Doing Difference Differently: Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances

Doing Difference Differently

Doing Difference Differently

Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances

Zhaozhe Wang

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Logan

© 2024 by University Press of Colorado

Published by Utah State University Press

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The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Colorado, University of Denver, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-1-64642-642-3 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64642-643-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-64642-644-7 (ebook)

https://doi.org/10.7330/9781646426447

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wang, Zhaozhe, author.

Title: Doing difference differently : Chinese international students’ literacy practices and affordances / Zhaozhe Wang.

Description: Logan : Utah State University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024002448 (print) | LCCN 2024002449 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646426423 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646426430 (paperback) | ISBN 9781646426447 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)—Social aspects—United States—Case studies. | English language—Study and teaching (Higher)—Chinese speakers—Case studies. | College students’ writings, Chinese—United States—Case studies. | Chinese students—United States—Attitudes—Case studies. | Generation Z—Education (Higher)—United States—Case studies. | Literacy—Social aspects—United States—Case studies. | Difference (Psychology)

Classification: LCC PE1405.U6 W36 2024 (print) | LCC PE1405.U6 (ebook) | DDC 808.042071—dc23/eng/20230311

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024002448

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024002449

Cover art: About Face, © Susan Chen, oil on canvas, 74 x 54, 2020.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Discourse of Cultural Diversity and Ethnographic Case Study of Literacy Practices

2. Manna: From the Dance Floor to Writing Tutor’s Table

3. Wentao: A Structuralist Poet in Disguise

4. Yang: A Translingual Gothic Musician in the Making

5. Bohan: A Cosmopolitan Robot Master

6. Doing Difference Differently

7. Networked Ecological Affordances

Epilogue: Toward a New Understanding of Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices

Notes

References

Index

Figures

2.1. Manna meeting her dance club members

3.1. Course syllabus annotated by Wentao

3.2. Wentao’s writing’s room

3.3. Visual representation of situational awareness created by Wentao and his team

3.4. Promotional image created by Wentao

3.5. Wentao’s WeChat status

4.1. 絵馬/えま/Ema, courtesy of DLKR (unsplash.com)

5.1. Bohan’s writing’s room

5.2. Bohan’s WeChat status

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to my students, who invited me into their worlds and imbued what I do with new meanings and purposes. I am grateful to everyone who has provided intellectual, moral, and emotional support and helped me in various capacities to bring this project to fruition: Tony Silva, Margie Berns, Bud Weiser, Thomas Rickert, April Ginther, Rachael Levay, two anonymous reviewers/mentors, Ji-young Shin, Xiaoye You, Hadi Banat, Sweta Baniya, Xiaobo Wang, Kai Yang, Pat Burnes, Deborah Rogers, Dylan Dryer, Mark Blaauw-Hara, Sheila Batacharya, Michael Kaler, the team at Utah State University Press / University Press of Colorado, and many others. I am forever in your debt.

Doing Difference Differently

Introduction

It was a chilly September morning in Cornville,¹ a small, quintessential US Midwestern college town home to approximately ten thousand international students who build their lives and dreams on the campus of Wabash University. The campus had just regained its hustle and bustle after a long, tranquil summer, as a new academic year began to unfold. As usual, I came to my office early in the morning to catch the first shaft of sunlight and get some grading done. A few weeks into the new semester, students in my writing classes, most of whom were from China, had not failed to regale me with their thoughtfully crafted literacy autobiographies that showcased the apotheosis of their rich, multifaceted literacy history. One student writer recounted how the hundreds of instructor-mandated weekly journal entries that she produced in high school led to a love-hate relationship with narrative writing, yet in the meantime cultivated in her an appreciation for the power of self-reflection. Another student writer reflected on how his experience with writing for a school newspaper helped him build confidence in writing papers for different courses in US high schools. Yet my eyes were locked on one piece, in which Yang, the writer, analyzed the lyrics of a Japanese song that was especially meaningful to her multilingual literacy.

