educational mobility – Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

Transitions across multi-worlds: Experiences of Chinese international doctoral students in STEM fields

Yang, Y., & MacCallum, J. (2022). Transitions across multi-worlds: Experiences of Chinese international doctoral students in STEM fields. Journal of Studies in International Education, 26(5), 535–552. https://doi.org/10.1177/10283153211016266

Introduction

Every year Chinese international doctoral students (CIDS) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) make transitions across different worlds in ways that supports achievement in their host community.

This article reports findings from a longitudinal study investigating holistic experiences of the contemporary generation of STEM CIDS in Australia. Endeavor to reveal both heterogeneity and commonality, this study examined their diverse and challenging experiences to identify factors that facilitate or constrain their successful completion of a PhD abroad.

The Three-Dimensional Multi-World Conceptual Framework

For this study, we developed a conceptual framework to accommodate the features of complexity and to allow a holistic understanding of the nature of doing a PhD abroad. In this framework (Figure 1), first we formed a three-dimensional space to accommodate student experiences. Along the three axles are Continuity, Interaction, and Situation. International doctoral students’ experiences were conceptualized as developmental over time, taking things from the past and modifying the quality of the future; interactive, assigning equal rights to both objective and internal conditions in interactions; and situated within the disciplinary, working, and living contexts.

Figure 1. The three-dimensional multi-world conceptual framework

Within this space we established the students’ multi-world model, including students’ research, personal, and social worlds. The three worlds are interconnected and interplay to co-construct study abroad experiences. Between the worlds, there are overlapping areas as experiential interfaces for transitions across each world to occur and lines in-between as borders that may constrain students’ transitions.

The Project

The CIDS Study is a narrative inquiry that involved a 4-year longitudinal study to understand Chinese STEM PhD students’ situated, continuous, and interactive experiences. We adopted narrative as a research approach because it incorporates a range of methodological stances and is agentive in demonstrating how individuals attempt to navigate their life, which suited the purpose of the study.

There were 38 CIDS participants from STEM fields at eight universities in five states of Australia. All participants were interviewed individually or in focus groups, with 17 followed up for a second interview roughly nine months after the first interview and eight followed up for a third interview. Most of these students had completed their PhD by the conclusion of data collection.

Congruence/Difference and Transitions Across the Worlds

The six categories of congruence or difference, and corresponding transitions identified through data analysis were used to structure the findings, though we combined the last two categories to highlight the final complications resulting in a doctoral withdrawal.

Congruent Worlds and Smooth Transitions

In this pattern (n=9), students reported their supervisory team and other social relationships as congruent based on the match of key expectations, values, and beliefs across their multi-worlds. The borders between their multi-worlds were almost imperceivable so that they could make transitions with ease. These students were generally satisfied with their study abroad experience by achieving academic success and enjoying social life while doing the PhD abroad. However, experiencing congruence and smoothness did not mean these students had not experienced difficulties, stress, highs, and lows in the PhD; rather, it meant immense bilateral or multilateral investment of time, effort, care, and patience in facilitating transitions, particularly at certain critical turning points, to enable students’ achievement and development.

Different Worlds and Smooth Transitions

In this second pattern (n=8), regardless of some critical differences in motivations, expectations, values, and beliefs between students’ multi-worlds, they reported easy transitions across and over time. The differences that created borders between the worlds were distinctive based on individual situations. Nevertheless, it was the empathy to accommodate differences and the respect to the existence of differences from the agents of their multi-worlds that enabled their smooth transitions.

Congruent Worlds and Border Crossings Managed

In this pattern (n=9), motivations, expectations, values, beliefs, and actions appeared mostly congruent between an individual’s multi-worlds, but this congruence was created with strong evidence of the performance of personal agency, strategies, skills, and initiatives in managing transitions across perceivable borders. Different from the first pattern that congruence was achieved with smooth transitions or the second pattern that difference remained, students of this third group, facilitated with strong and timely supervisory and peer support, managed to create a shared time and space between their multi-worlds. This sustained them through vicissitudes, sometimes crucial moments, in their PhD abroad.

