Feeling excluded: international students experience equity, diversity and inclusion

ABSTRACT

Many institutions of higher education have committed to the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). This collective move signifies an effort to identify and confront systemic issues of marginalisation and exclusion of minoritised groups in contexts of higher education. Nevertheless, international students are not always considered an equity-seeking group, despite the structural barriers international students face. As a result, international students’ experiences of EDI remain underexplored and are typically examined from a perspective of internationalisation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of five international students from the broader perspective of EDI at a Canadian university through a case study design. The findings demonstrate that, in spite of the university’s long-standing commitment to aspects of EDI, international students felt excluded and othered in the community. Their experiences pointed to a lack of intercultural awareness and sensitivity on the part of the superficially multicultural community, a lack of institution-led initiatives to include the students through socialisation with peers, and the limited internationalisation of the curriculum. This paper is concluded with a call for universities to recognise international students as a marginalised group in their EDI efforts and, potentially, address structural issues that internationalisation frameworks have neglected.

KEYWORDS:

• International students
• equity
• diversity
• inclusion
• exclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The links to the institution’s web pages have been removed for anonymity reasons.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vander Tavares

Vander Tavares is a Postdoctoral Researcher in education at Høgskolen i Innlandet, Norway (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences). He obtained his PhD from York University (Canada) in 2020. His research interests include language teacher identity development, second language education, internationalisation of higher education, and identity in multilingual/multicultural contexts. He is the author of International Students in Higher Education: Language, Identity, and Experience from a Holistic Perspective (Rowman & Littlefield) and co-editor of an upcoming volume titled Reconstructions of Canadian Identity: Towards Diversity and Inclusion (University of Manitoba Press).