“We See the World Different Now”: Remapping Assumptions About International Student Adaptation

Abstract

Student mobility has become a key feature in the drive toward internationalization of higher education in the United States. International students contribute to the academic culture of universities, yet, often face isolation, discrimination, and experience difficulties transitioning to new environments. As a result, conational networks have formed to provide support to international students in foreign institutions. This article examines the different ways membership in a conational support group mediated international students’ experiences in a university campus. Contrary to theories that suggest insularity such as fortressing and cultural enclaves, our findings suggest that conational groups are sites of creative potential where group members are consistently forging complex assemblages between norms that are familiar and experiences that are new. Although significant personal transformations ensue as a result of these assemblages, they are occurring in a setting and a pace that is determined by group members and perceived to be safe. We argue that conational groups should not be conceived as static spaces that reproduce cultural norms, but rather as sites of contestation and cultural negotiation. Based on these findings, we question whether “integration” should be a guiding institutional logic for international student engagement, suggesting instead an approach based on the concept of “inclusion.”

Keywords

conational groups international students internationalization higher education inclusion integration

Introduction

Over the past several decades, higher education institutions in the United States have pursued “internationalization” as a strategy for maintaining relevance in a highly globalized world (Knight, 2004). One prominent feature of internationalization is student mobility, and more specifically the recruitment of international students. International students serve not only as a means of building a “stronger international and intercultural dimension to teaching and research” (Cudmore, 2005, p. 47), but also provide the added benefit of being an attractive source of revenue to institutions. In 2013, for instance, international students contributed approximately 24 billion dollars to the United States’ economy (Kim, Collins, Rennick, & Edens, 2017). Cantwell (2015) found that the added financial benefit of enrolling international students was especially significant in public research universities, where domestic in-state student tuition is partially subsidized by the state.

The pressure to maintain global relevance through internationalization coupled with the financial benefits of international student enrollment has led to a significant increase in the recruitment of international students by institutions of higher education. These efforts have resulted in the incremental growth in the number of international students attending universities abroad, especially in the United States. According to the Institute of International Education’s annual Open Doors Report, as of the 2016-2017 academic year, 1,078,822 million international students were enrolled in a U.S. higher education institution, a 3.4% increase from the previous year (Institute of International Education, 2017). The prevalence of international students in institutions of higher education in the United States and elsewhere has been accompanied by a growing amount of research aimed at understanding their lived experiences.

One dominant strand of the existing literature stresses the challenges international students experience as they attempt to adjust to a new academic and cultural setting. Researchers often invoke the concept of “culture shock” to explain the disorientation that international students feel when they encounter a culture different from their own. Bennett (1977), however, argues that the difficulties international students experience are similar to what people encounter in their everyday lives when confronted by moments of significant change. Therefore, while “culture shock” is often part of the international student experience, moving to a new environment also requires adjustments to more mundane aspects of daily life such as finding one’s way around independently, learning new institutional norms, and securing simple services.

Hotta and Ting-Toomey (2013) found that these feelings of anxiety and stress were highest for international students during the first several months upon arrival. Adelman (1988) attributes these feelings to international students’ inability to cognitively map cause-and-effect relationships in their new environments. These findings dispute the long-held belief that adjustment follows a “W” pattern that starts with feelings of elation and romance for the new environment and is followed by feelings of challenge and stress (Gu, Schweisfurth, & Day, 2010; Ward, Bochner, & Furhman, 2001).

The lack of cognitive coherence is not only a source of mental strain, but can also lead to significant health problems among international students. Acculturative stress is, therefore, the likely result of a nuanced combination of students lacking self-efficacy (see Bandura, 1982, 1995) in a foreign environment and institutions that are unable to provide the instrumental competence and emotional support students need (Major, 2005). In many cases, programs and opportunities for student support exist, but are either framed in ways that are not useful to students (Rose-Redwood & Rose-Redwood, 2013) or are part of a larger institutional habitus that may be hidden to students who are not familiar with the structures, opportunities, and ways to leverage existing programs (Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2010).

