International education through a bioecological development lens – a case study of Chinese doctoral students in Australia

Portraying the ‘Chinese international students’: a review of English-language and Chinese-language literature on Chinese international students (2015–2020)

“…Moreover, different from the monolithic representation of Chinese international students in most existing research, policy and media, it is heartening to witness an emergent body of literature that reveals the heterogeneity of these Chinese students. For instance, while a dominant body of research in both languages still focuses on undergraduate and master’s level Chinese international students’ experiences, a nascent group has begun to probe into various aspects of the lives of pre-university (Montalbano et al, 2016 ; Ren [任], 2018 ; Will, 2017 ; Wu & Tarc, 2019 ; Wu, 2020a , 2020b ), vocational education (Cao & Tran, 2015 ) and doctoral level students (Ding, 2016 ; Ding & Devine, 2017 ; Hu et al, 2016 ; Weng, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2020 ; Yue [岳], 2015 ). There has also been research that accentuates their diverse gender and sexual experiences (Douglass et al, 2020 ; Martin, 2017 ), emotional lives (Coates, 2019 ; Montsion, 2020 ) and religious beliefs (Chen [ 2015 ; Yu, 2019 ).…”

“…Along the same line, Chinese international students have been portrayed as open-minded scholars and knowledgeable educators, adept at acquiring and integrating foreign and Chinese cultures. This is especially the case for Chinese international students as scholars who are highly critical and agentic, adept at intercultural learning (Ai, 2015 ; Dai & Hardy, 2020 ; Hu [胡], 2016 ; Hu et al, 2016 ; Meng [孟] & Abduweli, 2017 ; Xu et al, 2020 ; Weng, 2020 ) and are resourceful, strategic and tenacious (Cao & Meng, 2020 ; De Costa et al, 2016 ; Fox, 2016 ; Jensen, 2015 ; Yu & Moskal, 2019a , 2019b ), showing considerable growths through their transnational education mobility; they are also celebrated for integrating Chinese thoughts with western analytical methods (Chen [陈], 2018 ; Lin [林], 2016 ; Xu [徐], 2020 ; Yuan [元] & Zhang, 2016 ).…”

Academic Career Development of Chinese Returnees With Overseas Ph.D. Degrees: A Bioecological Development Perspective

“…Ai and Wang (2017) used autoethnography to narrate the first author’s experiences of integration as a returnee and highlighted the challenges of identity negotiation for academic returnees in Chinese HEIs. These studies, however, largely consider returnees as “in deficit” ( Xu et al, 2020 , p. 2), focusing on the influence of external factors but neglecting the interaction of the individual with environment - a process that CROPs actively engage through embodiment of personal characteristics, including dispositions, demands , and resources ( Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006 ) in their career development. Therefore, we adopt Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory ( Bronfenbrenner, 1979 ; Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006 ) to explore how CROPs manifest personal characteristics in interactions with their ecological systems, which then shape their career development.…”

“…It also recognizes the important role of personal characteristics, namely dispositions, demands , and resources , in person-environment interactions. Dispositions include CROPs’ career motivations and individual perceptions in different aspects of life, such as a preference for stability in work and life, which can facilitate or prevent their return and subsequent career development ( Crawford et al, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2020 ). Demands refer to CROPs’ characteristics that elicit immediate reactions from them in their ecological systems and produce change based on these reactions ( Xu et al, 2020 ), such as the need of establishing and maintaining academic social networks after return.…”

A Probe Into Chinese Doctoral Students’ Researcher Identity: A Volunteer-Employed Photography Study

“…With an aim to address a critical gap, this project recruited several international Chinese doctoral students to share their emic perceptions, given the unfortunate fact that the biggest group of international doctoral students since the 1990s (Shen et al, 2016) has received inadequate scholarly attention in terms of their emic meaning-making of an international study sojourn (X. Xu et al, 2020b). This study reports findings on their conceptualizations of researcher identity that remains a core element of the study journey.…”