Ideas for Intercultural Education

Ideas for Intercultural Education

Ideas for Intercultural Education Simon Marginson and Erlenawati Sawir

ideas for intercultural education Copyright Simon Marginson and Erlenawati Sawir, 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-11793-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-29808-2 DOI 10.1057/9780230339736 ISBN 978-0-230-33973-6 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marginson, Simon, 1951 Ideas for intercultural education / Simon Marginson and Erlenawati Sawir. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Multicultural education Cross-cultural studies. I. Sawir, Erlenawati, 1960 II. Title. LC1099.M37 2011 370.117 dc23 2011017331 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: November 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface About the Authors vii xiii 1 International and Intercultural Education 1 2 Refusing the Other: Psychology and Ethnocentrism 21 3 Engaging the Other: Ideas about Cosmopolitanism 53 4 International Student Lives 75 5 Cross- Cultural Relations in Higher Education 99 6 The Cross- Cultural Classroom 119 7 Conclusion 1: International Education as Self-Formation 137 8 Conclusion 2: Toward Intercultural Education 165 Notes 187 References 203 Index 219

Preface Like wind- blown grass We feel the time Graham Lowndes, Till Time Brings Change, 1973 Ideas for Intercultural Education is the unplanned and welcome outcome of seven years of research on the social and economic security of cross- border students in the global student market. It was a book that burned to be written, on the basis of what we discovered about cross- cultural relations in the course of that research. The research began at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2003 and later spread to the University of Melbourne in the same city where both authors of this book worked. More recently it followed one of the authors to Central Queensland University s Melbourne office. The research team working on this project consisted of the two authors of the book and Chris Nyland, Gaby Ramia, Helen Forbes- Mewett, and Sharon Smith, with contributions also from Felicity Rawlings- Sanaei and Ly Tran. Between them the full group has worked at seven different Australian universities in the last half decade. During the project we collected extensive data on cross- cultural relations between international students and local students and others, and on what happens inside classrooms with large numbers of international students. We also prepared a critical literature study on all aspects of international student security, including cross- cultural issues in international education and on cosmopolitan approaches to education. In preparing the summary book 1 arising from that study, we planned to include a chapter on cross- cultural relations in international education and international student life. However, we found that the draft chapter on cross- cultural relations was 75,000 words and still growing, instead of the planned 10,000. We also found that much of the prior literature was grossly inadequate for an understanding of intercultural relations in international education. It was seriously at variance with

viii preface what our interviewees were saying. It was clear that many researchers were unable to understand international students from non- Englishspeaking backgrounds on the basis of equal respect, or even conceive of forms of international education in which the autonomy and rights of the students were a central element. We began to conceive international education as a process of self- formation, led by the students themselves, in contrast to the patronizing vision of other- formation that dominated some of the research (especially many studies in the field of counseling psychology). It was also becoming obvious that the intercultural dimension, while crucial to student security issues, was also extending beyond the confines of a study focused on security. There was a larger story to be told about cross- cultural and intercultural relations in international education programs in the English- speaking countries, a story with both negative and positive aspects and one that we very much wanted to tell. We wanted to provide a detailed review of what the research literature was saying, drawing truths from some of it and critiquing other parts of it, and to explore the potentials for cross- cultural relations and for a more fulfilling international student experience for all parties. It was clear that the intercultural potentials of international education were as yet largely unrealized in Australia and apparent from the research literature that they were also largely unrealized in the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, United States, and Canada. All of that led directly to the writing of Ideas for Intercultural Education. The bulk of the text was prepared immediately after the summary book on international student security was completed in 2009, with revisions and additions a year later. Ideas for Intercultural Education does not set out to be the last word on intercultural issues in higher and international education. That would be too big a task for one book, and perhaps being definitive about something as large and important to human relations as intercultural education is not an appropriate task for any book. In the discussion of intercultural relations in education there is much good work and a number of unresolved issues. There are also too many people trying to lay down the law. We do not want to join them. Intercultural relations are an ongoing conversation that involves all of us. We can point to lessons learned, but we cannot be categorical about what the future might hold; and while some general principles (such as openness and responsiveness) hold in all sites, intercultural relations are always contextualized. Our educational connections with cultural Others are always located in space and time. They vary across the different sites and programs. This means that solely general