In her literacy autobiography, Yang, coming from China, presented to her reader—me, her first-year writing instructor, also coming from China—the gateway to her then literacy world that revolved around Japanese pop culture. As I was appreciating her evolving understanding of the aesthetics of Japanese pop culture, as seen in the sentence although [she] was never trained to understand what the definition of ‘beauty’ in Japanese culture is, [she] feels the resonance coming from this masterpiece [referring to lyrics by NaturaLe] an email notification on my phone abruptly interrupted me. It was Wabash Today, a digital newsletter sent to Wabash University employees every workday morning. The headline in Wabash University’s signature color read, Rogers [pseudonym] Tapped to Communicate Wabash’s Promise. Rogers, the former secretary of commerce for the state of Indiana and chief executive officer of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, was named Wabash’s executive vice president for communication and took on the responsibility of enhancing Wabash University’s visibility and growing reputation at home and around the world (Hasler Tapped, 2018). Specifically, Rogers would be in charge of brand marketing for the institution, strategic communications, media relations, and advertising.

This executive-level move didn’t come as a surprise; as a matter of fact, it was in line with the university leadership’s entrepreneurial vision of growing Wabash into a globally reputable brand that’s capable of attracting qualified students, scholars, and sources of funding from around the world. Over the previous two years, several bold strategic moves have been carried out at Wabash toward the ultimate goal of global branding; some of them invited controversies, if not resistance. For example, in the spring of 2018, Wabash officially launched Wabash Global—Wabash’s acquisition of the for-profit online college Lawson University. However, the marriage between the land-grant research university and the profit-driven corporation, unfortunately, was not a blessed one initially. The administrative rationale behind the deal, according to Wabash’s president, was to position Wabash as a leader in the evolving online higher education (Douglas-Gabriel, 2017). Yet, before the Higher Learning Commission was scheduled to approve the deal in October 2017, more than 300 Wabash faculty members signed a petition opposing the deal. In the petition, faculty voiced their concerns with the administration’s lack of transparency in negotiating the deal, the lack of faculty input in the decision-making process, and Lawson University’s poor track record, which could potentially damage the university’s reputation. Despite faculty pushback, the acquisition was greenlighted and the new Wabash-branded online university, Wabash Global, was up and running.

The university’s ambition to increase the visibility and impact of its brand continues to yield inspiration for innovative marketing strategies. During its spring 2018 commencement ceremony, Wabash connected live to the International Space Station to award NASA astronaut and alumnus Andrew J. Feustel an honorary doctorate, which became a trendy topic on social media where tens of thousands of people circulated and reacted to the story. The story also endowed Chinese international students at Wabash with tremendous bragging rights on WeChat, the social media platform virtually all Chinese international students rely on to connect with each other and their family back home. More interestingly, Wabash has also become the birthplace of two Guinness World Records—one for the most train whistles blowing at the same time (more than 5,000 students participated) and the other for assembling the periodic table in 8 minutes 36 seconds (set by a chemical engineering professor).

Wabash University is certainly not the only institution that’s caught up in the sweeping current of global expansion and a neoliberal political climate in higher education. Universities across North America, private and public alike, rushed to launch their marketing campaigns to earn a favorable position in fierce competitions for student enrollment, funding from the private and public sectors, and overall international reputation. According to the 2020 Open Doors Report, published annually by the Institute of International Education, the total enrollment of international students in US universities has well exceeded one million since the 2015/16 academic year. To attract more prospective international students from China, for example, around 50 prestigious universities, the majority of which are public institutions, participated in an annual college fair located in several major cities in China before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. A major contributing factor to this competition for international enrollment is an ongoing decline of state fiscal support for higher education. According to the Grapevine Report published by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), the year 2018, when the present study was conceived, witnessed the lowest annual percent increase in the 5 years preceding it in terms of state fiscal support, and almost all of the increase was accounted for by appropriations in only three relatively large states: California, Florida, and Georgia (Center for the Study of Education Policy, 2018). Worse yet, 19 states reported a decrease between 2017 and 2018 ranging from −0.1% in Ohio to −14.6% in North Dakota (2018). Consequently, public institutions became increasingly dependent upon tuition instead of public funding for financial sustainability. International students are prioritized as the most valuable customer (and derogatorily dubbed cash cows), as their tuition is double or even triple that of their in-state counterparts, not to mention the job opportunities and commercial vibrancy they bring to the local service industry.

