international education campusreview. com. au
A welcome plan for students
We need a national strategy to ensure international students are comfortably integrating into our culture and way of life.
By Phil Honeywood
According to the OECD, approximately five million young people are currently studying outside of their home country. By 2025 this figure is set to rise to seven million.
Each of these students has particular motivations for venturing abroad. Many are seeking“ global citizenship attributes” or to better themselves academically and become more employable. Others carry with them the weight of family expectations and the need to find paid employment to supplement their living costs. Some are desperate to leave behind difficult personal and even mental health situations.
If Australia is to continue as one of the world’ s top five study destination nations, then it may well be time to do a serious stocktake of the quality and extent of support services for student resilience we have in place.
When the New Colombo Plan, Australia’ s signature undergraduate student mobility scholarship program, was being designed, there was a strong push to place individual Australian students into separate cities and universities throughout the Indo‐Pacific region. The initial concept was that, forced to rely on themselves, our students would have a much more characterbuilding mobility experience. Fortunately, a different approach was adopted, and it was agreed that NCP students would study abroad primarily in small cohorts. The argument here was that, as a small group, they could provide support for one another and thereby better overcome the cultural, language and emotional challenges that often arise from living overseas.
The importance of peer support is reflected in the success of initiatives for domestic students such as the“ buddy bench” at our government schools. This is a simple solution enabling students experiencing loneliness to self-identify so that other students know when to reach out and talk to them.
Unfortunately, for international students, more work needs to be done in finding solutions to help them develop strong friendship groups, a sense of belonging and mutual support. For instance, when they arrive at our international airports, an International Student Welcome Desk is often manned by volunteer fellow students, but after the initial welcome, all too often they find themselves very much on their own.
The accommodation option that has, in most cases, been chosen for them pre-arrival can sometimes set the parameters for their entire experience. If they are placed in a share house with students from their own culture, this may provide them with great peer support. Conversely, they may also find that their English language goes backwards and their life in a monocultural bubble subsequently translates into poor academic, intercultural competency and employability outcomes. This situation leads to its own stresses. In equal measure, those students who find themselves living in a studio apartment or boarding house-style room may soon find that their sense of social isolation outweighs any perceived benefit of living independently.
Then, when they commence their studies in this strange land, they can quickly discover another type of disconnection. Getting to know other students on large modern university campuses is difficult, particularly when attending lectures in crowded auditoriums or not being entirely understood in attempting to articulate an idea in a small group tutorial. They may also find entirely new approaches to teaching and learning with increased emphasis on critical thinking, enquiry and participation difficult to navigate.
Given the many challenges our international students face, their coping mechanisms may well begin to break down. If that occurs, early intervention is crucial, but if they do not belong to a cohort,
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