Transnational Education Crossing 'Asia' and 'the West'

Adjusted desire, transformative mediocrity and neo-colonial disguise

Le-Ha Phan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138604605
• eBook ISBN: 9781317638131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, Phan Le-Ha identifies and discusses four growing self-sustained/sustaining fundamental phenomena in transnational education (TNE), namely (1) the planned, evolving and transformative mediocrity behind the endorsement of English-medium education legitimized by the interactive Asia-the West relationship; (2) the strategic employment of the terms 'Asia/Asian' and 'West/Western' by all stakeholders in their perceptions and construction of choice, quality, rigour, reliability and attractiveness of programs, courses, and locations; (3) the adjusted desire for an imagined (and often misinformed) 'West' among various stakeholders of transnational education; and (4) the assigned and self-realized ownership of English by otherwise normally on-the-margin groups of speakers. A focus on how these phenomena impact questions of identity and desire in TNE is a running theme.

The above phenomena are discussed against the backdrop of 'the rise of Asia' sentiment and how this sentiment has played out in interactions and relationships between 'the West' and 'Asia' and among Asian institutions and various entities. Phan Le-Ha's examination of the identified phenomena in TNE has been informed by her multi-layered engagement with the dialectic of the Asia-the West relationship, her critical take on certain pro-Asia and decolonisation scholarship, and her interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to theorise the field and the specific topic under scrutiny.

Phan Le-Ha shows that the current Asia chooses (not necessarily by force but largely by will and often with an informed and well-articulated agency) to go with the idea of the West and often desires an affiliation with the West either directly or indirectly, something that is getting more intense in the context of globalization, regionalization, and commercialization of education. The rise of Asia has made the idea of the West even more looked-for in Asia. TNE in Asia, in many ways, is the transforming and dynamic transit point, a layover that facilitates entry into a wanted destination – the West and/or the idea of the West. The West and Asia need one another more than ever in the context of the internationalization and commercialization of higher education. What's more, the West and Asia have hardly ever been mutually exclusive but have rather been in an eventful love-and-obsession relationship with each other. This is the very dialectic proposition that Phan Le Ha takes throughout this book while paying specific attention to transnational higher education in the greater Asian region including the Middle East, following her several research projects conducted in the region since 2005 to date.

Transnational Education Crossing 'the West' and 'Asia' explores:
• English, Internationalisation of Higher Education, and Identity: Increasing Academic Monolingualism and English-only Package
• Transnational Education and Dream Realization: From the Philippines to Vietnam, From Afghanistan to Dubai, From Everywhere in Asia to Thailand
• Desiring International /Transnational Education: Theorisation of Key Concepts and Next Steps from Here

The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of transnational education, Asia education and education policy.

1 Defining a stance

A dialectic monologue

As early as 2005, I proposed a major multi-year project to examine the rise of Asian higher education with a particular focus on the rapid development of transnational education in several Southeast Asian countries. I made a case for my project by positioning the rise of Asia as a threat and challenge to Australia’s leading status in international education in the Asia-Pacific region. One of my arguments was that many countries in Asia had appropriated English and made it theirs, and thus English was no longer Australia’s sole property, and it was no longer Australia’s ultimate advantage in attracting international students. I then urged Australian institutions to engage seriously with the reality that ‘English is a shared property’. I also urged Australia to take seriously the international outlook projected by countries in Southeast Asia and North Asia. In my argument, I saw Asia’s taking ownership of English and developing an Asian-oriented international outlook as having been both a cause to and a product of the rise of Asian higher education. Asian values and Asian traditions of learning were being promoted and celebrated as the enthusiasm about the rise of Asia heightened. From what I had briefly seen on the campuses of several Asian countries, such as Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, China, and Vietnam, I had come to believe in the rise of Asia and in its endeavour to cultivate a higher education (HE) inspired by Asian values and independent from the West.