Different Worlds and Border Crossings Managed

In this category (n=9), motivations, expectations, values, beliefs, and actions between students’ research, personal, and social worlds had critical differences, which had profound impact and led to conflicting ideas, attitudes, and behaviors that constrained students’ PhD progress. However, in general, the conflicts were able to be put under control, and the transitions were managed to achieve the PhD. Students of this group were agentic to act, persistent to achieve, resilient and strategic in expanding their small research context to a broader scope.

Different Worlds and Border Crossings Difficult or Resisted

In both categories (n=2 and n=1), there were some critical differences in motivations, expectations, values, beliefs, and actions across students’ multi-worlds. Differences led to conflicting ideas, attitudes, and behaviors. While some conflicts remained unsolved, diminished motivations, together with poor rapport and escalated complications constrained transitions and limited students’ achievement. In the fifth category, students adapted to the differences and completed the PhD, but negative emotions and limited output, resulted in both leaving the research world. In the sixth category, the student resisted adapting and dropped out of the PhD program.

Discussion and conclusion

Drawing on the three-dimensional multi-world framework, this study found that achieving a PhD abroad was challenging for each participant, but it was the way they experienced the transitions across their multi-worlds that created vast differences in their experiences. The six patterns demonstrated a range of experiences, shedding light on how in some cases STEM CIDS achieved their best outcomes and how in some other cases misunderstandings, frustrations, and severe conflicts occurred.

Besides persistence, resilience, and resources, agency to communicate, termed agentic communication, along with listening in negotiations between students and their supervisors, was key in supporting or undermining the PhD over time. This study highlights the effectiveness of agentic communication in making or breaking the rapport, trust, and respect in the most significant relationship in an individual’s multi-worlds during the PhD abroad.

This study revealed that culture might too easily become the scapegoat when we interpret miscommunication or under-communication situations. When doing a PhD abroad, the focus of these students was on achieving the degree and establishing their professional identity, rather than social or cultural integration with the host community. The conflicts or factors that constrained students’ transitions across multi-worlds were often related to their doctoral research rather than culture-related issues per se. When the communication about scientific research went smoothly, positive transitions ensued, or the reverse.

Given this study identified six patterns of PhD abroad experiences, further research could investigate how different experiences influence students’ post-PhD life and career trajectories and how these students contribute to the society, home, host, or elsewhere in the world, in return for their education received abroad.

Other works related to this project:

Yang, Y., & MacCallum, J. (2023). Chinese Students and the Experience of International Doctoral Study in STEM: Using a Multi-World Model to Understand Challenges and Success. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003258841

Yang, Y., & MacCallum, J. (2022). A three-dimensional multi-world framework for examining cross-cultural experiences of international doctoral students. Studies in Continuing Education, 44(3), 493-509 doi:10.1080/0158037X.2021.1890569

Yang, Y., Volet, S., & Mansfield, C. (2018). Motivations and influences in Chinese international doctoral students’ decision for STEM study abroad. Educational Studies, 44(3), 264-278. doi:10.1080/03055698.2017.1347498

Authors’ Bio

Yibo Yang, Associate Professor, PhD, Deputy Dean for the International Organizations and Global Governance, School of International Studies, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Her current research interests focus on internationalisation in higher education, international organizations, research methodologies, and academic writing.

Judith MacCallum, Professor Emerita, PhD, College of Health and Education, Murdoch University, Australia. Her research and teaching interests focus on social interaction for learning and development, with emphasis on motivation, mentoring and professional learning.

Managing Editor: Xin Fan

Bourdieusian Boundary-Making, Social Networks, and Capital Conversion: Inequality among International Degree Holders in Hong Kong

Au, A. (2023). Bourdieusian Boundary-Making, Social Networks, and Capital Conversion: Inequality among International Degree Holders in Hong Kong. Cultural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755231157115

The following summary was prepared by Dr Anson Au’s student: Yuxiao Liu (刘宇骁)

Within the sociological perspective of education, capital and distinction, existing literature has fully discussed the various ways and mechanisms of education transforming from cultural capital to other forms of capital (Lareau and Weininger, 2003).

