Chinese Educational Migration and Student-Teacher Mobilities

Experiencing Otherness

Fred Dervin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349696932
  9781137492906
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137492913
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This collected volume examines the multifaceted contexts and experiences of Chinese students, teachers and scholars in Australia, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US. It can serve both as an introduction to Chinese people's mobility and migration in Higher Education and as a thorough review for more knowledgeable readers.

Part I

The Experiences of Chinese Students Abroad

1

Negotiating Transnational Life Worlds: Experiences of Chinese Student-Migrants in Australia

Hannah Soong

Introduction

Student mobility has increased steadily over the last decades, and international students are now more visible in most universities, especially in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Europe, North America and some countries within the Asia-Pacific region (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2012). As many as one in five degrees conferred by UK universities in recent years is an international student (International Focus, 2009), and international education has established itself as the third highest export industry in Australia (Australian Bureau Statistics, 2011). However, current literature (e.g., Brown & Holloway, 2008; Carroll & Ryan, 2005; Marginson, Nyland, Sawir, & Forbes-Mewitt, 2010) frequently documents the unique challenges that international students face in adjusting to Australian higher education. Specifically, international students have to negotiate different academic systems, communication differences, racial and ethnic distinctions and a lack of social interaction with members within the host society (Arkoudis & Tran, 2007). While they are visibly culturally other within Western universities, and their legal status in the host country defines them as ‘temporary outsiders’, they are not homogeneously defined cultural subjects. Research regarding their needs and cross-cultural adjustment experiences is, therefore, important in order to promote future global intercultural understanding in our current times (Rizvi, 2011).

In Australia, there are an increasing number of international students who arrive intending to remain in the host country upon graduation as potential skilled migrants, and consequently discussions of the education-migration nexus are strongly emerging (e.g., Robertson, 2008, 2011). Like many other immigrant-receiving countries, Australia seems to act like a magnet attracting those living outside its borders by offering favourable conditions for linking study, work and migration. In 2010, approximately 244,000 onshore international tertiary students were enrolled in Australian universities (Australian Education International (AEI), 2010). Among the top five source countries of international students in Australian universities, China has dominated the higher education market in enrolments and commencements; followed by India, South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand (AEI, 2011). In confirmation of the education-migration nexus, between 2005 and 2008, about 62,200 international students remained in Australia as migrants after the completion of their studies (Robertson, 2011). This portion of student-migrants represented around 20 per cent of all economic migrants (Access Economics, 2009; cited in Robertson, 2011). Although the recruitment of international students as potential migrants intending to work in professional or managerial positions in Australia is not new, the link between international education and migration is often narrowly positioned as a policy problem (Robertson, 2011), and little is known about the lived realities and complexities of those international students with migration intentions.

Specifically, little is known about the lived experiences, positioning and reflections of international teacher education students, known as pre-service teachers¹ in Australia. Teacher education degrees differ from other degrees because they are designed to prepare students to become future teachers in Australian schools. Thus, it may be assumed that such a cohort is undertaking their studies with the ultimate goal of permanent migration and secure employment in the education sector. However, even though teaching is one of the key occupations on the Australian General Skilled Migration list, this list is constantly under review. In reality, there are no guarantees that these pre-service teachers will qualify as skilled migrants when they finish university.

Despite this uncertainty, more international students are choosing to study in Australia, and in degrees such as teacher education that demand considerable intercultural adjustment and communication skills for engaging appropriately with local students, staff and parents. These international pre-service teachers are exposed to stressful intercultural sites where they will be assessed on how they teach in the schools they are allocated to for their teaching practicum. This research therefore focuses on the teaching practicum as an intercultural site – in other words, a site involving interaction among people of diverse cultures, requiring all parties to make adjustments, but in this case, requiring the transnational pre-service student to plan for adjustment through the development of linguistic skills, work knowledge, and global intercultural understanding.

Drawing from a larger study, this chapter draws on extensive interview data to examine the lived experiences of three Chinese international pre-service teachers studying in an Australian teacher education program. Although the three participants’ voices cannot be generalised for other such students, their individual experiences and stories can raise bigger issues and exemplify the power of narratives to illustrate broader concepts. Thus, the initial research question was, ‘How do the individual Chinese student-migrant participants experience processes of change and growth through the complex terrains of transnationalism and mobility?’ And a second question, which emerged through the initial analysis, was, ‘How do their experiences add nuances to the concepts of transnationalism, and imaginations of fantasy and nostalgia?’

Understanding transnationalism

No discussion of the education-migrant nexus and its relation to individual Chinese student-migrants’ lived experiences can be sufficient without an understanding of transnationalism. While Vertovec (2001, 2004, 2009) asserts the distinct lack of consensus surrounding ‘transnationalism’, the term, nonetheless, currently frames various kinds of global or cross-border connections, including the concerns of migrants. The notion of transnationalism has evolved through time. It was first used by Bourne (1916) in his chapter ‘Transnational America’ to stress the importance of the American immigrants on maintaining their culture since their move was a permanent settlement. Over the years, the term ‘transnationalism’ has been used with increased frequency, specifically looking at new trends in immigration patterns (Garrett, 2011; Vertovec, 2009).

The way activities are conducted and by whom has since been distinguished transnationalism (Vertovec, 2004). For instance, according to Basch, Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton (1994), ‘transnationalism from above’ refers to cross-border activities conducted by the multinational corporate sector, governments and elite-controlled macro-structural processes. In contrast, ‘transnationalism from below’ consists of activities of immigrants and grassroots entrepreneurs. In more recent times, as a consequence of the great advance in technologies and relative ease of travel and communication, transnationalism is now understood as an inquiry into the phenomenon of globalisation (Vertovec, 2004, 2009).