Another prevailing justification for universities’ investments in the internationalization of their campuses comes into play, which lies in a discourse of cultural diversity. Over the past several decades since the Supreme Court regognized race inclusive admissions in its 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, diversity as a term of art has gained prominence in university admissions. More recently, in the age of multiculturalism, diversity has been appropriated and institutionalized as a compelling argument to enroll students of various gender, racial, ethnic, cultural, sexual, and socioeconomic identities. Divisions of diversity and inclusion became ubiquitous in higher education institutions, and the term diversity has packed on a load of meanings; it has been subtly tied to notions of not only social justice but also student experience, excellence and success (Wang, 2022). For example, Wabash University’s Division of Diversity and Inclusion (n.d.) claims that a diverse, inclusive community is an integral part of the Wabash experience and that it is vital that we create and sustain a welcoming campus where all students can excel, and prepare all students to thrive in our diverse, global environment. In the same vein, a line goes as follows in another flagship public institution’s statement of diversity and inclusion entitled "Inclusive Excellence: The Relentless Pursuit of Excellence through Diversity: At the center of IE (inclusive excellence) is the recognition and acceptance of the talents, worldviews, perceptions, cultures and skills that diverse communities bring to the educational enterprise that can be harnessed [emphasis added] to prepare students for leading, living and working in a diverse world. These manifestations of the institutional discourse of cultural diversity are well aligned with, if not inspired by, the American Council on Education’s and American Association of University Professors’ claim that diversity on campus provides educational benefits for all students" (2000, p. 3), which has been substantiated by statistical evidence (Gurin et al., 2002).

Revisiting Yang’s rhetorical analysis of Japanese lyrics in her literacy autobiography, I couldn’t help but wonder, Does this institutional discourse of cultural diversity² really represent the differences that international students embody and experience through their literacy practices every day? How might such discourse reduce and flatten our international students’ differences that seem to only index institutionalized identity labels? What are the material consequences of a misalignment between institutional identity labels and students’ situated and distributed practices of difference? Together, these questions suggest that we as a community of writing scholars have not done enough to complicate the notion of difference entangled with international students’ multiliteracies and that we are readily receptive to the institutionalized discourse of cultural diversity that reifies and stabilizes differences.³ Admittedly, many scholars in language, writing, and literacy studies have investigated how various institutional discourses of diversity mediate international students’ practices of difference. In addition, there is an abundance of empirical accounts that shed light on how international and multilingual students who are institutionally labeled as different navigate the literate worlds that they deem different (see, for example, Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b; De Costa et al., 2022; Fraiberg et al., 2017; Leki, 2007; Lorimer Leonard, 2013; You, 2016, 2018). However, we have yet to fully explore how these writers’ literate worlds—networked ecologies a writer inhabits and makes meaning of—afford or constrain their practices of difference.

The years leading to 2020 can be characterized as a golden age for Generation Z⁴ Chinese international students who sought higher education in western countries, particularly North America, as evidenced in the soaring enrollment statistics. They benefited from a booming Chinese domestic economy, a harmonious Sino-American diplomatic relation, relatively open international borders, a genuine interest in cultural exchange, and ever-greater transnational mobility. However, Chinese students enrolled in US colleges during the 2010s often ended up in a superdiverse cultural contact zone that was intertwined with a neoliberal institutional climate (Pratt, 1991; Vertovec, 2007). It has become increasingly challenging and sometimes confounding to navigate the complex material and discursive installations that purportedly embrace this group. Their literacy practices of difference, the term I use to refer to the construction and negotiation of idiosyncratic positionality through activities that involve semiotic resources, are further complicated and afforded by their increasingly intimate relationship with the digitally networked environment and a heightened sense of bodies and social connections. Worse still, in recent years, Chinese international students are caught up in politically precarious situations thanks to the pervasive anti-Asian, anti-Chinese policies, rhetorics, and sentiments in relation to the deteriorating trade and diplomatic relations with China since before the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