However, this direct conversion of different types of capital is not always smooth. With the popularization of international education, non-elite middle-class families are also able to send their children to overseas countries for higher education. The number of international bachelor’s degree holders or above is gradually increasing, which leads to the increasingly saturated labor market and increasingly fierce competition in the job market. Graduates with an international degree are less likely than before to find a decent job that meets their income expectations, which means that the direct conversion of cultural capital from an overseas education degree into economic capital is more difficult than ever (Tholen and Brown, 2017). In this context, how can international degree-holders transfer their cultural capital to other types of capital? And how can they justify an international degree with declining economic returns?

Indeed, while much research has been dedicated to examining the direct benefits of an international higher education degree, less attention has been devoted to understanding the cultural schemas that graduates acquire through foreign higher education, especially among those with non-elite university degrees whose economic returns begin to falter. Addressing this lacuna, this article inquires into the meaning-making in international student migration and the perceived value of an international education degree when its ability to convert into economic capital is disrupted.

The study focuses on the case of international degree holders in Hong Kong and draws upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice to interrogate the cultural schemas that valorize international degrees when their conversion pathways to economic capital are subjectively perceived to weaken.

When the ability of international degrees as cultural capital to convert into economic capital is undermined, how do international degree graduates perceive the indirect or implicit benefits of their degrees(the perceived value) and why they still choose to pay more for an overseas university (meaning-making in education)?

Using semi-structured interviews with non-elite international degree graduates based in Hong Kong, this study examines how cultural schemas resist change and symbolic violence is enacted among graduates against other degree holders in the wake of diminishing economic returns.

Traditionally, a Western legacy of cultural colonization in Hong Kong has allowed international degree holders to remain more competitive in some sectors, but this is fading over time.

Holders of international degrees admit that the economic returns of an international degree are declining, but they are found to justify their purchase of an international degree by recasting it as a decision motivated by values, vision, and taste. On that score, they emphasize the uniqueness of the opportunity to study abroad and vindicate the cultural riches of an international degree by pitting themselves against local degree holders, who are viewed as inferior.

The findings suggest that social networks play a significant role in embedding cultural schemas and their effects on relations within the field. When faced with diminishing economic returns, international degree holders hold fast to their schemas in view of fellow international graduates and reconceptualize their degrees as symbolic capital to cope with the loss by enacting symbolic violence against domestic degree holders.

These schemas entrench class boundaries because it makes manifest an interstitial homology, where international degree holders occupy different positions in different fields, namely, a dominant position in the cultural field but a dominated position in the economic field. Put simply, international degree holders are led by their schemas to ignore the structure of the economy as an explanation for why they or local degree holders struggle in the workforce, ignore the costs of an international degree, and ultimately ignore the fact that they are in the same economic boat as their local counterparts.

The conclusion is that the study highlights the importance of understanding the cultural schemas that graduates possess and use to respond to disruptions of capital conversion processes. The study also shows how social networks play a significant role in embedding cultural schemas and their effects on relations within the field. The findings have implications for understanding the dynamics of class boundaries and the role of cultural capital in shaping graduates’ responses to economic capital losses.

References

Lareau A and Weininger E (2003) Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment. Theory and Society 32(5): 567–606.

Tholen G and Brown P (2017) Higher education and the myths of graduate employability. In: Waller R, Ingram N and Ward M (eds) Higher Education and Social Inequalities. London: Routledge, 152–166.