At the same time, I was also engaged with the then scholarship on postcolonial studies, decolonisation and de-westernisation co-produced by many Asian, Western, and West-based scholars, such as Andaya and Andaya (2001), Bhabha (1994, 1996), Breidlid (2003), Canagarajah (2005), Chakrabarty (2000), Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, and Riazi (2005), Park and Curran (2000), Pennycook (1998), Shixu, Kienpointner, and Servaes (2005), and Stromquist and Monkman (2000), among others. The seemingly appreciation-of-Asia spirit embedded in this body of scholarship, together with the increasing criticisms of the West and Western hegemony from within the West (Hickling-Hudson, Matthews, and Wood, 2004; Marginson, 2004; Pennycook, 2001; Rizvi, 2005; Said, 2000; Sidhu, 2003; to name a few), played a major role in my scholarly projection of the promising future of Asian HE as a new equal playing field with the West. I then, in consuming this sentiment (perhaps in a rather one-dimensional manner), also came to see Asia and Australia as being two opponents in the internationalisation of HE in the Asian region, in which Asia was the ‘non-West’ and Australia was ‘the West’. As such, I conveyed a message in my proposed project in 2005/2006 that Asia and Australia were competing against each other in terms of Asia becoming and Australia securing the first place in the region as a hub of international education.

From 2005/2006 to about 2010 I did not see how limited my perspective was. I was critical of Western hegemony but was rather uncritical of the rise of Asia. I participated, through my scholarship, in the critiquing of the West and its affiliated power agendas without putting the same effort in questioning the populist discourse of the taken-for-granted victimised Asia. I did not take further steps in examining the validity of the widespread intellectual and academic empathy with the once colonised Asia by the West. Like most scholars I cited earlier, I took for granted the hegemonic nature of the West and treated Asia in a more or less idealised manner. There was indeed a strong urge inside me to present Asia in a positive tone those days – a practice that I am now revisiting.

As Asia has continued to receive much praise from the West and as many scholars in Asia have become more assertive in claiming their rights, their voice, and their ownership of Asian knowledge and/or knowledge about Asia, I have been even more exposed to fast-growing writings on ‘de-westernisation’ and ‘de-imperialisation’ simultaneously being produced in various fields, including cultural studies (G.M. Chen & Miike, 2006; K.-H. Chen, 2010;), media and communication studies (Gunaratne, 2009, 2010; Iwabuchi, 2010, 2012; Thussu, 2009), area studies and/or (southeast) Asian Studies (Goh, 2011), sociology/education (Connell, 2007; Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2015), and education (Breidlid, 2013; Singh, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013; Zhang, Chan, & Kenway, 2015). Embedded in these writings is the call to engage with other epistemologies than those of the West, to counter ethnocentricism and Western domination in knowledge production, and to offer local indigenous perspectives to research and issues. Inherent in most of these writings is also a tendency to revive, renew, and (re)create the perceived uniqueness, originality, depth, and long-lasting traditions of Asian epistemologies and worldviews, although such a tendency is often incorporated in varied efforts to problematise ‘Asia’, particularly in the signature work of K.-H. Chen (2010). Much of this scholarship also places Asia in a special position and attaches many positive, even superior, characteristics to Asia. It as well tends to assume and hopes to find a distinctive Asian epistemology and an Asian way of being and relating to the world – something as particular and specific to Asia as possible.

Unlike those days prior to 2010, however, starting in 2011, I became more skeptical about the ‘de-westernisation’ and ‘de-imperialisation’ scholarship. I have realised that many of the surveyed authors/scholars, including myself, who have argued for and wanted to cultivate the perceived originality and uniqueness of ‘Asian knowledge’, are not necessarily aware of the historical development of intellectual ideas and scholarship in many Asian societies. I have also realised that those scholars/ authors are often at the same time more familiar with and tend to align themselves with the mainstream (nationalist and pro-Asia) scholarship in and about Asia as a result of the decolonisation and de-westernisation movement, and thus they do/may not know or ignore that many things they label ‘Asian perspectives’, ‘Asian theories’, and ‘Asian indigenous knowledge’ did not start from that specific locality in Asia (that they refer to now) and were even alien to Asia when initially being introduced into Asia by certain Asian thinkers and reformers in the past two centuries. With regard to Vietnam, for instance, many scholars have proved that this has been the case (cf. Hoang Cao Khai, 1914/2007; Kelley, 2003, 2005, 2006; Luong, 1969, 1970; Phan Boi Chau, 1905, 1999; Phan Boi Chau, Vinh Sinh, and Wickenden, 1999; and Ta, 2012). Without such understanding and awareness, much ‘de-westernisation’ and ‘de-imperialisation’ scholarship, as a result, tends to fantasise Asia in its antiquity and ubiquity, while undermining the interactive nature of humanity.

