International doctoral students’ becoming: A dialogic perspective

Abstract

This paper takes up Bakhtin’s dialogic perspective to explore the becoming of one Chinese international doctoral student’s voices. We investigate how a single participant (from a wider study) assimilates the most transformative but alien voice of critical thinking in her supervision space by participating in dialogues with key speaking persons. When she assimilates this alien voice, the student also renovates her culturally enrooted and contradictory voice of respectful dependence. In this way, the student’s voices develop and transform through a process of conflicts, struggles and reconciliations. This rich case study illustrates how a doctoral journey may be transformative cognitively and socio-culturally for the student as a speaking person – for her subjectivity. It also shows how this transformation is enabled not only by the supervisors’ personal qualities but also through role modelling from peers: both kinds of relationships facilitate the student’s assimilation of the most transformative voice in intercultural supervision.

Keywords:

• Dialogue
• doctoral education
• intercultural supervision
• transformation
• voice

Notes

1. Manathunga (2011) applies assimilation to locate instances when supervisors ignore the students’ prior knowledge and demand full conformity with Western/Northern research approaches.

2. Manathunga (2007) defines transculturation as when ‘culturally diverse students may carefully select those parts of Western knowledge that they find useful and seek to blend them with their own knowledge and ways of thinking’ (pp. 97, 98).

3. ‘Becoming’ is used to echo Bakhtin’s notion of unfinishedness and to emphasise the ongoing process of the formation of students’ voices.

4. This case study is drawn from a larger research project that looks at feedback interactions between six Chinese international doctoral students and their non-Chinese supervisors in a large research-intensive New Zealand university.

5. Modelling, as a key theoretical component in social cognitive theory, means acquisition of learning through observing others (Bandura, 1986).