International Students Negotiating Higher Education

Critical perspectives

Silvia Sovic, Margo Blythman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415614696
• eBook ISBN: 9781136729478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the current economic climate, more than ever, international students provide an important income to universities. They represent much-needed funds for many institutions, but they also come with their own diverse variety of characteristics and requirements.

This insightful book offers a critical stance on contemporary views of international students and challenges the way those involved address the important issues at hand. To do this, the authors focus specifically on giving voice to the student experience. In particular, the authors show how international student experience can be a ready asset from which to glean valuable information, particularly in relation to teaching and learning, academic support and the formal and informal curriculum. In this way, the issues affecting international students can be seen as part of the larger set of difficulties that face all students at university today.

Integrating contributions from a academics and student voices from a range of backgrounds issues raised include:

• Academic Writing for International Students
• The Internationalisation of the Curriculum
• Identities: The use of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes
• International Students' Perceptions of Tutors, and
• The system in reverse, English speaking learners as 'international students'.

This book will be of interest to education management and administrators, higher education professionals, especially those working or training to teach large numbers of international students, to which it offers a unique opportunity to understand better the students' point-of-view. Because of this the book will likely appeal to academics in all English speaking countries that recruit significant numbers of international students, as well as the growing number of European universities which teach in English and those in the Indian sub-continent that send large numbers of international students to the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Silvia Sovic & Margo Blythman

DOI: 10.4324/9780203817483-1

This book grew out of the International Students' Experience Project at the Creative Learning in Practice Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CLIP CETL) at the University of the Arts, London, conducted in 2006–8. The rationale for this was a feeling that there was a dearth of international students' voices in the international pedagogical literature in the UK, especially when it came to discussion about teaching and learning. Many of the 141 international students we interviewed (in their own languages) had never even heard of the term ‘teaching and learning’ before, but their responses did not square at all with the assumed characteristics of international students as featured in the literature. On the contrary, these students demonstrated plenty of resourcefulness and critical thinking, and they frequently offered solutions to problems that neither pedagogical researchers nor institutions had considered before. Following the publication of the report on this project (Sovic 2008), and with the generous support of Alison Shreeve (then Director of CLIP CETL), in June 2009 Margo Blythman (then Director of Teaching and Learning at the London College of Communication) and Silvia Sovic (the Research Project Co-Ordinator) organized a cross-cultural workshop on ‘The Experience of International Students’ at the University of the Arts, London. The aim was to bring together other scholars to critically evaluate the current perceptions and to offer alternative views beyond the traditional stereotypes. This book includes contributions from the participants of that workshop as well as several others who had expressed interest but were unable to attend.

This book is divided into four parts. The first consists of five chapters on aspects of policy. Simon Marginson explores the paradigm of globalization and citizenship. Many international students, particularly of non-white origins and from emerging nations, experience various types of discrimination in the country they have chosen for their education. OECD figures of 2010 stated that each year as many as 3.3 million students study outside their country of citizenship. Marginson argues that ‘the political and legal Othering of globally mobile students by national governments functions as the master Othering process’ (page 10). Marginson calls for a more cosmopolitan approach in international education, and suggests that ‘in the interim the enlightened national response is to confer on international students a quasi-citizenship status whereby their rights and entitlements are aligned as closely as possible to those of local students’ (page 11). Beatrice Merrick addresses the UK's policies towards international students in recent decades, which she finds to be disjointed because they are spread across government departments. She explores the term ‘international students’ in various contexts and points out the limitation of this classification; an example would be students from the European Union, who may be categorized as ‘home students’ in terms of fees, but ‘foreign’ in terms of nationality. The rhetoric of internationalization is not matched by what is happening in practice. Moreover, financial benefits have led to the prioritization of recruitment, but also to a failure to reward good teaching practice or those who make efforts ‘to ensure that those students' experiences are positive’ (page 35). At the same time, international students do not fall under the remit of the Quality Assurance Agency, nor are they properly represented by the National Union of Students. Merrick concludes that this heavily constrained environment has necessitated initiatives by students themselves to negotiate UK higher education successfully.

Kelly Coate and Ganga Rathnayake provide a critical overview of the consumerist model of internationalization as currently applied by policy-makers in Irish higher education. They question the ethical commitment of current practices towards less developed countries and discuss the concepts of care, moral responsibility and cosmopolitanism. These values had a prominent role in the history of higher education in this missionary country, and were reflected in more charitable attitudes towards students from ‘poorer’ countries. The authors take up Rizvi's (2009) call for a ‘global humanity’ that ‘takes primacy over local concerns’ and that establishes a ‘moral’ basis for relationships with international students in an era of economic rationalism in which students are regarded as consumers (page 49). The last two chapters in this section raise more concerns in relation to internationalization. Joanna Al-Youssef takes up the perception of internationalization as understood by different levels of managerial structure at university, while Elizabeth Grant focuses on the current inconsistencies towards an international curriculum and lack of engagement within higher education in the development of such a curriculum.