What’s more, ‘de-westernisation’ and ‘de-imperialisation’ scholarship in general also tends to fixate its criticisms of Eurocentricism and Euro-ethnocentrism for the same reasons mentioned earlier. This body of scholarship, while being helpful in disrupting Western hegemony and its necessary evils, has lent a hand to the guilt-free and unquestioning urge to describe and generalise anything claimed to be ‘non-West’ in a positive, special, and sympathetic light. ‘The West’ and ‘Asia’ are very often at the two opposite ends in this body of scholarship. This very ‘empowering’ result has worked against its good intent because it has caused Asia to be seen, understood, and entertained in a restricted ‘positive’ domain. Asia as a living place is not in any way less complex or less problematic than other parts of the world.

Another major drawback of much ‘de-westernisation’ and ‘de-imperialisation’ scholarship has been its assumption of the clear-cut relations between ‘the coloniser’ and ‘the colonised’, seeing colonialism in a rather simplistic manner, and treating colonial space as being black and white. It also misleads others by depicting and fixating on the absolute aggressive, invasive, and dominating nature of the West as the coloniser and its associated Western knowledge and worldview, while painting the colonised (Asia included) as being submissive, pure, authentic, spiritual, and peace-loving. This very hegemonic view has ironically been presented simultaneously as an empowering tool to colonised and postcolonial communities and as a weapon against most Western scholars’ perceived essentialist Eurocentric perspectives and epistemologies.

The persistent, almost uncritical, promotion of black and white relations between the West and Asia and the romanticisation of the colonised as well as the all-around hegemony and symbolic violence associated with the West have continued to inform much scholarship in multiple disciplines. This is, I argue, a serious flaw in scholarship that has largely contributed to one-sided understandings of many phenomena, including those in educational contexts and settings, in which many stakeholders’ multiple identities have been routinely treated, absolutised, and imagined along the lines of the geographical, racial, and ethnic classification of their knowledge origins. I myself have, on several occasions, participated in this geographical, racial, and ethnic categorisation of knowledge (such as L. H. Phan, 2009a, 2012; Viete & L. H. Phan, 2007). Thus what I am doing now is trying to understand better the intersecting spaces of knowledge, where the West and Asia can be examined in their flesh and blood complexities, unchained from the usual colonial and postcolonial imprisonment mindset. This is important in my discussion and interpretation of many issues and phenomena in transnational education contexts covered in this book.

At the same time, I am aware that more and more scholarship on colonialism and/or colonial experiences produced in the fields of history and anthropology in particular (such as Bayly, 1988, 2004; Bayly & Harper, 2004, 2008; Goscha, 2014; Pelley, 2002; Sang, 2009; Wang, 2005; Zinoman, 2013) has demonstrated that during colonial times, people in Asia experienced multiple relations with the West, and they were always pushed and pulled by their own interests, calculations, and aspirations. Not everyone resisted and fought against colonial power; in fact, collaboration was rather common, and many locals were also colonialist and power seekers themselves. Many others played various roles at the same time. They were also able to see in what ways so-called Western ideas and epistemologies could benefit and inform them, their families, their societies, and their next generations.

In the light of these insightful understandings, colonial space has been revisited and understood through the lenses of complexity, thus as being negotiated space where all forms of practices were in place, engaged with, and studied about. More and more historians, through a thorough reading of thousands of pages of documents in archives globally, have shown that individuals in these spaces were much more active and creative in pre-colonial and colonial space(s) which they were also co-generating as well as participating in. They were collaborating with all levels of colonial authorities for many years as well, and many of them were themselves the authority. It has never been simply the case that these colonial subjects were all victimised, resistant, and nationalist in the same way and only submitted themselves to one particular form of colonisation that certain ‘de-westernisation’ and ‘de-colonialism’ scholarship surveyed earlier seem to entertain, simplify, and dramatise.

In particular, my multiple engagement with the works of scholars in the field of history, particularly Winichakul (1994, which I read in 2012), Kelley (2005, 2006, 2011), Mair and Kelley (2015), Kelley’s Southeast Asian history blog (https://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/), and Zinoman (2013); scholars in the field of communication studies, such as K.-H. Chen (2010), Ray (2012), and Waisbord and Mellado (2014); and scholars in education, such as Rizvi (2012, 2016), Luke (2005; 2010), Luke and Luke (1999), and Yang (2010, 2013, 2014, 2015) has helped me reconceptualise my understanding of the West and Asia relations – the relations that also influence inter-Asia relations. I now see that Asia has indeed always been interacting with the West in a much more complex, even productive, manner since before colonialism took place.

