Growing-up abroad: International university students in China

• In Event: Constructing identities through studying abroad

Proposal

Growing-up abroad: international students in China
John Lowe (university of Nottingham Ningbo China
Mei Tian (Xi’an Jiaotong University)
This paper reports and analyzes the findings from a four-year longitudinal study of the experiences of a group of undergraduate international students at a university in central China. The academic literature is replete with studies of international students’ experiences from many different perspectives; until quite recently, these were largely studies in ‘Western’ universities – especially in the USA, UK, Australia and other Anglophone countries that hosted the majority of globally mobile university students. As China’s share of the ‘international student market’ has risen, however, researchers have begun to turn their attention eastwards. These studies, in whichever country, have tended to focus on issues such as why young people choose to study there, their difficulties with cultural adaptation, how universities can better support this adaptation, or the level of satisfaction with their course or their experience – the latter seems to have been a particular concern in studies of international students in Chinese universities. Broadly, research into international student flows can be categorized into three levels – the national (how do international student flows serve national economic or political goals?), the institutional (what can our universities do to improve the student experience?), and the individual (how was the experience for you?).
Our study is unequivocally individual student focused. Our concern, however, is not on treating the students as part of a wider phenomenon of ‘international student mobility’, but simply on the influence of their study abroad experience on their individual development in a broad sense. Given that university students tend to belong to be in the age-range of (approximately) 18 to 24 years, we describe this development as part of ‘growing up’ – a term that was offered by one of the students in our study as a form of summary of the changes she had begun to notice in herself: ‘I suppose I am just growing up’.
This perspective on the students’ experiences led us to Arnett’s concept of ‘emerging adulthood’ as an analytical tool for our own data. Arnett (2000) proposes that ‘the university years’ (roughly between the ages of 18 and 25) effectively extend the time available to individuals to negotiate the transition from adolescence to full adulthood. He described this time as ‘a distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations’ (p.469). We felt that ‘emerging adulthood’ has an advantage over some other individual development theories in that it proposes an end-point to the development process – not of course a total developmental ‘end-point’, but a useful analytical device nonetheless for framing analysis. We are careful, however, not to accept a priori the details of Arnett’s own work with American students as we recognize that the specific nature of full ‘adulthood’ is culturally defined and enforced. This is particularly important in trying to understand the development of the spatially and culturally dislocated students in our own research.
The students in our study were all enrolled in a five-year medical degree program (taught in English). Over twenty different nationalities are to be found in this large program, with over half of the total being from Pakistan – a point which turned out to be significant to our own study. Our core group comprised 12 students from five countries, with whom we held long individual interviews each year for four years. Other classmates and friends of this core group were also interviewed on an occasional basis, often accompanying our primary subjects to what ultimately became long, quite intimate and loosely structured conversations.
There is considerable diversity amongst our students in how they dealt with this opportunity to experiment with their own lives when they were largely removed from familiar cultural and familial influences, constraints and sources of advice. The surrounding Chinese cultural context seemed to have little effect on them in terms of being a cultural referent for handling their own, personal emerging adulthood, largely because of linguistic barriers and the separation of Chinese and international students in the organization of university life, but there were exceptions to this. Where there was a large group of classmates of the same nationality – notably with the Pakistani students in this case – they acted as proxy cultural reference points, guides and – in some contexts - ‘enforcers’. At the same time, however, a consensus developed in the absence of stricter cultural constraints that space was allowed for greater experimentation while they are ‘abroad’ – experimentation with relationships and forms of socialization, for example. While those individuals who lacked such cultural support from the presence of co-nationals similarly took the opportunity to experiment, they were often faced with much more difficult decisions of self-regulation and dealing with difficult developments, such as when faced with revelations of their personal sexuality.

Author

• John Lowe, University of Nottingham Ningbo China