The globalizing force along with the ubiquitous institutional discourse of cultural diversity finds its local iteration at Wabash University—a large public research university in the US state of Indiana. Wabash’s internationally renowned engineering programs, echoing the current of globalization, helped the university to attract nearly one hundred thousand international students over the past decade. As a major contribution to campus diversity, international students comprised, at its peak in 2017, 21.9% of the total number of enrolled students (Office of International Students and Scholars [ISS], 2019). The total enrollment in 2017, sitting at 9,133, almost doubled compared with only a decade ago. International undergraduate students comprised 16% (4,964 in total in 2017) of the undergraduate body (ISS, 2019), a number large enough to characterize how the discourse of cultural diversity gets interpreted within this particular institutional context. Among the international undergraduate students enrolled at Wabash, the great majority (45.4% or 2,254) come from the People’s Republic of China (ISS, 2019). These Chinese undergraduate students can be found in virtually all disciplinary majors.

Yet it is precisely the massive flow of bodies and financial and cultural capital that endorse the institutional discourse of cultural diversity, which in turn render individual voices muffled or marginalized. These Chinese international students are discursively profiled as profoundly different in toto from domestic white middle-class English-speaking families. The discursive profiling of the very identity category of international students, on the one hand, allows this evolving group to be seen and heard, yet on the other, conditions not only the public perception of the group but also each individual’s social, bodily, and material experiences. For example, as the largest group identified by nationality within the international student body, students from China are highly visible on campus. They appear in small bands or individually in the libraries, dining halls, study and recreational areas, and classrooms across campus. They have assembled two large student/scholar organizations—the Wabash University Chinese Students and Scholars Association (WUCSSA), representing the entire Chinese community, and the Undergraduate Chinese Association (UCA), representing undergraduate students from China. Yet their dispersed presence on campus doesn’t translate to their recognition as an integral and indispensable part of the mainstream college experience. These Chinese international students’ individual struggles and efforts, achievements and failures, pains and happiness, talents and weaknesses often go unnoticed and, worse still, are characterized by the institutional discourse of cultural diversity simply as diverse cultural resources. In addition, their identity labels seem conveniently all-encompassing whenever the notion of difference appears in the official narrative. Their literate activities and experiences are reduced to those that only reflect their nationality or citizenship in the scholarship and public discourse (Canagarajah, 2017). Research in mobility studies, translingual practices, and cosmopolitan English suggests that literate activities can hardly be identified as bound to any particular language or modality that is solely attributed to a certain nationality or ethnicity. Rather, one’s literate activities are always translingual and transmodal and are not always tied to static linguistic, cultural attributes in a modernist sense (Canagarajah, 2013a, 2019; Silva & Wang, 2021; You, 2016). Nonetheless, deafened by the tropes of resources and deficits, we have also been desensitized to differences other than nationality and citizenship, let alone students’ own narratives and histories.

Critical applied linguists have long critiqued the neoliberal marketization of the notion of diversity and multilingualism by emphasizing the number of separate linguistic entities (Canagarajah, 2017; Makoni & Pennycook, 2006). The exotic cultures and languages that international students bring with them are seen as human capital linked directly to material profit. However, the institutional discourse of cultural diversity has yet to truly empower international students outside and beyond the more liberal educational sphere of first-year writing, as it puts students in a situation where they constantly juggle the resistance to prescribed labels of difference with their negotiated and performed difference. In other words, international students may feel valued and dismissed simultaneously as they navigate the discursive as well as physical space of a US university. Neglected or made invisible here are students’ self-sponsored literate activities that may directly or indirectly shape the ways in which they perceive their differences and the ways in which they navigate literate worlds. This conflicting view is evidenced across most of our programmatic and pedagogical practices (Costino & Hyon, 2007; Matsuda et al., 2013; Silva, 1997). Students’ agentive appropriation of their perceived differences remains in the blind spot of the institutional discourse of cultural diversity. As Chinese international students’ literacy sponsors, we may be naïvely optimistic about our institutionally granted authority to intervene. Worse still, we may inadvertently contribute to reinforcing the myths about this cultural group that Qianqian Zhang-Wu identified in her ethnographic study. The most insidious ones are (1) English is responsible for all the challenges facing Chinese international students, and (2) Chinese international students are well supported in American higher education, both linguistically and academically (Zhang-Wu, 2022, p. 150).