The West is within Asia, and Asia has for the most part been aware of this interaction and relationship. Asia has also been open about its admiration of many Western ideas, practices, and values. This open admiration, in the light of much postcolonial decolonisation and de-westernisation scholarship, tends to be reduced to only one thing, which is obsession with the West and submission to the West, which is in turn interpreted as Asia’s self-colonisation and lack of confidence in itself. While this obsession and submission is evident, there is more to it. And while self-colonisation is also marked, this practice and process points to more fundamental questions: “Why is a wealthier and more independent Asia becoming even more interested in the West and the idea of the West?”, and “In what ways are Asian societies and individuals exploiting Asia’s desire for the West?” These questions together with more nuanced understandings of the dialectic the West-Asia relationships are discussed and offered in this book.

Throughout the book I show that the current Asia chooses (not necessarily by force but largely by will and in many cases with an informed and well-articulated agency) to go with the idea of the West and often desires an affiliation and/or a connection with the West either directly or indirectly, which is something that is getting more intense in the context of globalisation, regionalisation, and commercialisation of education. The rise of Asia has not made Asia in any way more independent from the West as pro-Asia scholarship indicates and/or wants to see happen; likewise, more and more individuals in Asia are attracted to the West or the idea of the West. Data discussed in this book challenges the widely promoted cliché that ‘Asia must be and wants to be independent from the West and Western hegemony’ as if such alleged independence would automatically empower Asia. In many ways, what is seen in pride-in-Asia speeches or pro-Asia scholarship is disconnected from what is in practice by everyday individuals justifying their choices for ‘leaving Asia for the West and/or the idea of the West’. It is this disconnection that I am addressing in this book as well.

I also argue that the rise of Asia has made the West and the idea of the West even more desirable in Asia. More people go to and go across Asia for something close(r) to the West, and at the same time, more Asians are leaving Asia for the West. Asia, in many ways, is still the transit point but a dynamic and transformative transit point. The West and Asia need one another more than ever in the context of the internationalisation and commercialisation of higher education. What’s more, the West and Asia have hardly ever been mutually exclusive, but they rather have been in an eventful love-and-obsession relationship with each other. And this is the very dialectic preposition that I would like to take throughout this book while paying specific attention to transnational higher education in broader Asia, which also includes the Middle East.

I acknowledge that I do not use the terms ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’ in any way simplistic, dichotomous, or mutually exclusive. As all the chapters in this book show, simplistic understandings and interpretations of these terms are prevalent at all levels of policy conceptualisation, pedagogy, perceptions, and everyday desires and interactions in many transnational education contexts and settings. I also acknowledge the diverse and troubling definitions of the terms ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’, whether politically, geopolitically, geographically, educationally, culturally, ethnically, or racially. As will be seen in this book, it is too often that such diverse and troubling definitions get overlooked and unrecognised in transnational international education in broader Asia and ‘the West’.

Defining a stance

In this book, I identify and discuss four growing self-sustained/sustaining fundamental phenomena in transnational education (TNE) – namely (1) the planned, evolving, and transformative mediocrity behind the endorsement of English-medium education legitimised by the interactive Asia-West relationship; (2) the strategic employment of the terms ‘Asia/Asian’ and ‘West/Western’ by all stakeholders in their perceptions and construction of choice, quality, rigour, reliability, and attractiveness of programs, courses, and locations; (3) the adjusted desire for an imagined (and often misinformed) ‘West’ among various stakeholders of transnational education; and (4) the assigned and self-realised ownership of English by otherwise normally on-the-margin groups of speakers. A particular focus on how these phenomena impact questions of identity and desire in TNE spaces and places is a running theme throughout the book.

All the chapters in the book have been developed based on my decade of research in multiple contexts and settings in Asia, including Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The chapters engage with the four phenomena identified earlier through thorough discussions of multi-layered identity and positioning issues via interactions, experiences, stories, practices, incidents, etc., collected through a series of qualitative case studies, travel writings, website analyses, policy readings, and field observations.