Author’s Bio

Dr Anson Au,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Dr Anson AU is Assistant Professor of Economic Sociology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He presently serves as an Executive Council Member on the Board of the Hong Kong Sociological Association and on the Editorial Board of Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association. Applying mixed methods, his research examines digitalization, networks, economic sociology, and professions and organizations, with a regional focus on East Asia. Email: anson-ch.au@polyu.edu.hk

Managing Editor: Lisa (Zhiyun Bian)

Call for Papers for CIE / ECI

Comparative and International Education / Éducation comparée et internationale

Special Issue on Pluralizing Educational Mobilities

Guest Editors: Ian Craig, University of the West Indies; Kalyani Unkule, O.P. Jindal Global University, Law School Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, Seton Hall University; Jean-Blaise Samou, Saint Mary’s University

The journal of Comparative and International Education / Éducation comparée et internationale invites manuscripts to be considered for a Special Issue on “Pluralizing Educational Mobilities,” to appear in Summer 2024. In recent years, there has been a critical turn in international education scholarship (including education abroad), placing a stronger focus on issues of equity and inclusion, which trains a decolonial lens on research and practice around international mobilities, especially in light of the ongoing disruptions (social movements, global pandemics, wars, climate disasters) that have transformed our world in the past few years. The aim of this Special Issue is to contribute to this endeavour by presenting research in the area of educational mobility that further diversifies meaning-making around this activity by, amongst other approaches:

giving greater voice to internationally mobile students from the Global South, exploring their experiences with the same qualitative attention that has been bestowed on their counterparts in the Global North, with due critical consideration of the many complexities that may trouble that binary construct.
examining contexts for student mobility that are hitherto under-researched, particularly in the Global South.
drawing on alternative epistemologies and situated cultural knowledge that are typically beyond the purview of current mainstream international education research, thereby offering alternative narratives, tropes and framings that enhance understandings around internationalization in particular contexts.
harnessing collaboration between researchers across scholarly disciplines, thereby bringing complementary or disruptive external perspectives to bear on study abroad scholarship, or collaboration across roles in student mobility, such as between scholars, practitioners, administrators and student-participants.

This Special Issue thus seeks to open new pathways towards a fuller understanding of the contingent and multifaceted nature of this activity, paying due attention to the nuances of cultural context, subject positioning and historical conjuncture, amongst others, that bear on any experience of study overseas. The following questions are relevant:

What are the motivations and experiences of education abroad in and from contexts not typically reflected in the field of international education scholarship thus far?
For these individuals and contexts particularly, what is the interaction between international experiences and broader processes and systems such as curricula, institutional internationalization, international relations or development politics?
To what extent and how is this critical turn towards equity in the field having a meaningful impact on the way that student mobility is conceptualized, managed and experienced, both by student participants but also by administrators and other actors?
Which alternative narratives or situated cultural understandings might broaden or nuance understanding of study abroad experiences? Are there templates and historical experiences of mobility which would fundamentally disrupt and re-orient language and practices of “othering”, assumptions of “knowability” and instrumental framings of “cultural competence” currently pervasive in international education, particularly study abroad?
How can study abroad be further and more meaningfully decolonized, both as a scholarly field and an activity? What kind of ripple effects might this have for practices of knowledge creation and dissemination within higher education more broadly – for example: curriculum diversification, internationalization strategies, programme evaluation and reform?

Critical scholarship shows how the conception, structuring, and directions of educational mobilities are rooted in and strengthen dominant worldviews while instrumentally engaging with other ways of being and knowing. Pluralizing educational mobilities therefore includes pluralizing the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about them as a field of research and practice. In this spirit, this Special Issue will consider texts which:

Situate the meaning, purpose, nature, outcomes and ethics of mobility in alternative cosmologies and historical experiences.
Reflect stylistic and methodological approaches which embody reflexivity and emphasize context-specificity in research and its implications for practice.
Extend possibilities for bridging critical scholarship with programming practice, particularly through further reflection on conceptual framings, tacit assumptions, linguistic usage, and scope of enquiry in existing literature.