The disconnect between institutional provisions and international students’ needs has led to a growing interest in better understanding the different ways international students seek support and develop self-efficacy outside of institutional settings. Multiple studies have emphasized the importance of conational support groups in mitigating acculturative stress (Gomes, 2015; Hendrickson, Rosen, & Aune, 2011; Kim, 2001; Lee & Rice, 2007; Leong & Ward, 2000; Woolf, 2007). Major (2005), for instance, noticed that international students used conational groups for instrumental information purposes. She noted that international students often felt that the cultural remediation provided by conational groups (i.e., explicit information and tips on how to thrive in the new environment) was more useful than orientations provided by institutions. Similarly, McLachlan and Justice (2009) observed how international students sought conational support as a means of overcoming feelings of depression that resulted from the academic demands of their studies and the difficulties of communicating and interacting in a new cultural environment. Gomes, Berry, Alzougool, and Chang (2014) found that in addition to conational groups, international students establish a wide variety of support mechanisms, which include home-based social media networks.

Despite being a positive source of emotional and instrumental support, conational groups are consistently portrayed by administrator and media outlets as a barrier to international students’ engagement with mainstream university practices (Brown, 2009; Hotta & Ting-Toomey, 2013; Marangell, Arkoudis, & Baik, 2018). Chen and Ross (2015), for example, found that Chinese international students were often perceived as “meek, quiet, or stand-offish [and] unwilling to integrate into the ‘rest’ of campus life” (p. 177). The lack of engagement between international students and mainstream university practices has compelled numerous authors to suggest that institutions of higher education should take a more active role in facilitating international students’ cross-cultural adjustment (McLachlan & Justice, 2009; Ramsay, Jones, & Michelle, 2007; Rose-Redwood & Rose-Redwood, 2013). Such portrayals, however, are often situated within a deficit framework that presents conational networks as “having a set of identifiable problems rather than focusing on any inadequacies within the host community” (Lee & Rice, 2007, p. 388). These types of narratives are found in other fields of education where students on the margins are encouraged to adapt and integrate into existing systems, while there is little critique of the exclusionary nature of educational systems (Ainscow & Miles, 2009; Ryan, 2011). When international students seek conational support, there is often a staid narrative in higher education literature that portrays conational groups as insular, failing to acknowledge the different ways group membership may provide international students with the necessary social capital to engage with mainstream university practices (Glass & Gesing, 2018). Such practices may consciously or unconsciously exclude international students.

Heeding Adelman’s (1988) advice that more research on international students should engage with group-level analysis, this study focuses on a conational group of Brazilian graduate students and postdoctoral researchers enrolled in a large Midwestern public university in the United States. By focusing on graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, this study attempts to deviate from the larger corpus of international student research, which is almost exclusively centered on the undergraduate experience (Gardner & Barnes, 2007). Often ignored, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers experience similar challenges adapting to a new educational and social environment, albeit without the same formal induction and follow-up processes available to undergraduate students (Golde, 2005). Focusing on this study sample we pose two overarching research questions:

Research Question 1: Why do international graduate students and postdoctoral researchers seek membership in conational groups?

Research Question 2: In what ways do conational groups assist or inhibit their cultural and academic adjustments?

Although our original goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the mediating role of conational groups, our findings suggest that in-group dynamics cannot be understood as being apart from institutional practices. Contrary to concepts that suggest insularity, such as fortressing and cultural enclaves (Chen & Ross, 2015; Sobre-Denton, 2011), conational groups are sites of creative potential where group members are consistently forging complex assemblages between norms that are familiar and experiences that are new. Although significant personal transformations ensue as a result of these assemblages, they are occurring in a setting and a pace that is determined by group members and perceived to be safe. We argue that conational groups should not be conceived as static spaces that reproduce cultural norms, but rather as sites of contestation and cultural negotiation. Based on these findings, we question whether existing models premised on a logic of “integration” should continue guiding how universities engage their international student body. Drawing on Ainscow and Miles’s (2009) understanding of “inclusion,” we stress the importance of an approach that fluidly recognizes and promotes the participation of diverse students in ways that are meaningful to both the institution and the students themselves. In the context of this study, this entails not only acknowledging the dynamism of conational groups, but also recognizing the opportunities for potential learning these groups may provide for the broader campus.

