ABSTRACT
Chinese students and scholars have become highly mobile, both within China and beyond her shores. Increasing numbers travel abroad for study and engage in transnational and transcultural research. Nevertheless, are these ‘flows’ of people and ideas (Appadurai 1996) translating into the generation of new knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy and new intercultural knowledge? With this mobility, new knowledge and ways of perceiving and analysing the world are being made available to both the host nations and the scholars themselves. Nevertheless, the discourses of education in the West are still largely focused on disjunctions in knowledge and approaches to learning. More particularly, students from countries such as China are often narrowly construed in terms of deficiencies such as needing intensive support and guidance to engage in ‘critical thinking’ and reproduce Western academic ways of writing and interacting. Drawing on our own experiences in education faculties in Australia, where we accompany students in their negotiation of knowledge and academic tasks, this chapter presents a different view of Chinese students abroad. It shows how they craft their own, highly effective voices in writing and scholarly interaction, how they work with staff and other students to co-construct more global views of educational issues, and how they shape new identities for themselves in the ‘thirdspace’. We draw on their accounts of their learning and their experiences of being able to construct new, respected identities for themselves through teaching and learning interactions that value Chinese as well as Western ways of knowing, writing and communicating. We argue that this generative process of knowledge building is beneficial for students, their host institutions and their future sites of professional engagement both in China and elsewhere.