For this Special Issue, CIE / ECI welcomes articles in English, French, or Spanish presenting original research and scholarship on the specified topic. Submitted articles will be subject to the standard peer review process, must follow the current style guidelines of the American Psychological Association, and include a title and an abstract (up to 150 words). Manuscripts should not exceed 8,000 words, including all notes, quotations, and references. Manuscripts must be submitted through the journal’s online system.

Submission deadline: full manuscript October 1^st, 2023.

For submission information, visit: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cie–eci/styleguide.html

If you have an idea for a submission but are not sure whether or not it falls within the scope of this Special Issue, you may submit, by May 15^th 2023, a 500-word proposal to ian.craig@cavehill.uwi.edu. Your proposal should cover the following (as applicable): context and purpose for the study, methodology, preliminary findings, implications for research and/or practice, a statement about how the proposed submission pluralizes educational mobilities. This prior submission is optional and all final submissions will be considered for inclusion solely on the basis of the blind peer-review process.

This special issue arises from the work of the Global Collective for Study Abroad Researchers and Administrators (GCSARA), which is the recipient of a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Authors are encouraged to visit www.gcsara.org.

Managing Editor: Xin Fan

Call for Papers: Online Seminar “Chinese Educational Mobilities in Europe and Beyond”

Organizers:
Sofia Gaspar, CIES-Iscte, Portugal
Fanni Beck, CEU, Hungary

Date: 1st December 2022 (Thursday)

Format: Online

Abstract: International student migration has been of scholarly interest for decades. However, most attention has been given to tertiary education, and educational mobility in the pre-university stage (between 5 and 16 years) has been neglected, despite its importance. Primary and secondary educational mobilities differ qualitatively from international student migration in two important regards: first, in these cases, it is (more obviously) the parent, who makes the decision to migrate, decides where to migrate and until when. And secondly, in the vast majority of cases at least one parent accompanies the child on the migratory journey, coupling the educational rationale with other concerns like his or her own employment and or investment opportunities. In the past decade, educational migration of middle-class Chinese families is becoming increasingly visible in Europe, an emerging destination following other more established educational locations in Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong), and the Anglophone world (US, UK, Canada, Australia). This results in important educational, social, economic, and political ramifications in sending and receiving states facilitating and facilitated by policies and mobility regimes across countries. Recent research has highlighted that motivations to move for primary and secondary education are related to a better quality of lifestyle, an escape from pollution and the rat-race of Chinese mega cities, and the desire for a less competitive and less commodified educational and social environment for children as well as for freedom.

The Seminar “Chinese Educational Mobilities in Europe and Beyond”, on the scope of WG5 Chinese migration of CHERN Cost Action, intends to explore and analyse this topic, with the contribution of several scholars who have been dedicated to understanding this phenomenon. As such, we invite scholars to send their proposal on one of the following topics (but not limited to):

I. China

– Chinese educational system and the desire for overseas education
– Preparing for overseas studies in China: transnational educational industry at home

– “Happy education”: defining childhood happiness, successful childhood, and the articulation of their reconciliation

II. Comparative analysis of educational destinations: motivations, regimes, and integration

– Socio-historical dynamics of Chinese educational migration to Europe and beyond – New trends in Chinese educational migration to Europe and beyond

– Comparative analysis of educational migration destinations across countries and continents

– Migration agencies and education migration to Europe and beyond
– Complexity of educational mobility regimes between China and Europe

III. Family

– Chinese families’ motivations to move abroad

– The role of migrant parents in children’s education

– Types of family arrangements in educational migration

– Educational integration of Chinese students and their parents in European schools

– Negotiating “childhood happiness” and success in the migratory environment, anticipating the future

Deadline and submission instructions: Proposals should be sent until 14th October 2022 to the organizers (Sofia Gaspar, sofia.gaspar@iscte-iul.pt and Fanni Beck, Beck_Fanni@phd.ceu.edu ), and they need to include a title, abstract (250 words), and 4 keywords.

The papers will be included as part of a Special Issue to be published on a leading English peer-reviewed a journal.