Method

The study emerged from an informal conversation with a visiting scholar in a large Midwestern public university in the United States about the perceived lack of institutional support international students received regarding their cultural and academic adjustment. The scholar, who was originally from Brazil, indicated that most of the support she received was from a large group of Brazilian graduate students who were also enrolled in the university. This conational group met informally, but on a consistent basis. Membership in the group ebbed and flowed each year, but on average, about 15 people were present at any particular informal gathering, with pods of students who met more frequently for social events. After obtaining ethical approval from the university’s institutional review board, the research team scheduled a meeting to gauge group members’ interest in participating in the study.

During this introductory meeting the researchers provided an overview of the premise of the study, explaining how conational groups fit into the broader phenomenon of internationalization of higher education. Of a total of 15 group members present, 10 agreed to be interviewed for the study. All participants were Brazilian and were either graduate students or postdoctoral researchers working in the field of natural sciences. The group represented a significant proportion of the Brazilian graduate and professional enrollment at the university, which consisted of 35 individuals in total.

Through their affiliation to the university, all participants were provided a wide variety of induction opportunities upon arrival. These included cultural and logistical orientations sponsored by the university’s central international unit, and curricular and programmatic orientations provided by the university’s academic unit. In addition, ongoing opportunities to connect with other international students existed, but did not seem to be utilized by our participants. Finally, walk-in advising, and counseling services were available to all participants. Table 1 provides a demographic breakdown of the participants.

Table 1.

Interviewee Profiles (All Pseudonyms).

Name	Gender	Type of study/employment	Program	Years in the United States
Maria	Female	Graduate student	Plant ecology	5
Diego	Male	Graduate student	Chemistry	4
Luiz	Male	Graduate student	Chemical engineering	4
Fabio	Male	Graduate student	Entomology	3
Guilherme	Male	Graduate student	Entomology	3
Sergio	Male	Postdoctoral researcher	Plant biology	3
Carolina	Female	Postdoctoral researcher	Plant biology	3
Francisco	Male	Graduate student	Microbiology	2
Julia	Female	Graduate student	Pharmacology	1
Fernanda	Female	Graduate student	Veterinary medicine	1

Interviews were semistructured and lasted anywhere between 30 and 80 min. Questions focused on the participants’ background experiences prior to moving to the United States, their experiences as graduate students or postdoctoral researchers at the large public university, and their involvement with the conational group. Questions were open-ended, nonjudgmental, and aimed at allowing “unanticipated statements and stories to emerge” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 26). Most interviews took place in a coffee shop the members of the conational group often visited. Care was taken to ensure our Portuguese-speaking research team member interviewed group members who asked to be interviewed in Portuguese or a combination of English and Portuguese. To ensure accuracy, an external agency specializing in bilingual interview transcription was hired and provided the research team with printed transcripts of interviews. All interviews took place over a 4-month period during the fall of 2016. Throughout the 4-month period, analytical memos were written to preserve insights that could later inform coding and analysis.

Consistent with a grounded theory approach (Corbin & Straus, 2008), data analysis began concurrently with data collection through team meetings and discussions of interview notes. Interview transcripts were initially coded through a close reading of the text. Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014) define codes as “labels that assign symbolic meaning to the descriptive or inferential information compiled in a study” (p. 71). Based on this definition, coding was accomplished through a line-by-line reading of the transcript, with in vivo descriptors being the primary approach to assigning labels to codes. Through initial coding, 27 categories were established, but were subsequently reduced to 14 categories. For example, five of the 27 categories were labeled “Relief,” “Assurance,” “Comfort,” “Safe Place,” and “Family.” Although there were nuanced differences between these five different categories, all of them indicated an understanding that the conational group provided a space in which individuals did not have to be vigilant of how they behaved, and therefore, could act more authentically. These categories were, therefore, merged and given the overarching descriptor of “behaving authentically.” As suggested by Corbin and Straus (2008), theoretical codes were then developed to establish the relationship between the categories. Throughout the analysis process, emerging findings were periodically discussed with a key informant. These discussions helped inform the analysis process and also served as a means of improving the reliability of the findings.

