By Cheryl Yu
This is an edited version of a journal paper
According to Freire, neutral, uncommitted, apolitical educational practice does not exist. Educators and practitioners are thus obligated to conduct critical reflections on the political, social, and cultural context of their work in order to uncover the unequal power dynamics and work to transform them.
International mobility is typically “pushed” by unfavourable conditions at home, and “pulled” by more favorable conditions host countries offer. For this reason, international students have been mostly flowing from the developing South to the developed North.
International education has been utilized by major Anglo countries as an export industry to obtain economic resources. International students from developing countries pay much higher tuition fees in comparison to home students. For instance, the annual tuition fee is about £1,000/year at most top universities in China, and the international fees at most UK Russell Group universities are about £25,000/year, plus the ever-increasing living expenses.
As one consequence, international education has increased the wealth gap between the global north and south. Then there is Brain Drain of course. For example, about 90% of the PhD students from India and China would like to stay in the US after the completion of their studies.
Obviously, international education is mostly only available to rich kids from wealthy families in the developing world. The Bourdieu theory of social capital reproduction is still a sound paradigm to understand the global educational mobility pursued by privileged individuals to convert social capital across borders. As a result, international education has served to reinforce the economic inequality and social stratification in developing countries as well.
As practitioners in international education, we must recognize these deep inequalities in higher education globalization and internationalization. The other day, I was having a conversation with a senior staff from a university about the emerging market of Vietnam for UK universities, and he commented that it was another market to be exploited sadly.
Recognizing the inequalities is a starting point of our ethical action as international educators.
De Wit argued that international education has become an industry, a source of revenue and a means for enhanced reputation in the past 30 years. Traditional values such as exchange and cooperation, peace and mutual understanding, human capital development, and solidarity have been pushed to the side for the purpose of competition, revenue, and reputation/branding.
However, the discourse on higher education internationalization has hit a turning point, transitioning from an overwhelming focus on its benefits to a reflection on its negative implications.
The same urgency in the wake of Global Warming and the global pandemic is needed to deal with the ethical challenges of global higher education.
As a recommendation for ethical practice, Healey suggests that international work should start to put international students’ education at heart, instead of equating internationalization with international recruitment.
As international educators working in the field, the vocabulary we hear most often in our work with international students are “acculturation,” “adjustment,” “adaptation,” and “integration.” So, the most dominant paradigm guiding our work with international students is still an ethnocentric one, viewing international students as in need of acculturation in a one-way path to the elitist host country language and culture. The goal is to change students’ previous habits in learning or living to fit into the new academic environment. Similar to the direction of mobility, education and service are also characterized by a one-way street.
Challenging the acculturational approach, Liu & Rathbone argue that a truly global perspective should be embraced which stops treating international students coming to study in technologically and economically advanced regions as novice members of the elite society, but as global citizens who are on their way to effect change to the current world order, and our goal in international education is to equip students with bilingual and bicultural competences so that they can become effective global leaders for the future.
From this perspective, international education is not a process of the diffusion of Western values, but a process of the diffusion of the universal values of care, justice, and peace. International educators need to engage in truly intercultural advising which requires deeper understanding and appreciation of students’ home cultures.
A fundamental shift of the profession is needed to change from its current singular focus on the host country culture orientation toward a broader function of intercultural brokering. To better serve as students’ intercultural brokers, international educators need to become interculturalists in order to support students in their additive and bicultural identity development.
We often deem inbound international students as in need of acculturation in order to fit into the academic, social, and cultural norms of the host country, but we afford outbound domestic students from the Western centre the status of being global citizens in training for global awareness, global competence, and global leadership. The postcolonial ideology looms large in such different narratives with the perception of a Western centre and non-Western periphery.
A new perspective needs to be adopted by international educators in our work with education abroad students from the West.
More students from the West should be encouraged to study in poor developing countries to strengthen their willingness and commitment to building a more equitable and just world. The ultimate goal is to develop a generation of mindful, idealistic, and transformative global citizens in the West who are conscious of the world problems we face and are committed to working toward change. Education abroad programs are to be designed in a mindful way to reduce stereotypical understandings of non-Western cultures and systems.
As a summary, what can we do as practitioners in international education? Here is a non-exhaustive list for consideration:
● Aware of the unequal, postcolonial and neoliberal practice of international higher education
● Adopt knowledge diplomacy as a general goal of our work to promote world peace and justice
● Take international students studying with us as global citizens and global leaders to effect positive change for the world
● Explore more equitable institutional partner collaboration
● Reduce the environmental footprints of our international education programming, particularly short-term programming
● TNE should not merely be a cheaper version of UK degrees overseas, but incorporate local epistemological understandings to enrich the learning experiences of students
● Online and blended education and mobility should be encouraged if possible, for equitable educational provision as well as reducing international travel
● Encourage and enable outbound mobility from the Global North to the South to raise students’ awareness of world injustice and inequality
● Focus on the universal values and responsibilities of care, justice and peace for both inbound and outbound students
The original journal paper is available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14782103221117653
Commentaires