To understand how Chinese international students inhabit their literate worlds and make meaning of their differences, I adopt an ethnographic case study approach and recount stories and counterstories of four individuals’ (Manna, Wentao, Yang, and Bohan) ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices on and off the campus of Wabash University. Through analyzing extensive ethnographic data collected during the period from 2017 to 2019, including observations, semistructured and nondirective interviews, artifacts, and video recordings, I reconstruct the rich literate activities that the four students participate in—activities that are nonetheless consistently reduced to the myth of linguistic and cultural difference reified in institutional discourses of diversity.

Two questions guided me as I listened to the four individuals’ stories and attempted to recount them:

1. How do Manna, Wentao, Yang, and Bohan, the four Generation Z Chinese international students in the study, do difference as they engage in everyday literacy practices?

2. How do Manna, Wentao, Yang, and Bohan leverage, resist, or counter the ecological forces that mediate their literacy practices of difference?

Granted, I did not expect to fully answer the guiding questions through my participation in the four students’ literacy lives. The students’ idiosyncratic orientations toward their own literacy practices of difference drove what I focused on. However, the two guiding questions inevitably prescribed a particular analytical lens through which I interpreted and made sense of the students’ practices. While consciously aware of my privileged position as a researcher, I embraced this dynamic negotiation of our positionalities, knowing this is what we all engage in as we practice our differences.

I approached the protagonists of the book—Manna, Wentao, Yang, and Bohan—in the summer of 2018. Adopting a typical case approach to recruiting participants (Creswell, 2013; Miles & Huberman, 1994), I invited a total of 17 Chinese international students who had enrolled in the first-year writing course that I had taught between 2016 and 2018. Among them, four participants generously agreed to participate in my study. The four students, whose self-chosen pseudonyms for my study are Manna, Wentao, Yang, and Bohan, are all mainland Chinese in nationality and citizenship, and they speak and write Mandarin Chinese as their first or primary language.

Manna enrolled in my class in 2018. She would normally sit quietly in the back corner of the classroom, burying her head behind her laptop most of the time and occasionally raising her head to make eye contact with me. The writings she performed in class, however, revealed her otherwise-concealed personality traits—introspective, expressive, and adventurous. Born, raised, and educated in Beijing, the capital city and the political and educational hub of China, Manna appeared to be a free spirit with confidence and an open mind. Yet she rarely exuded an air of superiority—quite the opposite; she was down-to-earth, amiable, jovial, and always ready to connect with people and things around her.

Wentao didn’t quite catch my attention until I read his literacy autobiography two weeks into the fall 2016 semester. Decorated with ornate expressions, his literacy autobiography took on the style of a seasoned columnist for The New Yorker as opposed to a recent transfer student from China. Born in southern China, Wentao spent most of his formative years in northeast China and one year of undergraduate studies at a prestigious university in Beijing before landing in the United States.

Rarely smiling, Yang didn’t seem readily approachable. Peers around her easily noticed an unusual air of composure that meshed maturity and melancholy. Her composure rendered her emotional or cognitive engagement at any particular moment obscure and elusive. In a sense, most of the time, Yang appeared to be immersed in her own ironclad contemplation and indifferent to the happenings in her immediate surroundings. However, when I invited students to perform group activities or respond to my questions, Yang would instantly withdraw from her contemplation and engage with others. It was not until our first individual conference that she apologetically revealed to