This section discusses cultural discourses and pedagogic identities. These two concepts are used to theorise how discourses maybe implicated in international students’ experiences of education. It will be recalled that the concept of discourse is defined in line with Fairclough (cf. 1992) as language use as a form of social practice in that they establish relationships between people.
Cultural discourses
In the studies reviewed in Chapter Two, cultural difference was understood as the defining experience of international students. In those studies, it was the students’ culture that was said to have affected their learning, adaptation and reasons for accessing an international education. In addition, culture was used to suggest that
students might be a curriculum resource to instruct about international as opposed to national perspectives in the institution. The emphasis on culture suggested that it would be significant in the accounts of experiences that Eastern Asian students would have in the institution. As a result of the emphasis on culture in previous studies of international students, the concept was incorporated into the research problem guiding this dissertation.
The preceding sections of this chapter discussed studies that problematised the emphasis on culture. These studies argued that culture is a discourse and, as a result, it positions individuals in ways that are often taken for granted. The studies reviewed in the earlier section of this chapter often utilised Appadurai’s (1996) notion of flows in their theoretical framework to point out the limitations of fixed, static
notions of cultural identity (cf. Singh and Doherty, 2004; Kettle, 2005; 2010), As the dissertation is concerned with experiences in the particular context of Australian schooling, it draws on Appadurai’s (1993) concept of cultural discourses rather than
cultural flows. The concept is used to examine how culture is used to account for the
experiences of Eastern Asian students. Of course, cultural discourses are not static, and are likely to shift, change and flow.
Appadurai (1993) suggested that cultural discourses are constructed around ethnicities that appear as natural labels. He examined how allegiances are
developed that encourage individuals to align themselves with a wider, discursively constructed nation that is separate to, and bigger than, the family, the tribe, the caste or the region. Appadurai (1993) stated that “nations, especially in multiethnic settings, are tenuous collective projects, not eternal natural facts” and that apparently natural labels of nationality “create a false divide between the artificiality of the nation and those facts they falsely projected as primordial – tribe, family, region” (p. 414). Thus,
nations are created out of discourses that construct similarities between disparate people for the purpose of keeping these people together. Differences are constructed for those people who are outside the nation.
Appadurai (1993) argued that discourses of nation and national subject are collective cultural products. As a result, a national subject needs to learn the cultural discourse of their nation in order to construct their cultural identity as a national. Appadurai (1993) cited Habermas (1989) and Calhoun (1992) to argue that “modern nationalisms involve … reading books, pamphlets, newspapers, maps, and other modern texts together” (p. 414). The consumption of these cultural products is one of the means through which national discourses are learned. Thus, the modern nation-
state is less a product of “natural facts – such as language, blood, soil, and race”
(Appadurai, 1993, p. 414) than it is a cultural product constructed through discourses of national culture. For Appadurai (1993), apparently natural labels, such as
Australian or Eastern Asian, are used to draw people into a national or supranational
identification. Identification refers to the ways that individuals identify with cultural
texts. Individuals are drawn into an association with a cultural discourse through media and other texts that encourage the reader to adopt a particular subject position.
A national identification positions individuals within discourses of an individual nation while a supranational identification positions individuals within regional discourses or discourses associated with multiple nations. Identification with a nationality involves those who choose the label, those who are forced into the label and still others who use the label to tidy “messy problems of language and history, race and belief” (Appadurai, 1993, p. 415). As a result, “there are few forms of popular consciousness and subaltern agency that are, in regard to ethnic
mobilization, free of the thought forms and political fields produced by the actions and discourses of nation-states” (Appadurai, 1993, p. 415). Labels, consciousness and ethnic mobilisations form the core of discourses that are used to position individuals into cultural identities.
In recent work that has been concerned with identification, Coupland (2010) examined how identification was one part of the process of positioning individuals in discourse as the other. He argued that, in addition to identification, social practices involved production (of discourses) and representation. In his work on the other, Coupland examined representation as a social phenomenon in the sense that "decisions taken on how we represent ourselves will be taken in relation to how others represent themselves, and how each party may represent the other ... Self representation and other representation can be mutually influencing processes" (2010, p. 243). Other recent studies have used the term to examine New Labour's education policy (cf. Mulderrig, 2011) and gay identities (cf. Levon, 2010).
Further, the identification with a particular supranational or national discourse may be either voluntary or involuntary. A voluntary identification with a discourse involves reflexive positioning. Davis and Harré (1999) argued that reflexive
positioning involves “imaginatively positioning oneself as if one belongs in one
category and not the other” (p. 36). The voluntary identification with a national discourse would suggest that an agent actively chose to position themselves within discourses of that nation state. Thus, cultural discourses would be used to construct their experiences.
Hall (1997) takes this notion further by discussing the double play of a subject. He argues that subjects are produced through discourses that personify forms of
knowledge produced by the discourse but also through the discourse producing a place for that subject. For example any discourse of the Asian learner produces identities for Asian learners in Western education while simultaneously constructing their place in institutions. In addition, because identities emerge through what Hall (1997) terms modalities of power, they are constructed around differences and exclusions rather than through unities or sameness that are traditionally associated with a notion of identity.
Other studies have used the idea of modalities of power to examine
experiences of immigration (cf. Ngo, 2008; Silva, 2010), constructing identities (cf. St Louis, 2009) and classroom experiences of racism among non-white students
(Sharma, 2010). Sharma (2010) argues that modalities of power in classrooms make discussing and addressing issues of race problematic. Even more problematic is the exercise of modalities of power that exclude in immigration policy (Silva, 2010). Silva (2010) argues that because the state reinscribes identification and excludes those who are deemed to be a threat, identification and position are used to construct identities as the dangerous other.