Findings

The conational group was composed of a wide variety of individuals who sought membership for diverse reasons. Most responses, however, cohered with the literature on undergraduate international students who viewed conational groups as being crucial in their attempts to adapt to a new cultural and academic setting. Participants identified limited proficiency in English and the lack of institutional support as the two primary barriers to their adaptation. For example, Francisco described how limited English proficiency directly influenced his ability to communicate with his officemates. Although he felt comfortable with an academically oriented form of English, he was uncomfortable with using English as a means of expressing his own opinions. When discussing his social interactions with his officemates, he asserted,

Of course, I had some classmates, some officemates that I spent some time with, but it wasn’t the same—I wasn’t feeling very comfortable to hang out with them and feel comfortable, especially because of the language

Language was not only viewed as a barrier to expression; it was also a source of mental stress and strain. Participants referred to speaking in English as being exhausting, leading them to desire some form of mental repose. When Maria first arrived, she lived with a Brazilian roommate. When discussing her experience with the English language, she stated,

In the beginning, it was very hard—speaking English is a mental activity, so I remember that I used to arrive home with this huge headache, and I was like, “Oh, I cannot deal with this anymore.” He was my roommate in the first two years here, and we had this deal that we should talk in English as much as we could because we had to improve our English, and if we just spoke in Portuguese, that would not be good for fast improvement. But, we couldn’t handle it, because we would get home and it would be, “No, forget our deal, let’s speak in Portuguese because my head is killing me.”

Feelings of social isolation and mental strain that emerged from a linguistic barrier were exacerbated by institutional factors. Participants did not believe that the institution fostered a welcoming environment or provided adequate forms of support. Throughout the interviews, most participants expressed that unclear academic expectations, limited advisor support, and a competitive departmental culture were not only sources of frustration, but also discouraged them from developing personal relationships with other members of their department. Carolina shared an incident that exemplified this sentiment. During her first semester, she was required to operate a machine in her laboratory, which she was unfamiliar with. Upon requesting assistance from her advisor, she was referred to a classmate who had substantial experience with the machine. Carolina describes the interaction with this classmate as follows:

[My advisor asked] his PhD students to help me and teach me something about the machine that I need to work, but she—the girls that know about the machine, for example, always came to teach me super hurry and then teach me like 30 minutes or less, and ask me, oh, do you understand? If you don’t understand, send me email, bye, I don’t have time to, to help you more or to teach you, and then like I still afraid about these because people here, I don’t know if they are so competitive or they don’t want to teach us the right, the right way to do it or I don’t know.

Fernanda provides a similar take on what is believed to be an unwelcoming departmental culture. She describes her interactions with her classmates as being strictly professional and colored by feelings of competition. These feelings were most acute during her interactions with host-country national students.

I feel that they are—highly competitive. They are not very open to close relationships—and sometimes I feel that they think that we—not Brazilians, we foreign people—are kind of a threat.

A seemingly natural place for international students to develop new relationships is the classroom. However, this group described scenarios where host national students were more interested in completing tasks in a competitive environment than in cultivating relationships. In many ways, the conational group emerges as a response to these frustrations. Not only is it a space where linguistic barriers are absent, but also it provides the opportunity for the participants to cultivate relationships that are not competitive or premised on professional work. Participants often described the group as a form of escape; a means of getting away from the daily life of a university graduate student. The idea of escape is most evident in Luiz’s description of his interactions with the group, which he describes as being a means of “getting away from my daily life concerns and everything else.” Similarly, Fernanda describes her interactions as allowing her to “think about something else other than work.”

In addition to providing an escape from university life, participants also referred to the group as being a space in which they could be at ease to disclose personal information without the fear of being judged. Fernanda, for example, described the group as a space in which she did not have to be vigilant of what she either said or did. Diego, on the contrary, believed that the ability to behave authentically provided him much-needed emotional relief. While discussing some of the difficulties he initially experienced as a doctoral student living in a new country, he stated,

I think from the moment that you start to—start for yourself, your problems, the problems sometime can get—seem like they are bigger than they really are. So, to have somebody that you can unload those things, and have an honest conversation, is really good in that sense.

Maria echoes this sentiment by stating that the group made her feel safe to “put my vulnerabilities—some of my vulnerabilities—to the group, and I’m comfortable knowing that they will help me as much as they can.”