Part II of the book focuses on teaching and learning. Silvia Sovic addresses creative arts students' perceptions of their tutors and calls for cosmopolitan learning engagement in mixed classrooms, which in a global age will benefit all students. Margaret Kettle and Allan Luke engage with a narrative of two postgraduate students from two major source countries, China and Thailand, in an Australian university. Rather than generalizing about their teaching and learning experiences, the study offers an in-depth insight into ‘the complex cultural dynamics and exchanges at work in postgraduate study’ (page 105). The evidence presented in the study offers ‘new empirical insights into a topic that has been riven with entrenched theoretical position and controversy’ (page 106). Ly Tran's chapter investigates ‘the theory of transformative learning as a possible explanation for the changes international students make in their journey to negotiate higher education’ (page 124). The author's main evidence comes from interviews conducted with Chinese and Vietnamese students about their learning experience at an Australian university. She highlights the contradiction between the transformative environment that universities claim to offer in their promotional literature, and the real situations in which potential transformative learning processes for international students are supposed to take place. In this context, she further problematizes the internationalization of curricula through the spectrum of transformative learning and the positive impact this could present for international and home students alike. Michelle Barker, Ray Hibbins and Peter Woods carried out an exploratory study of masters-level business students with the aim of helping researchers and practitioners to integrate the principle of internationalization into the formal and informal curricula of higher education, to equip university graduates with the knowledge, skills and attributes of a ‘global citizen’. Students' own definitions of global citizenship are presented within the framework of cultural intelligence. Part II concludes with Yu-Ching Kuo's chapter, which joins the others in questioning the prevailing view of international students who are seen in the scholarly literature as ‘victims’ or ‘problems’, and suggests that many students are much more resilient in entering higher education. She investigates the idea of international students' identity as entrepreneurs, and argues that the identities of customers and entrepreneurs are by no means the same.

In recent years much has been written on the subject of Part III of this book, language issues. It would not be an overstatement to note that language inadequacy, associated with the much-contested concept of ‘cultural differences’, is far too often offered as a simplistic explanation for the learning deficiency of international students. The two chapters in this part focus instead more specifically on academic writing, which the authors discuss from different angles. Carol Bailey challenges current assessment strategies of academic writing through a critical pedagogical viewpoint, and calls for application of more flexible assessment methods. She argues that ‘certain assessment types do disadvantage certain groups of international students’, and suggests that higher education should reconsider this issue within the framework of equal opportunities, thus promoting greater inclusivity (page 184). Weronika Górska questions whether students receive sufficient and appropriate guidance and writing support while progressing from generic to subject-specific areas of academic writing. Her study adopts an academic literacies approach, and her findings are based on pre-masters student voices and ‘their perspectives on the support they receive, the academic requirements they have to meet and their own engagement in learning to write academically approved texts’ (page 190).

The final part of this book addresses the reverse phenomenon: the experience of home students studying abroad, or so-called ‘horizontal mobility’. In this context ‘home students’ are represented by Australian students in the chapter by Wendy Green, and UK students in the chapter by Brendan Bartram. Green points out that there is a vacuum in scholarly research, which focuses on the experience of horizontally mobile students. However, she argues that study abroad is coming to be seen as an important component of an internationalized curriculum. Her study emphasizes that ‘if the benefit of studying abroad is to be measured on the basis of levels of immersion in the host culture, universities that send and receive students need to do more to support this intention’ (page 223). Bartram reports on his research on UK Study Abroad students' motivations and challenges relating to their sojourn overseas, and concludes that career and academic benefits do not rate as highly as social or personal benefits, such as transformative shifts in self-identity.

The contributors to this book join other recent critical studies that have challenged the widespread notion, usually reached by focusing on a ‘deficit model’, of international students portrayed as victims. The methodology deployed in these studies is often inadequate, based on anecdotal evidence or with little methodological rigour; many of them fall into the category defined by Holliday as a ‘large culture paradigm’, an approach that ‘imposes a picture of the social world which is divided into “hard”, essentially different ethnic, national or international cultures’ (Holliday 1999: 240). The contributions to this book show considerable variety in terms of the methodology and techniques they have adopted. Many used semi-structured interviews (Tran, Barker et al., Kuo), in some cases large scale (Marginson, Sovic); others involved a smaller number of in-depth interviews (Al-Youssef) or detailed studies of one or two cases (Coate and Rathnayake, Kettle and Luke). Some have made use of special procedures such as the nominal group technique (Barker et al.), positioning interviews (Tran), paradigmatic analysis (Green) and critical discourse analysis (Kettle and Luke). Contributions are also informed by reference to other disciplines such as philosophy (Coate and Rathnayake) and ethnography (Górska).