preface ix formulas cannot solve all the issues involved here. Neither ethnocentric stereotypes based on one culture nor an abstract cosmopolitanism that treats all cultures as equivalent and interchangeable is adequate to the issues. Yet these barren alternatives have been the main options offered up to this point. As this book s title suggests, to move beyond the present limitations we need new ideas to inform research and practice, ideas that combine principles of human relations with action in particular contexts. The objective of Ideas for Intercultural Education is to break open the debates to encourage fresh thinking, talk, and, through that, fresh educational practice. Practices and ideas are in continual interplay. This book was generated by problems we observed in the practical domain of international education. This practical orientation led us to a critical review of knowledge in the field. In turn, a forward move in the domain of knowledge and ideas is the precondition for better practices. As new ideas emerge and begin to colonize that practical domain a domain in which improving the quality of intercultural engagement has become one of the ways of gaining a market edge those ideas will be enriched by research- informed practitioners and lead to more fruitful strategies in higher education institutions in the English- speaking world, especially in their classrooms. The book s argument is presented in three stages. First, Chapters 1 3 lay out the terrain of discussion and critically review the existing scholarship and research on intercultural aspects of international education and related fields. The book tackles the scholarship and research first because knowledge matters. Knowledge frames and limits our educational practices both directly and indirectly. Correspondingly, new knowledge also helps us to expand practice. Second, Chapters 4 6 move beyond the realm of ideas to consider what happens in educational sites: in the lives of international students, in their classrooms, and in their relationships with locals. Again we review, summarize, and critique knowledge and insights from the published research literature and also include data we collected. Chapter 4 consists of stories of individual students. These stories have been taken from actual research interviews with students in Australia during 2005 2008 and are reported accurately, except that the names of the students have been altered to protect their privacy. Chapter 5 focuses on cross- cultural barriers and problems. Chapter 6 explores cross- cultural classrooms and relations between local and international students. Third, the book concludes with Chapters 7 8. Chapter 7, Conclusion 1: International Education as Self- Formation, summarizes our

x preface theory of international educational in the light of the book s discussion of intercultural relations. Chapter 8, Conclusion 2: Toward Intercultural Education, draws together the ideas in the book and explores the practical implications in educational organization and classroom teaching and learning. We are sure that if international education is to move toward the located, relational cosmopolitanism that is needed, changes in theory, scholarship, research, and learning practices will all inform each other. The stories about Zhao Mei at the beginning of Chapters 1 and 8 are fictional, a composite of several real- life East Asian student stories unearthed during the research. This book makes a pair with the study of the social and economic security of international students published separately as International Student Security (Marginson et al., 2010). That book focuses on issues of social protection and personal empowerment affecting international students, the regulation of those issues, and gaps in that regulation, with reference to English- speaking nations in general while focusing on the Australian case. The two books are about different things but sympathetic to each other. The underlying ambition of both works is to rethink and remake international education in terms of universal humanism and global cosmopolitan intercultural exchange. International Student Security is about grounding the mobile noncitizen student securely in the country of education. Ideas for Intercultural Education is designed to open up the possibilities for mutual learning that are offered by the large- scale presence of international students. Both books are about our slow but essential progress toward a one- world society. The research and literature review on which this study was based were initially funded by the Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements at Monash University. The main support was from the Australian Research Council through an ARC Discovery Grant. The Australian Professorial Fellowship awarded to Simon Marginson provided reading and writing time. Erlenawati Sawir was helped by an Early Career Researcher Grant from the University of Melbourne. Erlenawati Sawir conducted the two hundred interviews used in the empirical studies that are drawn on in Chapters 4 6 and prepared early drafts of some materials from those studies used in Chapters 5 6. Simon Marginson did all final writing and editing. The authors would like to thank their coresearchers in the international student project, who have been most kind and solid colleagues and a delight with whom to work. We would also like to thank the students and staff who generously participated in interviews and opened up as they did. We also acknowledge those working in Australia or elsewhere

