Understanding and Supporting the Confucian Heritage Culture International Students in Victorian Independent Schools: A Perspective of School Leaders

Hongzhi Zhang,Philip Wing Keung Chan

doi:10.3390/socsci10100377

Abstract

Greater demand for quality post-secondary education has been seen in Asia, particularly in China. Many Western countries have seen a rise in international education. Increasingly, schools in Australia are embracing internationalisation policies, leading to an increase in international student enrolment before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. International students in school education are something of a little-understood issue for educational scholars, policy makers and the general public. Leadership is seen as pivotal in the success of schools’ internationalisation program. By applying a mixed-method approach to collect data from an online Qualtrics survey and semi-structured interviews with independent school leaders in Australia, this paper reports how school leaders understand Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) international students’ linguistic, cultural and educational contributions to schools, and their experience in supporting the international students to adapt into the new educational environments through various programs and strategies. This article also advocates that it is vital to respect the international students’ educational subjectivities generated in their “home” countries when providing support programs to help them engage with new educational contexts in “host” nations.

Highlights

Rising living standards in Asia, and especially in China, have fuelled an unprecedented demand for quality tertiary education (Wade 2018)
From the literature which finds Western educators viewing their international students through a Western lens, which has inhibited the process of internationalisation (Singh 2009), we found that school leaders at Victorian independent schools have open-minded views about different cultural, intellectual, academic paradigms and learning approaches
The findings of this study indicate that, in contrast to those scholars and educators using a Western lens to view international students as “problematic” in their adaptation to the “host” education system, school leaders in Victorian independent schools positively recognized and acknowledged their contributions

Summary

Introduction

Rising living standards in Asia, and especially in China, have fuelled an unprecedented demand for quality tertiary education (Wade 2018). This has led to an international education boom in many Western countries. While a large proportion of international students are enrolled in higher education, schools in Australia have been increasingly adopting policies of internationalisation, leading to the growing enrolment of international students (DET 2018). The independent schools enrol roughly 30 percent of 25,564 international students in Australia (Independent School Australia 2019). In Victoria, there are 214 independent schools with 13,750 Full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers, 7222 FTE administrative and support staff and 147,006 FTE students in 2019 (Independent Schools Australia 2020a)

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion