International students conceptions about learning and teaching: An exploration through metaphor analysis

Students’ conceptions of learning and teaching influence students’ learning experiences and outcomes, and these conceptions are deeply shaped by students’ cultural backgrounds. Understanding students’ conceptions of learning and teaching has become critically important with higher education’s growing internationalization. This urgency, however, is overlooked as internationalization discourse remains confined to policy realms, neglecting pedagogical implications. To address this issue, this study explores international students’ conceptions of learning and teaching through metaphor analysis and interprets them using Hofstede’s cultural dimension framework. A total of 204 metaphor responses of international students are collected in this study. Then this study identifies, categorizes, and compares variations in students’ conceptions of learning and teaching using phenomenographically informed qualitative analyses. The results reveal both notable diversity and meaningful similarities in international students’ conceptions of learning and teaching. Findings reveal convergence toward student-centered learning across cultures, alongside the continued dominance of teacher-centered teaching conceptions. Discussed through Hofstede’s cultural dimension framework, these results show clear cross-cultural differences while also highlighting several conceptions shared across cultural clusters. These findings underscore the importance of acknowledging and engaging with diverse learning and teaching conceptions to create culturally responsive instruction in higher education. They also invite a critical reflection on Hofstede’s cultural dimension framework, highlighting both its usefulness for structuring cross-cultural comparisons and its constraints in representing the nuanced, dynamic identities of contemporary international students.