Trevor Grimshaw

`Where am I from?' `Where do I belong?' The negotiation and maintenance of identity by international school students

While the benefits of a mobile expatriate lifestyle are widely reported, it must also be recognized that many students who have attended international schools experience a confused sense of identity due to the fragmented nature of their personal histories. This article seeks to refine our understanding of how these globally mobile young people negotiate and maintain a sense of identity. It reviews a range of relevant literature, identifies a series of research questions, and concludes with some suggestions as to how to approach empirical research on identity in international schools and other multicultural educational settings.

Problematizing the construct of ‘the Chinese learner’: insights from ethnographic research

Large numbers of students from the Chinese‐speaking world are nowadays enrolled in Western universities, prompting the need for awareness of their educational beliefs and practices. Although an established literature seeks to characterize ‘the Chinese learner’, much of this research results in stereotypical representations of a ‘reduced Other’: passive, uncritical and over‐reliant on the instructor. This paper, which is based on ethnographic research conducted in universities in the People’s Republic of China, aims to illuminate some of the common misperceptions of Chinese educational cultures.

Concluding editorial: ‘The needs of international students rethought – implications for the policy and practice of higher education’

In recent years higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and elsewhere have witnessed unprecedented growth in the enrolment of students from other countries. While current practice and policy to some extent acknowledge the needs of these students, it is necessary to interrogate dominant assumptions and to take account of constantly changing circumstances. Such was the context of the series of seminars entitled ‘Rethinking the needs of international students’ that took place at the Universities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Bath during 2008 and 2009. The stated aims of the seminars were:

Styling the occidental other: interculturality in Chinese university performances

Abstract Essentialist representations of the Orientalised Other abound within the literature of intercultural communication. The dominant discourse constructs Chinese-speaking students as members of a homogenised collective: passive recipients of knowledge who are reliant on a reproductive approach to learning. This article seeks to offer a corrective to such notions, which underestimate the complexity and dynamism of Chinese academic cultures. Using a critical ethnographic approach, it examines interdiscourse communication within the context of institutional performances. In ‘international evenings’ and ‘debate contests’ Chinese-speaking students are observed to engage in acts of ‘crossing’ and ‘styling’, involving the selective and playful appropriation of the discourses of the Other. These communicative events are thus seen as sites of discursive struggle and transculturation in which hybrid identities are negotiated and contradictory subjectivities are produced.

Book Review: Bilingualism in International Schools: A Model for Enriching Language Education by Maurice Carder Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007, ISBN 978—1-85359—940—8

In this latest publication Maurice Carder draws upon his extensive experience in international schools in order to propose a model for bilingual education. In his acknowledgements Carder mentions several of the major authorities in the field, including Colin Baker, Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas. Catherine Wallace and Tove SkutnabbKangas provide endorsements, while yet another authority, Jim Cummins, adds his seal of approval with a foreword. Given such endorsements, a review of the book seems a somewhat daunting proposition. I am pleased to say that Carder’s book lives up to the recommendations. Carder’s voice is clear and succinct. He explains key terminology in an accessible way. The book is user friendly, containing an appropriate balance of theoretical exposition and practical advice. The text is enlivened by student case studies and carefully selected diagrams. There are chapter summaries, recommendations for further reading, and a list of useful websites for bilingual educators. The author begins by highlighting a fundamental tension within the world of international schools: that while the medium of instruction in most such schools is English, only a minority of students speak English as their first language. Furthermore, while most international schools offer some kind of provision for EAL (English as an Additional Language), there are others where non-native, English-speaking students are thrown in at the deep end of the linguistic swimming pool and left to ‘sink or swim’. A related issue is that few international schools provide sufficient support for the students’ mother tongues. Research has shown that the resulting cognitive impairment and sense of cultural alienation can have serious knock-on effects in terms of students’ subsequent development. Carder correctly points out that problems are in part attributable to the level of linguistic and cultural awareness amongst staff. Despite the multilingual and multicultural mix within the student body, most international school teachers and leaders are from the Anglophone West. Although some of these ‘expatriates’ are bilingual, many achieve only minimal competence in the local language, remaining in professional terms functionally monolingual. This raises an important question: how sensitive can a teacher be to the needs of second language students if that teacher lacks the experience of living with bilinguality? The parents of many EAL learners seem disturbingly unconcerned by these issues. I myself have noted that parents almost always underestimate how much time it will take for their children to be competent in an additional language. As Carder points out, many parents share the misconception that ‘everything can be bought’ (p. 18) Book Reviews