Kun Dai’s book, Transitioning ‘In-Between’: Chinese Students Navigating Experiences in Transnational Higher Education Programmes, provides an original and insightful research-based account of the experiences, educational and cultural, face to face and technologically mediated, of Chinese students who participated in Transnational Articulation Programmes (TAPs) between Chinese and Australian higher education (HE) institutions. These mobile students are a manifestation of the flows of people across the globe, ethnoscapes in Appadurai’s (1996) account of globalisation, which both reflect and express globalisation. These flows, of course, have been interrupted in the context of less porous national borders in response to national approaches to managing the C0vid-19 global pandemic, which might be seen as a viral global flow. It will be interesting to see the short- and long-term effects of the pandemic on TAPs and also the impact of changing global geopolitics and China-US tensions on these flows of HE students and the continuation of such articulation programmes. The rising global status of a good number of Chinese universities, an explicit Chinese government policy agenda in HE, will also have impact on such programmes.
These articulation programmes, in this case between China and Australian HE institutions, meet the interests of both nations and both sets of participating, articulating institutions. For China, such programmes link to moves to enhance the global standing of Chinese universities and to enhance the quality of provision and international outreach. For Australian universities, there is a strong financial incentive to encourage such programmes in the context of reducing government financial support for universities and their greater dependence on other sources of funding. The latter has been very well illustrated in the financial stringencies facing many Australian universities as the pandemic has decimated the numbers of full fee-paying international HE students and particularly from China.
Dai’s analysis gives voice to the students participating in articulation programmes. The study draws on interviews with a number of students participating in these programmes. Creatively, he also draws on his own experiences as a student who participated in such an articulation programme. The conjoining of the interview data with what we might see as autoethnographic insights demonstrates issues inherent in such articulation programmes. These include the different positioning and usage of the internet, websites etc in the two HE contexts, different pedagogical practices, different assessment practices, and different organisation of the classes in which the students participated, as well as broader cultural differences between the two HE systems and of course between the two national contexts. The issue of English language competency is also shown to be of real importance, especially as the students in the Chinese arm of the articulation programme focus on their English language competence so as to successfully pass the English test necessary to participate in the Australian arm of the articulation programme. English is also important in respect of HE in another way. In the context of post Cold War globalisation and the work of universities, we have witnessed the emergence of a one-world science system with English as its lingua franca.
While Dai’s analysis utilised extant research on articulation programmes, especially the psychological work that stresses processes of adaptation or otherwise, his work also interestingly draws on more sociological, cultural studies approaches that focus on ‘third spaces,’ spaces in-between (Soja, 1996), in mobile individuals’ experiencing of globalisation and its various flows. The internet enabled some of the students to live in-between China and Australia when negotiating the Australian arm of the articulation programmes. This is a liminal space and perhaps also precipitates something of a liminal identity. It is in effect, Dai’s analysis demonstrates, the disarticulation between the Chinese-Australian arms of articulation programmes, that enables this liminality, enables this living in-between, living and learning here and there simultaneously. This is somewhat akin to how the affordances of the new technologies have supported similar experiences amongst global diasporas, very different experiences from earlier waves of migrants pre the internet. Dai hypothesises that this unintended outcome for some of the students in his study, probably well prepares some of the graduates of such programmes for participation in global labour markets and within the technical and professional arms of the new transnational class. Other less adaptive students are probably destined for their national labour markets.
This is an original study that ought to be read by policy makers and those in HE in both nations responsible for articulation programmes. The book also provides a base for future research on TAPs and on the student experience of them. It makes a very real contribution to research on the experiences of mobile students participating in these articulation programmes at a poignant moment in the context of globalisation and its associated flows and changing global geopolitics, which will surely have effects on such programmes as we move into the future.
References
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. The University of Minnesota Press.
Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Wiley-Blackwell.