Throughout this book there are many issues that remain unresolved, but which we hope will stimulate future debate. Who are international students? What do we mean in practice when we talk about internationalization? Most would by now agree that it must entail more than the setting up of an international recruiting office and language centres; but what precisely? What is an international curriculum in practice? Do the so-called ‘international’ universities have guidance and policy to help their staff create and develop such a beast? Is globalization just for home students? And finally — something that appears repeatedly in the literature — what exactly is meant by ‘western learner’, ‘western education’ and ‘western pedagogy’?¹ In a recent article on the internationalization of the curriculum, Glynis Cousin debates the concept of westernism and questioned its value-free concept as an explanatory framework in the globalized classroom. In her view,

the idea of the west ‘sets a certain structure of thought and knowledge in motion’ that we should be wary of. While we need provisional ideas and concepts to bring to bear on our analytical labour, ‘provisional’ is the key word here; we need to be open to rival explanations when we examine an issue with a particular frame. A ‘tool’ that overly frames the direction of our inquiry in this way presents the danger that we see what we anticipate seeing before we look.

(Cousin 2011: 587)

One could paraphrase this by saying that it is for educationalists to demonstrate critical thinking in practice rather than just brandishing it as a slogan to describe western approaches to learning. Many contributors of this book suggest that the age of globalization should really be the age of cosmopolitanism in the classroom. Institutions and their staff will need to fully engage with these issues, otherwise there is a danger that all students and staff who cherish and value the opportunities of cultural exchanges will come to see internationalism as empty rhetoric.

Given the present climate for higher education, the circumstances and economics of international student migration are set to change, perhaps quite rapidly. The map of migration may look very different in as little as a decade. The economic balance of power, the methods of delivery (with ‘local’ campuses of ‘global’ universities), even the ecology of the linguistic map of higher education, may all see fundamental transformation. Much less likely to change are the underlying psychological and social factors at work when students elect for an international dimension to their education and the risks and sacrifices they incur in the process. However much it remains an unfulfilled ideal, a truly cosmopolitan approach, based on premises that are not chained to colonialist or post-colonialist structures and attitudes, is the best hope for a world of genuine international student mobility.

Note

1. 1 A current attempt to explore these issues further is the ESRC Seminar series ‘Global Citizenship as a Graduate Attribute’. See www.wlv.ac.uk/globalcitizen (accessed 17 March 2012).

References

• Cousin, G. (2011) ‘Rethinking the concept of “western”’, Higher Education Research and Development, 30, 5: 585–94.
• Holliday, A. (1999) ‘Small cultures’, Applied Linguistics, 20, 2: 237–64.
• Rizvi, F. (2009) ‘Towards cosmopolitan learning’, Discourse: Studiesin the Cultural Politics of Education, 30, 3: 253–68.
• Sovic, S. (2008) Lost in Transition? The International Students' Experience Project, London: CLIP CETL. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.arts.ac.uk/librarylearningandteaching/clipcetl/projects/internationalstudentsexperience/ (accessed 13 February 2012).

Part I Policy

Chapter 2 Equals or others?

Mobile students in a nationally bordered world

Simon Marginson

DOI: 10.4324/9780203817483-2

Introduction

Across the world, 3.3 million students study outside their country of citizenship each year (OECD 2010: 315).¹ Almost half of them move from Asia and Africa into English-speaking education systems. Another quarter move between countries in the European Higher Education Area. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand international education is a large and growing commercial export industry (Bashir 2007). In the United States international students contribute to the national knowledge economy and American foreign relations. Both the nation of education and the educated international student appear to gain from the exchange. But for international students in general, and more so for non-white students from emerging nations, the exchange is premised on less than equal respect and treatment. Most people in the country of education give this little thought. If it is difficult for international students, the thinking runs, why do ‘they’ come? Clearly ‘our education’ is superior to what ‘they’ have at home. And being supplicants, as it were, ‘they’ ought to ‘adjust’ to the country of education to the degree necessary to absorb its bounty.

Leaving behind their country of citizenship and the rights and protections it provides, international students enter a new education system and living setting where they are variously constructed as supplicants, strangers, outsiders, consumers, social isolates and people in learning or linguistic ‘deficit’. Without their consent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Policy
• PART II Teaching and learning
• PART III Language
• PART IV Home students abroad
• Index