International students’ interactions with their host communities can have a “dark side”, leaving them marooned with each other and making them feel like social outcasts.
Adelaide researchers have found that overseas students’ engagement with their adoptive communities can accelerate their careers and benefit them socially and academically. But they can also end up disillusioned and alienated.
One?, published in the?International Journal of Intercultural Relations, was based on interviews with educators, community workers and other service providers to overseas students. Lead author Michael Mu said the paper outlined “a more complicated understanding” of community engagement than the “rose-tinted” version often presented.
“If we want to engage more productively with international students, and international students want to engage more productively and meaningfully with locals, I think it’s important to understand both sides,” said Mu, an educational sociologist at the University of South Australia.
He said language issues, time constraints, cultural assumptions and locals’ existing friendships stymied their contact with international students, often “unintentionally”.
“Once we understand [these] structural problems…both sides – locals and international students – can think about how they take actions to break those usually hidden and invisible structures.”
The paper explores unsuccessful attempts to bring the two sides together, including a “speed friending” programme which only managed to entice international students. Their domestic peers already had well-established social networks and were “not necessarily looking to make new friends”, the coordinator explained.
A faith-based organisation, which staged community get-togethers in the hope of “forming a very multicultural mix”, likewise attracted only overseas students. “What brings them together is that they don’t really have anybody else here,” the convener explained.
The paper says international students were “drawn” to community-based activities but often encountered social segregation. “The social chasms before them are not vacuums. They are filled with a fog of social distrust, cultural divide and time constraints.”
A related?, based on an online survey of almost 1,400 international students, found that their well-being mostly hinged on engagement with Australians through both organised activities and “random” exchanges. But these interactions often misfired because the locals simply backed off – rather than adapting their speech – when the students struggled to understand them.
Mu said international students were often “sensitive” to their failed attempts to communicate with the locals. But they were also delighted when casual chats in the neighbourhood gave them a sense of genuine connection.
“Community engagement programmes do not always have to be organised,” he said. “They can be very organic. The everyday, natural, small things within the communities mean a lot to international student well-being.”
Mu said both sides could benefit if locals asserted the “social licence” to initiate interactions with foreign students. “Without this invitation from the ground up, it’s hard to build sustainable mutual engagement between the two.”
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