It is well documented (Brown, 2009; Cheng, Leong, & Geist, 1993; Mori, 2000) that international students provide emotional support to one another. Support, however, is often framed as an antidote to emotional trauma. The benefit for this group seems to be less about notions of peer counseling and more about providing an emotional, cultural, and linguistic safe space that allows students to be relaxed in an otherwise high-stress environment. Similar to concepts of the Danish hygge or the Portuguese word aconchego, a salient feature of this group was the relaxedness experienced by members. Such relaxation was cultivated by the cultural context, language, and freedom to joke, hug, laugh, and eat familiar foods. The group was arguably a reproduction of Brazilian extended family life, but different because the external environment for the students was a U.S. higher education institution. Julia describes the coziness of the group and what this meant for her.

And so it’s nice to have people to go out, to think about something else other than work, and talk about things that are from your home country that they understand. Right? And in your own language, it’s easier to express your feelings too. . . I feel more comfortable. We laugh more compared to the other groups. The conversations are more funny, we make more groups with each other, amongst each other. So I feel more relaxed with them than with the others. Yeah, it’s different. I feel much more comfortable. I feel like I can say anything.

In a competitive graduate education environment, the luxury of “saying anything” is risky. The risks of “getting it wrong” either academically or socially may run higher for international students who many times are required to communicate in a nonnative language. Maria described this phenomenon as having to constantly be “vigilant.” In turn, the group was often described as being a “family.” This metaphor was frequently used in interviews and potentially represented a safe space to which students could return after working in a challenging environment. It likely further filled a gap for students who, for many, were unaccustomed to living without family support. When describing the group, Carolina said,

I think that they make my life more cozy because we understand each other’s customs. . . Yeah, our culture. It’s easy to, to talk with person that understand you—your feeling like, yeah, I think that they are like brothers and sisters for me.

Although participants were grateful of what the group afforded them during their academic and cultural transitions, they also felt that membership in the group limited their ability and desire to interact with individuals who were not group members. Fernanda exemplified this stance when she stated,

I think that it’s more comfortable to be with people from the same country. Sometimes it’s not very good for us because we—should try other relationships, too. But, it’s cultural—aspects of us make us more—how can I say it? Naked? So, one side, it’s more comfortable; it’s a comfort zone that we sometimes don’t wanna go out.

Group membership seemed to inadvertently limit the creation of significant social bonds with nongroup members. Few participants claimed to have other social groups or to have formed significant bonds outside of the confines of the group. When asked if she was part of any other group—either social or academic—Maria responded by stating

A group? No. This is a very short answer. I have a few people outside—I can count on one hand—that I can reach out to that are not a group. No, definitely not. This is my experience. Because I’m not that connected—you mentioned before how this group makes you connected with your program, your department—in my academic environment, I don’t feel like I have a strong connection because I don’t feel that much connected with my program. So, my contact with people, my peers, and my colleagues in my program is very brief.

There is a common assumption that national and cultural enclaves may inhibit the possibility of transformative experiences (Chen & Ross, 2015). However, despite the limited contact with nongroup members, participants consistently expressed that they felt significant personal changes, either in professional outlook or even in their conceptions of self. For example, the experience of being an international student made Maria reconsider whether she wanted to continue pursuing a doctorate in the natural sciences. Rather, she has become increasingly interested in better understanding how diversity shapes both teaching and learning.

I got really interested in higher education and how diversity, for example, shapes the teaching and learning experience in the classroom, and how instructors can take advantage of this diversity and improve the learning experience of students.

Participants also discussed that while the conational group is perceived as being homogeneous, the interactions with group members differed significantly from what they had previously been accustomed to. This led to the development of new interests and a sense of personal change. Julia describes this process when she states

Sometimes I think that because they have this experience abroad, it makes a part of you richer or they are exposed to other problems and other situations that make them—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. But I feel a difference from Brazil. Here they have a background and they think some stuff that are more good quality than my friends in Brazil. It’s good to get out of your comfort zone, right? To learn more. So, I think that’s what we have in common here that some of my friends in Brazil don’t experience before.

