International Student Mobility in Higher Education: Case Studies in Agency
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Description
International Student Mobility in Higher Education: Case Studies in Agency presents an in-depth look at the stories of nine international college students as they pursued degrees in the US. Drawing on recurring interviews with the students and other qualitative data collected over four years, the book investigates how the students’ academic development intersected with other factors, including their status as international students, their linguistic backgrounds, their professional ambitions, and their experiences of living in a new sociocultural environment. By highlighting the themes of agency, identity, and motivation, the book demonstrates how the students worked to make higher education align with their own goals for learning and growth.
Endorsements
"Presenting a multi-year longitudinal case investigation of nine international students at a US university, this book is brimming with insights into the experiences of international students and their agency and identity development. It delves deeply into the academic, cultural, and linguistic experiences of these students, showcasing how they navigate and interact with both their academic environments and home cultural communities. The nuanced perspectives provided are invaluable for academic faculty, practitioners working with international students, and graduate students alike."
—Dr. Yusuf Ikbal Oldac, Education University of Hong Kong
"This book exemplifies the value of meaningful, unrushed research that speaks across multiple disciplines. Schneider’s analyses are thoughtful and precise, grounded in the richness of his participants’ experiences, and elevated by just the right amount of theory. His concept of alignment is a valuable theoretical contribution, but what stands out most is the clarity of his writing. He presents a vast amount of data so seamlessly that it feels as though the narratives unfold on their own. This is essential reading for qualitative researchers in any field—a masterclass in clear, well-communicated scholarship."
—Dr. Nathan Thomas, University College London
The story behind the book
After many years of teaching international students in the US, I came to realize that I wasn't always listening to my students--or at least that I wasn't listening to them in a way that could help me appreciate how their academic work intersected with their experiences of international mobility. I decided to develop a research project centered on listening, using recurring interviews with a cohort of international students as they made their way through college. At the beginning, my goal was to understand the students' development as academic writers and language learners in relation to their broader sociocultural experiences, inspired by the work of applied linguists Bonny Norton and Ilona Leki. However, as I met with the students for interviews--term after term, year after year--I realized that their growth as college writers was a very small part of their lives. As the study progressed, I started focusing more directly on the many ways that the students were working to assert agency and define their paths--including their academic, professional, and personal paths--as they pursued goals and built new identities in the US.
These and other topics form the core of the book, which brings together vignettes from the students' stories--often in their own words--with theoretical discussions on issues in educational research, including, most of all, the tension between students' desires to define their own paths (to assert agency) and the local and global pressures that can complicate such pursuits (structure). A key contribution of the book is the idea of alignment, which I use to explain processes by which the students in the research worked to transform their internal ambitions into realities amidst various structural constraints.
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