preface xi who helped to advance our thinking about intercultural education and related issues, especially Fazal Rizvi, who founded the Monash Centre for Research in International Education where this work began, and others including Chi Baik, Melissa Banks, Joe Lo Bianco, Brendan Cantwell, Dang Thi Kim Anh, Glyn Davis, Nadine Dolby, Paula Dunstan, Hiroko Hashimoto, Jane Kenway, Kazuhiro Kudo, Betty Leask, Jenny Lee, Allan Luke, Grant McBurnie, Peter McPhee, Dennis Murray, Rajani Naidoo, Thi Nhai Nguyen, Peter Ninnes, Imanol Ordorika, Hiroshi Ota, Yoko Ota, Phan Le Ha, Natt Pimpa, Michael Singh, Nishani Singh, Ravinder Sidhu, Hans de Wit, Simone Volet, Yang Rui and Chris Ziguras. Erlenawati Sawir would like to thank Paul Rodan at the International Education Research Centre of Central Queensland University. Simon Marginson would like to thank Richard James, Sophie Arkoudis, and Mirella Ozols at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, and Field Rickards, Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. The first draft of the chapters was largely written in August to September 2009 while Simon Marginson was a visiting professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) at Hiroshima University in Japan. The scholarly atmosphere sustained by RIHE Director Yamamoto Shinichi and colleagues, and the daily walks between the university and the apartment in nearby Saijo, provided excellent conditions for this work. Special thanks go to Huang Futao, Oba Jun, and Araki Hiroko. The drafts were thoroughly revised in Melbourne in March 2011 on the basis of comments from colleagues and a wise Palgrave reviewer.

About the Authors Simon Marginson is a professor of higher education at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia. He works on globalization and higher education, comparative and international education, knowledge economy policy, and issues of freedom and creativity, with some emphasis on the Asia- Pacific region. He is a coordinating editor of the world journal Higher Education, a member of 14 other international journal boards, and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and chapters. His previous books include Markets in Education (1997); The Enterprise University (2000) with Mark Considine; and three books with Peter Murphy and Michael Peters: Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (2009), Global Creation: Space, Mobility and Synchrony in the Age of the Knowledge Economy (2010), and Imagination: Three Models of the Imagination in the Age of the Knowledge Economy (2010). In 2010 he also published International Student Security with Chris Nyland, Erlenawati Sawir, and Helen Forbes- Mewett. In 2011 his published work has included the collection Higher Education in the Asia- Pacific: Strategic Responses to Globalization, edited by Simon Marginson, Sarjit, Kaur and Erlenawati Sawir; and Handbook of Higher Education and Globalization, edited by Roger King, Simon Marginson, and Rajani Naidoo. Erlenawati Sawir is research fellow at the International Education Research Centre of Central Queensland University in Melbourne. Previously she worked as research fellow at Monash University and the University of Melbourne, and prior to 2000 as a senior lecturer at the University of Jambi in Sumatra, Indonesia. A 2003 Monash PhD graduate in sociolinguistics and education, and specialist in international education, she has contributed to Asian EFL Journal, Australian Journal of Education, International Education Journal, Higher Education, Journal of Studies in International Education, Journal of Asia Pacific Education, Higher Education Policy, and

xiv about the authors Global Social Policy. With Simon Marginson, Chris Nyland, and Helen Forbes- Mewett she was an author of International Student Security (2010), and in 2011 she has coedited Higher Education in the Asia- Pacific: Strategic Responses to Globalization with Simon Marginson and Sarjit Kaur.