parents are much more involved in their daughters' and sons' studies than we would expect to be the case in the UK (or indeed than GDPR would permit in that domestic setting). Parents are very much part of the student journey and the student voice. (Indeed, it can take real skill to negotiate the notion and presence of parents as active stakeholders alongside their daughters and sons!)
But the expectations of both parents and students depend of course on their cultural contexts. In the United Arab Emirates, for instance, where many people are familiar with British and Indian education systems, there's a strong desire for curricula to be filled with opportunities for independent study and experiential learning. The students (and their parents) are particularly focused on their future professional prospects, and therefore want their studies to have strong emphases on practical employability. In short, they very much want a (culturally appropriate) version of modern UK HE.
In Central Asia, by contrast, students and their families have what we might consider more traditional perspectives on education, expecting a higher ratio of contact time in their academic timetables. They're far less keen on independent learning and prefer their studies to be much more explicitly structured, instructional and classroom-based.
Our promotion of Student Voice Committees has given us a much more immediate, detailed and vivid sense of the significance of these cultural differences than more static student feedback mechanisms might, and has allowed us to adapt our provision appropriately. This student-centred approach to strategic contextualisation ensures our provision is fit for purpose, and has often been really eye-opening.
Many of our students come from cultures which are perhaps more polite than our own, and naturally wouldn't think it right to complain about their studies (especially to their respected teachers). But once they recognise that it's okay (in fact, that it's necessary and beneficial) for them to express what they need and want, they come to appreciate those opportunities for meaningful dialogue and constructive accountability. We provide a safe environment in which they can speak, and they genuinely feel they're being heard, that they're valued, that they're truly at the centre of the whole system, and that their world and perspectives are represented in their institution and in their classrooms.
In the UK we may sometimes struggle to ensure all our students' voices are expressed, and that student representation is consistently representative of the broad range of views of an entire cohort. But in our transnational work, we've found students so appreciative of the recognition that these student voice mechanisms afford (recognition which we might ourselves sometimes take for granted) that they participate with extraordinary enthusiasm, vigour and professionalism in these processes, energizing these cycles of feedback, action, outcome and feedback in an ongoing journey of continuous improvement.
These processes have dynamized and been dynamized by our students' commitment to their studies. We've found, for example, that (by listening to, and acting on, what our students want) our promotion of opportunities for entrepreneurship and ways to explore and apply concepts of sustainability have encouraged the active expression of students' voices through working on those things they really care about, generating new ideas and sparking new initiatives and collaborations – and underpinning their passion to have their voices heard.
But, as we consider and celebrate the importance of the student voice, and ways we may continue to develop to empower our students, we should of course give (almost) the last words to the voices of some of those students… some words, then, directly from our class reps in Kazakhstan:
Your leadership, open communication with students, and the regular meetings you hold with representatives from each group have made a real difference. You always listen to our concerns, respond with actions, and make us feel that our voice truly matters. Having studied in South Korea, Canada and Russia, we can confidently say the support and student engagement at DMU Kazakhstan stands out. At no other university have we felt so genuinely heard and valued.
That, of course, is precisely what we always hope to hear and to achieve together. It makes everything we do worthwhile.