Identity work: Exploring Identity in Education

Identity, Education and the International Student.

Who are our international students?

Who are our international students?

The identities of these students are in process and changing. Of interest to this paper is the identities we construct for them and with what consequences

Introduction

This paper is renamed Identity, Education and the international student.

It explores the ways educationalists speak about international students within educational institutions which have become increasingly globalised.

The research

The paper refers to my research into the ways that international students have been spoken about in secondary schools.

Case studies2004 – 6 Government secondary schools2006 – 6 Government secondary schools2007 – 4 secondary schools (Gov’t, commercial,

private)Spoke to Principal or representative and 8

teachers

The argument

Discussions about international students are no simple matter.

• The terms and conditions that define the ways that they are spoken about derive from deep seated notions about the relationships between self and others,

• And the ways in which those who are one-of us can define themselves through those who they are not.

In globalised times

The logic of identity and an-other identity which structures the ways that we have come to define ourselves has become more complex as

• The world has become increasingly globalised and seemingly fluid in its interactions

• The impact of changed discourses calling for fiscal constraint, administrative accountability and consumption

The paper

My argument is in three parts

• Understanding identity Other-wise

• Identity and the international student

• Identity education and the international student

Notions of identityAnalysing how international students are understood and spoken is

implicated within the ways that identities are understood and practised within a context.

Stuart Hall argues that Western notions of identity must be understood as contingent.

That is1 – Foucault's notion that social positions are constituted and reconstituted as individuals actively

interpret the world and are themselves interpreted through different versions of meaning (eg. Hall’s own story)

2. The psychoanalytic notion of identity - far from being integral - is formulated through the eyes of others. The image of the other - both desired and hated, studied but never quite known. The self, construed not in its own selfness but through an ambivalent relation with others (eg. Lacan’s notion)

3. Homi Bhabha’s (following Derrida’s) notion of identity as over-determined and de-centered - as the polarities implied by binary notions fall apart - are disrupted so that the identity of the person is in process more or less than his or her constituent parts.

In the confluence of these three approaches identity becomes redefined as something fragmentary, changing, constructed, in process, struggled over, ‘something that we might become’

Postcolonial Notions of the ‘Other’

A central focus of post-colonial analysis is of the subject firmly tied to unequal positionings mapped out within a naturalised and taken-for-granted world.

• Fanon – Colonisation is operationalised at both representational and material levels. Materially, society is structured for some at the expense of others. Representationally this process is normalised - so that the colonised as well as the coloniser come to see and speak about it as normal-.

• Said – The West has made ‘The Orient’ - It defines who people are and how they can be

• Spivak – Can the Sabaltern speak’ - ‘epistemic violence’. The social text of the other is so erased that they are in a profound way annihilated. In a sense the other cannot speak at all

She suggests the possibility of silence – the subaltern so colonised that she has no place to speak or words save those suggested by the colonised

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Notions of whiteness

Following from Postcolonial theory theories of whiteness argue that in a unequally empowered world individual and institutional practices and interests create and navigate what it is to be in ‘our’ world .

• It is in the power of those speaking from a position of the ‘us’ to define the dimensions of the map that structures the ways that day-to-day worlds in contemporary western societies are understood.

• The terms and conditions of ‘whiteness’ come to be seen as normalcy – of that what is.

• The privileges of whiteness are so taken for granted that they become – in some way invisible. Whiteness comes to be seen as ‘having no culture. Whiteness comes to be nothing but in some way everything

• That which ‘it is not’ comes to be seen as that-which-is-not-white. The Other comes to frame that which whiteness is not – in the ambivalent language of the stereotype

Notions of silenceThe argument is that commonsense understandings normalise the

world as it is known,. Such notions are not only conceptual but material. These concepts are not arbitrary, they are articulated within the

constraints that define relationships between those who belong as ‘us’ and those who do not.

As site and subject of communal attention these concepts become normalised maps made through the dominance of some people as they understand themselves through those people who they are not.

They are configured by two silences: the silences of those who draw the maps, whose ways of understanding and being are so normalised they do not have to speak; and the silences of those who are so thoroughly mapped by the words of others they are left with no position from which to speak

Multilayered complexity

The relationship between selves and other takes place within a terrain that shifting, changing: unequally empowered ways of meaning are struggled over by experiencing individuals caught within these same ways of understanding.

Atvah Brah (1996) in her particular imagination of diasporic space provided an important description of the multi-layered complexity of these relations. She reminded us that these ways of meaning are not only notional. They are ones of materiality which, played across patterned fields of power, constitute and transform social relations and identities.

Making the every day problematic

Dorothy Smith’s (1987) insight is that the research task begins from the study of the everyday lives of practitioners within the systemic structures and practices which shape and are shaped by them to find a ‘way of seeing from where we actually live, into the powers, processes and relations that organise and determine the everyday context of that seeing’.