Appadurai argued that there is an inherent violence in these associations because they may not adequately represent the cultural discourses that individuals inculcate. Moreover, the discourses through which individuals position themselves and their identity may change over time. For example, the increasing movements among people, such as international students, may result in translocal loyalties or
Trojan nationalisms. Translocal loyalties involve an imagined link between the place
of origin and the place of migration (Appadurai, 1993). Trojan nationalisms “contain transnational, subnational links and, more generally, nonnational identities and aspirations” (Appadurai, 1993, p. 417). Cultural identities and loyalties are the
products of a collective imagination of specific nation states and employ many cultural discourses and labels associated with individual nations. Loyalties and nationalisms outside of nation states, such as Trojan nationalisms and translocal loyalties, reflect “the anxieties attendant on the search for nonterritorial principles of solidarity” (Appadurai, 1993, p. 417). Thus, Trojan nationalisms and translocal loyalties are inter- and intra-national identities that reflect the experience of diasporas.
Appadurai (1993) defined diaspora as a community of individuals that utilises the cultural discourse of several nation states. He stated that, “in the postnational world that we see emerging, diaspora runs with, and not against, the grain of identity, movement and reproduction” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 171). While nation states are the cultural spaces into which diasporas must incorporate themselves, the culture of the nation state, which is imagined through discourses of cultural difference, may make it difficult for diasporas to find a place within the nation (Appadurai, 1996). The difficulty in finding a place caused by the multiple cultural discourses that diasporas use to position themselves may also be true of international students studying in Australian schools. Data analysis will examine whether multiple cultural discourses are used by staff and students to position international students in the school and thus account for their experiences of education.
Appadurai (1996) argued that cultural discourses and diasporas are both the work of imaginations drawn from a “specific, historically situated play of public and group opinions about the past” (p. 146). The term imaginations was used by
Appadurai (1990) to refer to three major streams of thought, namely: (a) the idea of images, especially those that are mechanically produced (this refers to mechanically produced in the sense of the Marxist Frankfurt School); (b) the notion of an imagined
community; and (c) the constructed landscape of aspirations reflected through images (this refers to the French imaginaire). Imagination has become a social
practice that, in the sense that Appadurai (1990) described, has become ‘work’, so
that it is no longer mere fantasy, escape, elite pastime or contemplation. Rather, imagination is “now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order” (Appadurai, 1990, p. 5).
According to Appadurai (1990; 1993; 1996), cultural discourses work with imaginations to divide things and people into groups. As a result, cultural discourses construct cultural differences along a hierarchy so that the other is “simultaneously different and inferior” (Abu-Lughod, 2006, p. 161). In line with Appadurai’s (1990) concept of imagination, the other is an imagined category that is constructed through discourses of difference. Consequently, Appadurai (1996) argued that culture is a “pervasive dimension of human discourse” (p. 13) that both exploits and naturalises difference to generate diverse conceptions of group identity. Cultural difference is constructed using cultural discourses that: (a) imagine difference; (b) naturalise difference; and (c) construct group identities based on difference. It may be that teachers and students in the Australian school imagine and naturalise cultural differences between Eastern Asian and Australian students.
Hall (1997) argued, in much the same terms as Appadurai (1993; 1996), that cultural meaning and identity are produced at several different sites, and are
circulated through many different practices and processes. Cultural discourses offer “a sense of identity, of who we are and with whom we ‘belong’ – so it is tied up with questions of how culture is used to mark out and maintain identity” (Hall, 1997, p. 3). Further, just as Appadurai (1993; 1996) argued, Hall (1997) stated that cultural discourses construct identities through the marking of difference as well as the
production, consumption and regulation of social conduct. The production of culture and identity are not fixed, rather they depend on representation of national as well as individual signs (Hall, 1997).
Accordingly, identity is not found but is produced, so that it is not so much an “identity grounded in archaeology, but in the retelling of the past” (Hall, 2003, p. 235). Thus, identity and cultural discourses inform each other. Both identity and cultural discourses are based on representations of national signs and, as a result, are subject to change and development. Individuals choose to position themselves, and are positioned by others, within discourses. These discourses may be based on representations of national discourses in much the same terms as essentialised discourses described earlier in this chapter. For example essentialist views of culture position individuals who share a geographic region as having the same culture.
Similarly, Hall (1997, p. 287) argued that identity, like culture, is fluid. As such, identity is never a finished thing, it comes not from a “fullness of identity which is already inside us as individuals” rather it is a “lack of wholeness which is ‘filled’ from
outside us, by the ways we imagine ourselves to be seen by others” (p. 287). He
argued that identity is not just about sameness but also about difference. Hall (1997) argued, in line with Appadurai (1993; 1996), that cultural identity is an ongoing process of identification. Moreover, it is “matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’ … it belongs to the future as well as to the past” (Hall, 2003, p. 236).
To sum up this section, this dissertation will examine how accounts of staff and students use discourses of culture to position Eastern Asian international students' experiences of Australian schooling. Cultural discourses constructed around what appear to be natural labels create divisions between people (Appadurai, 1993). These divisions mark out and maintain identities through defining who we are and
with whom we belong (Hall, 1993). The next section of this chapter focuses on pedagogic identities. It provides a macro-level theoretical language to describe students’ experiences of culture in Australian schools.