Donna M. Velliaris

Australian Students in China: Making the Foreign Familiar

Australian students are choosing to study in China in growing numbers, with strong support from their educational institutions and the Australian Government. All parties involved anticipate the experience will be transformative, but the diversity of individual study abroad experiences is not well understood (Tian & Lowe, 2014). The different parties involved in Australian student mobility to China, and elsewhere, anticipate some form of return on their international outbound investment. Students aim for a learning experience and improved employment prospects, institutions seek to enrich and internationalise their services, and governments pursue long-term economic prosperity through gaining a globally competent workforce.

The Other Side of the Student Story

Apart from occasional parent-teacher meetings, parents rarely have the opportunity to discuss with teachers important matters related to the social and educational development of their children. This parent-teacher divide may be exacerbated in the case of ‘international’ families, where the choice of schools is generally more complicated than it would have been in their home countries (MacKenzie, Hayden, & Thompson, 2003; Pascoe, 2006; Pollock & Van Reken, 2001).