While Julia describes how experiences of discomfort can lead to the development of new interests, Guilherme discusses how his own understandings of critical contemporary issues have changed as a result of his conversations with group members. He states,

So we have at least once a month—actually, it’s usually more than once a month—we have dinner or lunch and we discuss and we discuss informally things that come to our minds. For instance, our president was impeached and we discussed what we could do to make Brazil better. And we discuss ideas and we have things that we agree that here are better and we discuss even the economy and the politics in the U.S. like who should we support and what are the effects on our lives if someone wins. So always we discuss and we try to talk about different things. Like [Matheus] always bring ideas about the sexual (orientation)—to defend that people have equal rights independent of their sexual (orientation)—that’s always brought to us. And usually didn’t talk about that in Brazil and here we always discuss that. And probably it affected me as I have a different mind about the rights of people. . . because of these conversations with people like [Matheus].

Guilherme’s story of critical dialogue and transformation is framed as being personally enriching. He also, however, describes the dilemmas and unexpected challenges it poses.

I think that is a big challenge because we are not Americans and we are not the Brazilians that we used to be. So, we still have a hard time to reconcile things. We see the world different now. We don’t do the same things that we did and we don’t think that many things that our friends or our friends that are still in Brazil are doing are fine anymore.

These personal changes are portrayed as positive, but as also creating new and unexpected challenges. Participants, nevertheless, viewed these changes as being uniformly experienced, which helped further solidify the level affinity among group members.

Discussion

U.S. universities have long enjoyed the economic, academic, and diversity benefits of international students on their campuses. In some cases, conational group incidence is so large that students can find ways to engage socially with one another on a regular basis. Students join conational groups for a variety of reasons, including the opportunity to speak a home language, glean advice from others, share humor, and experience emotional support. Chen and Ross (2015) note that such groupings can be explained by enclave theory, but that the theory itself may have a pejorative tone, noting that “U.S. media and university administrators often view the. . . enclave as a segregated space for students within their closed niche” (p. 172; see also Stevens, 2012).

The findings from this study provide a more complex depiction of conational group dynamics. Consistent with the underlining assumptions of enclave theory, participants did not cultivate significant social bonds with nongroup members. Feelings of comfort within the group and inadequacy outside of the group precluded participants from seeking nongroup interactions. Despite this perceived insularity, participants consistently discussed how their experiences abroad were both professionally and personally transformative. These transformations are not perceived as being momentary reactions to a new context, but as enduring. Guilherme, for instance, emphasizes this stance when she stated that having an experience abroad, we see the world different now.

The ongoing theme of transformation troubles common depictions of conational groups as static spaces that reproduce the cultural norms of its members. The group was often portrayed as a space in which participants shared the diverse and at times frustrating experiences they were having within the institution. While participants were emphatic about the cathartic importance of disclosing their experiences to the group, they also provided narratives of how critical dialogue inspired by institutional experiences led to the creation of new and transformative understandings. Feelings of personal transformation were widespread. Many of the study’s participants, however, had difficulty articulating what these transformations entailed. Julia provided a common response to the theme of personal transformation when she stated “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. But I feel a difference from Brazil.”

The personal transformations described by the study’s participants were inspired by institutional experiences, but were mediated through group discussions. As Guilherme explained, these discussions provided group members the opportunity to process new ideas and connect them to the norms and values they were accustomed to while living in Brazil. Group discussions allowed participants to ascribe meaning to experience in a setting that was perceived to be safe and at a pace of their choosing. Through group discussions, participants were able to express themselves freely, unimpeded by the fear of saying something that would be deemed socially or academically inappropriate.

Throughout the interviews, institutional experiences were routinely described as being central to group interactions and discussions. Despite the centrality of institutional experiences for in-group dynamics, conational groups are either barely visible to the larger institution or are routinely portrayed as being isolated from mainstream campus culture. Chen and Ross (2015) provide some insight as to why these portrayals occur. They argue that institutions consciously or unconsciously expect students to assimilate into the mainstream or dominant campus culture. Such expectations are followed by programs designed to “help” international students integrate on campus. These programs usually expect individuals to fit within existing institutional practices. Engagement occurring outside of institutionally devised programs often remains unrecognized, leading to a deficit account of conational groups.

Reay et al. (2010) add that integrative approaches premised on the assumption that international students should assimilate to mainstream campus culture are not only premised on a deficit account of conational groups, but also reflect more widespread structural forms of marginalization. Echoed in other critical accounts of international student experiences (Lee & Rice, 2007; Thomas, 2002), integrative approaches are argued as being underlined by both values and practices that may either implicitly or explicitly promote norms that are nativist, monolingual, and homogeneous. As a result, students who do not fit within such visions of value are expected to assimilate to dominant ways of knowing.