Ong’s (1999) discussion of ‘flexible citizenship’ constructs it as transnationalism from the ‘middle’, a form involving increasingly more activities and mobility of people, such as Westerners teaching English in China (Stanley, 2010) or Asian international students becoming migrants in Australia (Soong, forthcoming). The increasing flexibility of citizenship arrangements, for these mobile individuals, has not created ‘ungrounded’ transnational individuals in opposition to the national discourse in their home country, but instead has grounded them to ‘the conditions of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space’ (Ong, 1999, p. 4). In other words, transnationalism from the ‘middle’ has further

induced subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political and economic conditions. In their quest to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena, subjects emphasize, and are regulated by favouring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes. (ibid., p. 6)

However, Ong’s analysis covers only the visible tip of the iceberg. It is limited to the hyper-mobility of transnational capitalist class with high-incomes, high social class, and high social professional networks. Much more happens below it, particularly pertaining to the conscious, and unconscious, tenacity of the individuals, the question of identity and the subjective emplacement of the transnational lifeworld.

In other words, huge variations of transnationalism are experienced amongst individuals: on one hand, we have transnationals who are regarded as ‘foreign talents’ or ‘expatriates’ or ‘rich business associates’, mostly from developed countries, working as distinguished thinkers or managers or corporate owners in the host institutions. On the other hand, we have those transnationals known commonly as ‘maids’, ‘construction workers’ or ‘abattoir workers’, mostly from Third World countries, seeking to find work in wealthier and developed countries such as Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and Australia. Even though their sojourn in the host country is transitory, it still has an effect on their future trajectories and global interculturality. Despite these variations, Ong’s notion of ‘flexible’ transnationalism and her description of the transnationality of ‘astronaut families’, where heads of immigrant households place their spouses and children in countries such as Canada, while they are working back in Hong Kong, adds a perspective that could also have relevance for student-migrants.

Based on this complex view of transnationalism, Rizvi (2011) has used transnational space as an analytic lens to examine issues of global mobility and the cultural dynamics of an elite group of international doctoral students studying in Australian and American institutions. Rizvi seeks to understand how, through the process of transnationalism, the international doctoral students have negotiated the space they inhabit and become transnationals of a certain kind, and how they are impacted upon by national discourses to resolve tensions of living and working within a transnational space. While Rizvi’s point about identity conditioning factors in a transnational space is vital to this study of Chinese pre-service teachers’ transnational experiences, we differ in our views about the extent to which the authority of the host nation dictates how social relations are experienced in the lives of the participants. If Chinese transnational pre-service teachers can be thought of as a subset of migrants, some questions do arise: what makes the pre-service teacher-migrants assume a transnational identity rather than defining themselves as just international students? Why would they adopt a transnational profile, and how long will they keep it?

A closer reading of ‘Minor Transnationalism’ (Lionnet & Shih, 2005) can offer a context to think about these questions. Lionnet and Shih assert that, ‘unlike the post national and nomadic identities that are relatively unmoored to bounded territories’ (p. 8), ‘minor’ transnationalism actually makes visible the multiple relations between the national and the transnational and highlights the difficulty that minority subjects without statist parameters of citizenship face when the nation-state remains the chief mechanism for dispersing and regulating power, status, and material resources. In other words, transnationalism is an experience that is part of the daily existence of a certain group of people living outside their place of origin. It is this level of transnationalism that this study is investigating.

Thus, the concept of ‘minor’ transnationalism not only problematises the prevalent notions of transnationalism as a homogenising force, it is also vital to this study because it explores a new field of meanings in theorising the inherent complexity of being a ‘minor’ transnational Chinese pre-service teacher in Australia. It raises questions about how each one is affected by the phenomenon of transnationalism, in particular how they position themselves between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ within the ‘empowering paradox’ of their multi-locality that they find themselves in (Clifford, 1997, p. 322). Such connections between ‘here’ and there’ or ‘empowering paradox’ are not only relevant to diasporas, they also are part of the lived realities of transnational subjects. In reading this way, transnational modes of consciousness for the Chinese participants in this study can be understood as how they are imagining placing themselves to be part of a whole world (Cohen & Kennedy, 2007).

The study and the three Chinese participants

This study is taken from extensive research work conducted in 2009 in a large metropolitan university in Australia where about 100 international students were enrolled in a two-year masters degree in education programme. This cohort formed the largest proportion of international pre-service teachers within the university’s School of Education, a large portion came from countries within the Asian region which were predominantly non-English speaking countries; they had diverse ethnic backgrounds, prior working experiences and qualifications. In order to maintain students’ anonymity, an invitation letter was sent electronically to all potential participants through the program director, with interested students advised to contact the researcher directly. As detailed in Table 1.1, three Chinese international pre-service teachers were among those who volunteered to participate in this study.

These life histories reveal that all three participants had prior experiences, relationships and intentions that had an impact on their choices to study for an Australian teaching degree, in search of fulfiling their imagined futures. This study takes a hermeneutic view of their experiences that is drawn from phenomenology (Heidegger, 1962; van Manen, 1990). Such an approach allows the researcher to explore and interpret the experiential dimension of human actions and events, using a process where ‘meaning is always negotiated between one’s own preconceptions and those within the horizon of the other’ (Tate, 1998, p. 13). This inquiry, thus, is value-bound by the nature of the questions asked, the values held by the researcher, and the ways findings are generated and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  The Experiences of Chinese Students Abroad
• Part II  Going Back Home or Not?
• Part III  Chinese Teachers Abroad: Adapting to Other Contexts
• Afterword
• Index