Managing editor: Lisa (Zhiyun) Bian

From Female Graduates to Female Insurance Agents: Educationally Channeled Labour Mobility from Mainland China to Hong Kong

Research highlighted

Zhou, S. & Song, J. (2022). From Female Graduates to Female Insurance Agents: Educationally Channeled Labor Mobility from Mainland China to Hong Kong. Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, 171(3). Available at: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/kopLQ74k-9n8I3ShrZtwWA

中文版本

In the increasingly interwoven global trends of educational mobility and labor migration, a growing number of young women have obtained higher education and acquired greater labor mobility, and have been involved in service work that is more professional and with higher job status. Nevertheless, educational mobility and labor migration are commonly regarded as two independent research fields. Education migration is often related to a promotion of employment opportunities for young people, which provides chances of social upward mobility for men and women. For labor migration studies from a gender perspective, female migrants are often found to concentrate in labor-intensive and low-paid service work. Little attention has been paid to the field where the two topics are related. In Hong Kong, due to the cross-border expansion of the insurance industry in recent years, many female graduates from mainland China have benefited from their cultural capital and cross-border social connections and have been recruited as insurance agents. This study examines the gendered experiences of cross-border labor mobility of these atypical skilled migrants and professional service workers.

This study adopted a qualitative research approach based on in-depth interviews with 32 female graduates who had mainland backgrounds and worked as insurance agents in Hong Kong. The study also draws on participant observation of their work and life, as well as online ethnography about how individuals and companies presented such cross-border labor mobility on social media. To examine women’s educationally channeled labor mobility, this study focuses on how they were recruited and why they chose to become insurance agents. The findings indicate that Hong Kong’s cross-border insurance business tended to recruit highly educated women with mainland backgrounds as professional, independent, and elite women, meanwhile with an emphasis on their patient and empathetic femininity. Such narratives restructured and reinforced gender stereotypes prevalent in service work. These highly educated women were able to utilize human capital and cross-border freedom to pursue greater autonomy in career choice against the control of natal families in places of origin. Nevertheless, these young women also faced a double marginality in the host labor market regarding gender and geography, and they still needed to balance family obligations and career aspirations over the life course. Women’s cross-border mobility helped them to pursue individualistic aspirations and negotiate new career pathways, which challenged traditional gender stereotypes in low-end feminized service work, but their professional and independent workplace images were still constrained by the gendered division of labor and structural inequalities in public and private spheres.

By focusing on female graduates in the cross-border insurance industry, this study demonstrates how the intersection of educational mobility and labor migration can provide new employment opportunities for highly educated women. To some extent, women’s cross-border participation in professional service work has undermined traditional gender role expectations, but their personal choices have not formed a fundamental challenge to gender and structural inequalities in the labor market and domestic spheres. Bridging the two research traditions on educational mobility and labor migration, this study suggests incorporating women’s education-based resource and horizon into the study of their working experience in the host labor market, and linking women’s diverse career choices with their evolving gendered self-positioning processes. The new perspectives can add to a better understanding of how women’s migration brings about new economic opportunities as well as social pressure, and contribute to a more comprehensive reflection on the gender and social implications of women’s evolving career choices.

Author Bio

Siyuan Zhou (周思媛),
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ms. ZHOU Siyuan (周思媛) is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies Programme and the Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include gender and work, migration, and female entrepreneurship. Her doctoral project is about “doing gender” and “doing business” between Hong Kong and mainland China among female IANG insurance agents (Email: siyuanzhou@link.cuhk.edu.hk).

Dr. Jing Song (宋婧),
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Dr. Jing Song (宋婧) is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and an Associate Researcher (by courtesy) at Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include family, gender, work, urbanization, migration and China’s market transition. She has published in China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Urban Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Work Employment and Society, Population Space and Place, China Review, Journal of Sociology, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Housing Studies, Asian Anthropology, and so on. Her book Gender and Employment in Rural China was published in 2017 by Routledge (Email: jingsong@cuhk.edu.hk).

Managing editor: Lisa (Zhiyun) Bian