Interrogating ‘imagined’ communities: exploring the impact of international students in local schools

Abstract

This paper suggests new directions understanding the impact of international students in schools. It is concerned with the ways that community representatives discuss these students and their impact on the community of the school. Recent literatures describe communities such as those of schools as ones of perception and materiality whereby some are included differently than others. Discourses such as multiculturalism and monoculturalism, which have traditionally shaped these discussions about community relations, have always been ambivalent. They take on new forms as local/global interaction, and the individualistic and market‐driven changes that lead to the arrival of international students have consequences for the everyday lives of school community members. These need to be investigated if the location of international students in local school communities is to be properly described and interrogated.

Keywords:

• international students
• identity
• difference
• cosmopolitanism
• commodification
• schools

Notes

1. Footnotes have been referenced by pseudonyms to maintain the anonymity of respondents.

2. Including Vice Principals, international student coordinators, English language teachers, class teachers.

3. This material is large and is still being added to. It is impossible to explore all of the examples and themes developed by the analysis within the limited space provided by this paper. These examples do provide real examples of experience and practice, and in this way add to our understanding of the ways that community and difference has been understood, particularly in relation to the presence of international students in Victorian state secondary schools.

4. These case studies have been taken from research in eight Victorian state secondary schools mentioned earlier: four rural and four urban. In line with notions expressed within ethnographic literatures, I am not suggesting that the scenarios discussed are true across all or most secondary schools within rural and urban Victoria (e.g., Denzin and Lincoln 1998). They do, however, describe patterns in the data that exemplify the point I am making here.

5. The data discussed here is taken from transcripts in my study. The names and descriptions of the schools and of the respondents have been changed so as to preserve their anonymity. At the same time, steps have been taken to preserve a sense of the kind of school and the essential integrity of the respondents represented.

6. See for instance Arber (2008, in press), Hage (1998), Stratton and Ang (1998), Gunew (1994).

7. See particularly Dwyer (1997); for discussions of ways this takes place in Australia, see for instance Hage (1998), Stratton (1998).

8. Hage’s concept of ‘not‐wogginess’ takes from the Australian colloquialism ‘wog’, which is used, usually disparagingly, to describe ethnically different Australians and migrants.

9. This codification of the world as it is made and known and is caught in a formation of ‘linkage’ has been described by Hall and by Grossberg as ‘articulation’. For an in‐depth discussion of articulation, see Grossberg (1992, 1996). For more details see Hall (1992, 1996, 1997).

10. For other discussions of these ideas, I consider the work of Chambers (1996) and Papastergiadis (1998).

11. See, in the first instance, Paolini (1997).

12. For a discussion of the relation between this imposition of the outside into the centre of our very homes, and the enunciation and embodiment of relations between others and ourselves, see McCarthy (1998).

13. See, for instance, Kincheloe and Steinberg (1997).

14. Various Australian policy statements have discussed these trends; see, for instance, Towards a National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, Advisory Council on Multicultural Affairs (1988), 2; or, within academic textual discussion, see for instance Jupp (1996); Cahill (2001).

15. See, for example, most recently, Commonwealth of Australia (2003).

16. See, for instance, Stratton (1998).

17. See for instance Whitehead (2005), Matthews (2002), Singh (2001), Purdie and Neill (1999), Dooley (2001).

18. See Bauman (1997a, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004).

19. See, for example, Delanty (2006); Beck (2002).