Contrary to deficit accounts, which suggest insularity, the findings from this study highlight the dynamism of conational groups where participants are consistently drawing on institutional experience in the effort to forge new understandings. Rather than trying to discourage such groupings, institutions may find that organic conational groups serve as a source of additional support for international students and of potential learning for the broader campus. Furthermore, collective voices of conational groups may provide valuable insights on campus climate, services, and academic practices. Indeed, as Glass and Gesing (2018) argue, greater engagement with conational groups enable longer lasting relationships with international student alumni, which may even assist in recruitment and development initiatives. However, to leverage the potential benefits of conational groups, there must be a shift in the current logic underlying international student engagement. Instead of focusing on integrating international students into mainstream campus culture, we believe that an approach based on the concept of inclusion provides a potentially generative alternative.

In higher education, the concept of inclusion is often used to describe the systems and practices devised to support students with disabilities (Moriña, 2016). The existing literature on inclusive education often characterizes the approach as consisting of two central tenets. First, inclusion in education is conceived as being an ongoing process of improving educational practices for learners with different needs (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2016). Second, inclusion is an approach to transforming education systems to be more responsive to the diversity of the students present (Ainscow & Miles, 2009). In many ways, inclusion is the antithesis of integration. In an inclusive system, institutions are expected to respond to the needs of the students. Whereas in an integration-focused system, students are expected to respond and assimilate into the institution. More importantly, inclusive approaches aim to be responsive and structurally adjust to diversity within, rather than pathologize and create subsystems for students who do not learn, speak, or act in normative ways (Ainscow, 2005).

We believe that the central tenets underlining an inclusive approach may be applied to all populations, including international students. An inclusive approach begins with a critical examination troubling dominant constructions of campus life. By troubling these dominant constructions, institutions may become better suited to acknowledge the multiple ways students engage with campus life and recognize the diverse needs that may emerge as a result of these engagements. Rather than being perceived as an impediment toward international student integration, under an inclusive framework, conational support groups become an additional mechanism of support, one that often operates in conjunction with those already provided by institutions of higher education.

Conclusion

This case study focused on the experiences of members of a self-organized group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in a large urban campus in the Midwest of the United States. Although findings from this microexample may not generalize across all settings and to all students, it provides a glimpse into the importance of conational groups as a support mechanism and learning conduit in postsecondary education. As a result of our findings, we argue that postsecondary institutions may benefit from reframing current integrative discourses about international students and the ways in which they support one another.

Chen and Ross (2015) argue that “there is not one way for students to engage in life and learning” (p. 177). Recognizing the value of conational social and learning groups is imperative to creating more inclusive campuses. Inclusive approaches to higher education may mean a rethinking of how international students are expected to engage on campus. Far from isolative, conational groups provide students an opportunity for meaningful engagement and potential personal transformation. Implications for institutions lie in both a general acceptance and encouragement of such groupings as vital sources of support for international students. Rather than trying to discourage such groupings, institutions may find that organic, plural groupings of students serve as a source of support for international students and potential learning for the broader campus. Collective voices of conational groups may provide valuable insights on campus climate, services, and academic practices. At the same time, individual voices within conational groups remind institutional offices that there is great heterogeneity in both international student populations and particular conational groups. Such diversity represents one of the key aspirations for universities as they seek to become more global in nature (Killick, 2018; Knight, 2015).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Tiago Bittencourt is a PhD candidate in Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota. Among his research interests are the internationalization of education, educational policy borrowing and social reproduction theory.

Christopher Johnstone is an assistant professor of Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on inclusive outcomes in education, internationalization of higher education, and international development. He currently serves as the faculty coordinator for the university’s Leadership in International and Intercultural Education low-residency PhD program for international educators.

Millicent Adjei is director of Diversity and International Programs at Ashesi University, where she spearheads the University’s internationalization, diversity and inclusion initiatives. As a scholar-practitioner, her work focuses on using indigenous theories to understand the post-secondary educational experiences of first-generation, international, and low-income students and designing interventions to support their success. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota.

Laura Seithers is a PhD candidate in Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the internationalization of higher education, women’s transnational mobility, and narrative inquiry.

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