That is research is concerned with a: socially organised world where everyone’s experience is intimately

connected to their work of bringing into being the world as they live it, It assumes, in contrast to knowing ideologically, that what everyone knows experientially is always embodied a and a subject always exists in a body that is located in time and space (Smith , accessed 2007, p.17

A complex matter of homework

The researcher interrogates the everyday and embodied experiences of teachers and their work. and critically confronts the often taken-for-granted ways of meaning, which shape their understanding.

It is not just that the social and cultural structures and notions that historically position researchers and the researched are to be explored, they must also be dismantled.

The addition of a critical aspect to ethnographic research moves within and against the parameters of comfortable research and repositions in of process of ever greater ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ Pillow (2007, p.188)

Frame of ‘Analytical Abstraction’

This integration of unequally empowered discourse can be interrograted from three different, but integrated vantage points: That of

• narrational practices - the seemingly ad hoc nature of individual experiences and stories and the ways that experiencing individuals understand and participate in their day-to-day worlds

• narrational fields -the patterned yet contingent and often-disjunctive ways in which meaning and practice are related to a particular conceptual or practical domain.

• narrational maps - the logic, or terms and conditions of the debate as they appear as essential ways of knowing and being in the world. (Arber, 2008)

A study of international students

This first section disentangles this discussion and gives as an example discussions with a teacher at one school as he discusses the international students market at their school.

A country school – Wentworth college

Reasons for taking in international students

For Gregory, the school takes in international students for

two reasons, one is that we need to break down the monocultural aspect of our school and the wider society and a lot of people nodded that and say the other reason is and the ears prick up that we can potentially make money out of it and a lot of people expect the money to flow immediately ( went p.18)

‘Word of mouth’- most important

Personal relationships are essential in these processes particularly those developed by ‘word of mouth’ as these:

maintain the best way of getting students long term and getting them rolling over is to develop a personal relationships with schools and then word of mouth. If you’re offering a good product it will spread and you’ll keep on getting them. So that’s what we’ve done basically – went 5

Developing trust

The first kids we got from China though even though I went on a marketing trip and met the parents there again I believe it was that initial contact with the kids coming here was the most important thing. They were familiar with the school. And going on the marketing trip was important in the sense that their parents got to meet me and reassured that everything was okay and they could trust me and trust is very important with them …

What is most important isParents being able to put a face to a school and having

confidence that that person will look after their children is really, really important and as it would be for us if it was on the other foot.

Developing networks

They would say my son is 13, in 3 years I’ll be looking for a school and he will be going to Wentworth College because my friend recommends him and we had that so often and all this very, very important powerful people who in themselves know other people because Chinese society seem to work…its very patriarchal still but it works on networks, male networks basically.

Problematising discourses

The examination of conversations that I have with teachers about the impact of international student programs on their day-to-day experience brings into view other and more taken-for-granted conversations that define the nature of community belonging.

The investigation of the ways such programs are marketed suggests that international students programs are mediated by discourses of:– identity and difference, – neo-liberalism and – cosmopolitanism

in ways that differentiate, objectify and commodify the students as other and serve to racialise them.

Discourses of identity and difference

• Such conversations interpolate already-contradictory discourses traditionally used to define community belonging for immigrant and refugee students.

They further a binary between:• Multiculturalism: concerned with an ethnically or

racially differentiated other who is included within our community, even as they continue to be defined as different and as not-quite-part of our community

• Mono-culturalism: concerned with the ways that representatives of other ethnic and raced groups are allowed to enter a seemingly culturally and racially homogeneous community

Strategic Essentialism (Luke, 2005)

• Working with international students often demands a strategic essentialism as teachers require new cross-cultural, cross-linguistic skills

• Too often this move to describe those within the school usefully and economically slips into the discursive device of the stereotype (Pickering, 2001)

• More than an attempt at categorisation, here ‘we’ define the broad elements of cultural practices and process as primordial attributes. Negotiation with the identities described as individuals and as other than the attributes ascribed them is lost.

OrientalismThe notion, ‘to know’ and locate as ‘ours’ the other who provides the

focus of our conversations, is to locate them, both conceptually and materially as an-other and to locate ‘them’ within the slippery and ambivalent protocols of fantasy and desire (Bhabha, 1996; Hall, 1997)

As part of the orientalist project to locate and to know others miscellaneous and unequally empowered individual and institutional practices and interests create and maintain what it is to be in ‘our’ world (Said, 1991).

The central condition of orientalism, is its appearance of normalcy, as an almost unconditional ‘us’ represents the condition of being and working within the world (Dwyer, 1997).

Discourses of Neo-liberalism

An embedded trope of capitalism and neo-liberalism articulates discussions about international students.

Discourses of identity and difference are overlaid by the entrepreneurial nature of the international student enterprise.

The ‘cherry picking’ that underpins a capitalistic approach to education means that support for international students is complex and inconsistent

Notions of educational practice distorted

Public education is seen as a market commodity in need of marketing (Matthews, 2002).

Notions in support of international student programs - providing social justice, international skills - are distorted as ‘altruistic reasons’ for bringing in international students are refocused by others to ‘make money’ and increase profits for the school community.

Hard-won intercultural and linguistic skills needed to participate within the marketing process - interaction with agents, government and local bodies; attendance at marketing expos held in participating provider countries, interacting with social networks and families – are no doubt well intentioned but are nevertheless fraught by inconsistent purposes.

Crucial values – trust, friendship, pastoral care become inducted into the marketing process.

The lexical terms and conditions of marketing imagery, as they are shaped by capitalism and global business implemented spatially, reconfigure the ‘human face’ of the school (Sidhu, 2002)

Naïve cosmopolotianismNotions of race and identity and those of neo-liberalism are criss-

crossed by those of trans-locality and globalisation. Older notions used to describe refugee, immigrant, indigenous and

religious groups describe groups of others who are here to stay and reconsider the ways that their inclusion into ‘our’ community can be organised (Rizvi, 2005).

The commonly held notion of international students as ‘soujourners’ impacts on traditional conversations about identity and difference as international students are sought from over there ‘to come here’ and come ‘to us’ (Viete).

This suggests a naïve cosmopolitanism whereby, in a modern world, some people (international students) have the ability to travel extensively, corporally and imaginatively and virtually whenever and wherever they wish.

The phenomena of international students allows some to be ‘tourists’ rather than ‘vagabonds’ but it is in a raced, classed and gendered post-colonial global world (Bauman, 1997)

The commodification of cultural practice

Moreover, the person of the international students soujourner allows all school members to share, however vicariously, the notion that they are international and cosmopolitan.

It is a semblance of participation within the larger global context; a matter of opportunity, but also of incredible tension as international students provide access the skills and resources needed to participate in an increasingly complex globalised world

‘Framed as consumers of international and national difference, learners and educators become differently entitled citizen consumers in a global markets place in which cultural practice are mere commodities’. (Kenway and Bullen P.279)

The commodification of the international student

Within the convergence of these discourses, the international student, differentiated and located outside of our community becomes depersonalised and objectivised: the focus of our imagination and desire.

It is not just education that becomes consumable but international students themselves.

It is a process of consumption that is itself an imagination. An expression of fantasy in which people define and redefine themselves in a processes of ascetics and desire interpolated within the twinning process of fetishisation and mimicry

The international student becomes- bringer of foreign skills and knowledge/ not-wanted if antagonistically different; wanted when profitable/ not-wanted when not-profitable;

much-wanted as they ‘add value’ to the school/no longer wanted as they add ‘negative value’

Popular RacismRizvi (1997) argues that understanding racism requires an understanding of

‘popular racism’• Only by examining the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning ‘others’ is

it possible to understand how racism operates not just at an individual or institutional level but through interactions on a daily basis

• Exploring raced understanding involves understanding and contesting individual actions and relationships as they are shaped within the systemic and institutional devices and the historic and socio-cultural understandings that shape (and are shaped) by them.

• At stake, in conversations about race and ethnicity and particularly in times of immense global and demographic transformation, is our ability to know who we are. At issue is the definition of who-they-are and therefore who-we-are and the ways that ‘they’ can be allowed to live as part of ‘us’. The way forward asks that we interrogate and renegotiate the ways that we behave and speak about others in the everyday of our lives and enter into the national debates which seek to define and structure the terms and conditions of these relationships.

Ascetics of desire and dreamsThe ethnographic endeavour locates the subject in an ‘everyday world

of bodily and material existence’, and traces social organisations and material forms that structure everyday conversations (Smith, 1987)

The study of the international students market describes everyday lives in schools working within an unequally empowered world shaped by conversations about user-pays, markets and accountability.

The systemic and institutional arrangements take pattern these activities take place within other and taken-for-granted Discourses about race and identity, neo-liberalism and naïve cosmopolitanism which interpellate the ways that international students are understood.

In evoking consumerist dreams, images and pleasures, genres of consumption engage both international students and local communities in a complex imaginary embedded in the ascetics of desire and dreams

Ascetics of desire and dreamsThe ethnographic endeavour locates the subject in an ‘everyday world

of bodily and material existence’, and traces social organisations and material forms that structure everyday conversations (Smith, 1987)

The study of the international students market describes everyday lives in schools working within an unequally empowered world shaped by conversations about user-pays, markets and accountability.

The systemic and institutional arrangements take pattern these activities take place within other and taken-for-granted Discourses about race and identity, neo-liberalism and naïve cosmopolitanism which interpellate the ways that international students are understood.

In evoking consumerist dreams, images and pleasures, genres of consumption engage both international students and local communities in a complex imaginary embedded in the ascetics of desire and dreams

Discourses of antagonism and desire

• The international student complicit within local school dreams of travel to far of places, intercultural interaction and pecuniary existences indulges his own and his families need and desire to commodify western education. In dreaming, they become involved within a process of imitation of mimicry which provides a form of resistance which subserves and negotiated its domination. It is a schizophrenic form of resistance which is never complete as it is shaped within other and powerful discourses of identity and difference and commodification. As the object of our dreams and the intensity of our desires international students become fickle commodities: much wanted when they are fit in and are profitable – no longer wanted when they do not.