My ultimate commitment in this book is to theorise the phenomena identified above and several key concepts central to the understanding of these phenomena as well as to offer possible conceptual frameworks to engage with the many everyday complexities concerning and generated in, around, and by TNE. In the spirit of this commitment, the book does not stop at merely examining problems, neither does it aim at offering implications for pedagogy and practice. Instead, the book endeavours to theorise and conceptualise terms, phenomena, and problems that future works can draw on, engage with, and critique.

All in all, the issues I investigate and engage with in the book will remain important and current for as long as TNE is still taking place. Latest reports and research have showed a significant growth (threefold) in this dimension of education, while indicating a significant lack of knowledge and scholarship in the field when it comes to engaging with TNE (Altbach & Knight, 2007; Australian Educational International (AEI), 2012, 2013; Bhandari & Laughlin, 2009; The British Council, 2013, 2014; Caruana & Montgomery, 2015; Chowdhury & L. H. Phan, 2014; Huang, 2007a; Institute of International Education (IIE), 2012; Knight, 2013; OECD, 2012, 2013, 2014; L. H. Phan, 2013a; Trahar, 2015). This book is a theoretical, methodological, empirical, and conceptual response to the field and to knowledge and scholarship more broadly.

Why do we need serious work and scholarship on transnational education?

First of all, I would like to explain what I mean by transnational education (TNE). For McBurnie and Ziguras (2006), TNE includes any educational programs that enrol students from a country other than the one in which the awarding institution is based. There are three major modes of delivery in TNE – namely, distance education, partner-support delivery, and a branch campus (Wilkins 2011, p. 73). The movement of programs across borders through all forms of delivery is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of TNE these days. If the movement of people was emphasised in the initial stage of TNE, the movement of programs is now the key idea, as can be seen, for instance, in the work of Altbach and Knight (2007), Huang (2006, 2007), and Trahar (2015). What is covered in this book is also extended to certain forms of exchange programs and short study tour programs, where students can also be placed in a host institution but they may not necessarily get credits for their exchange or study tour period.

In addition to the aforementioned understanding of TNE, I argue that English-medium programs and courses offered by local institutions can also be seen as a form of TNE, although their students are not earning degrees and/or qualifications from any overseas universities. Why? In creating their own programs, these institutions often draw on existing programs, materials, course syllabi, and lectures from other English-medium programs developed elsewhere. They also invite academics from other institutions to offer advice concerning the shape and content of their programs and curricula, and some institutions also contract a group of international academics and advisors to develop English-medium programs that are internationally competitive. Many universities, such as those in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, employ international academics who can teach and do research, as well as develop courses in English to meet the needs of an international student body. In the case of the Advanced Program initiative launched by Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training in 2005, to date about 23 Vietnamese universities have worked with a number of American universities to create programs for these Vietnamese universities using so-called American modern methodologies, curricula, and instructional practices. English, in principle, has been used as the medium of instruction in these programs. Therefore, many English-medium programs offered by local universities in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, for instance, whether developed in-house or in multiple locations, are inherently mobile and transnational in ideas, structures, contents, and medium of instruction.

Now I am going to offer several answers to my own question: “Why do we need serious work and scholarship on transnational education?”

First, at the very general level, the literature on transnational education (TNE) (also known as ‘borderless’, ‘cross-border’, and ‘offshore’ education) is on the rise, given the fast growth of the internationalisation of higher education (HE) globally. Although scholarly research ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Defining a stance
• 2 Foregrounding the debates
• 3 The West, Asia, and ‘the rise of Asia’
• 4 Engaging with the ‘convenient’ Western-Asian paradox
• 5 English, internationalisation of higher education, and identity: Increasing academic monolingualism and English-only package
• 6 Appropriating and abusing transnational education in Saudi Arabia: Commercialisation, neoliberalism, desire, and English (with Osman Barnawi)
• 7 Student identities in transnational space: Vietnam in focus
• 8 Intercultural interactions in English-medium programmes as imagined interactions with a ‘Western’ entity
• 9 International teaching staff and international students raising concerns over questions of integration and belonging in TNE
• 10 Transnational education and dream realisation: From the Philippines to Vietnam, from Afghanistan to Dubai, from everywhere in Asia to Thailand
• 11 Desiring international/transnational education: Theorisation of key concepts and next steps from here
• 12 Afterword
• References
• Index