Cultural Border Crossings in the UAE

Over one academic year, the author documented the experiences of new first-year male Emirati students at a college of higher education in the United Arab Emirates. He described and attempted to explain the gamut of transition experiences as young male Emirati school-leavers moved from their pre-dominantly Arabic life-world associated with their families and schooling to the pre-dominantly Western culture found in higher education. He also investigated factors affecting student learning and assessed best practices in the college administrative and academic areas which appeared to facilitate smoother border crossing transitions. Adopting a multi-paradigmatic research design that drew methods and quality standards from multiple paradigms to create a methodology that enabled an artful, critical and interpretive exploration of complexity supplemented by a descriptive analysis of general social patterns, a Border Crossing Index was found to broadly correlate with student placement levels indicating that those students placed in the lower levels were much more likely to leave college and seek full-time employment within the first semester - 66% of the new students left in the first year.