Exploring The Scholarly Identity Development Of International Doctoral Students In China

In the era of globalization,many countries release various policies to attract international talents.The Chinese government has implemented a series of scholarship programs to sponsor graduate-level international students,especially doctoral students who study and conduct research in Chinese universities.Recruiting international doctoral students is a significant means of building the Studying-in-China Brand and upgrading internationalization level of China’s higher education.Compared with the western countries,the international doctoral education in China is still at the exploratory stage.The context of Chinese doctoral education has its distinctive features for international students.With a growing number of international doctoral students studying in China,more researchers have carried out studies on international higher education in China,but not enough attention has been paid specifically to international doctoral students.In fact,there’s a lack of empirical research on their academic development experiences.The doctoral journey is as much about identity formation as it is about knowledge production,and scholarly identity is the core issue in the development of all doctoral students.International doctoral students in China face many challenges in their scholarly identity transition and intercultural adaptation during their doctoral studies.Therefore,there is an urgent need for understanding their academic learning experiences.Based on the past research on the concept of identity and scholarly identity development from several important theoretical perspectives,i.e.,socialization,sociocultural perspective,critical realistic perspective and intercultural adaptation,this study proposes a conceptual framework with key concepts including academic capital,community of practice,acculturation,doctoral student agency and socialization stages.Drawing on the above literature review and according to the results of pilot study in which twenty international students were interviewed,three research questions are put forward:(1)What is the scholarly identity trajectory of international doctoral students in China?(2)How do they negotiate their scholarly identity?(3)What are the factors affecting the development of their scholarly identity? Guided by the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis(IPA),the author recruits six international doctoral students majoring in social sciences as participants in the current study.Three rounds of in-depth interviews have been conducted with each participant to investigate(1)their life history before doctoral study,(2)their experiences during doctoral study and(3)their reflections on doctoral study.The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim,after which an iterative data analysis has been conducted,with constant comparing,analyzing,merging and interpreting themes within and between cases.Based on the data analysis,the author identifies three major themes that captures the characteristics of international doctoral students’ scholarly development process:(1)features of scholarly identity development,(2)critical academic practices,and(3)the challenges and identity negotiation.In order to ensure the reliability and validity of the study,the research also conducted self-reflexivity,triangulation,member checks in addition to phenomenological in-depth description.The main findings of this research are:(1)International doctoral students experience a developmental process from anticipated scholarly identity to emerged scholarly identity and stabilized scholar identity,however the development is dynamic and nonlinear.There are stages in their scholarly identity trajectory,including anticipation stage,structural learning stage,informal learning stage and personal development stage.During these stages,there are three types of critical academic practices supporting their emerging researcher identity,including learning research,doing research,and talking about research.Different academic capital before doctoral study makes three different types of international doctoral students,namely “green hands”,“in-service practitioner” and “research enthusiast”.This study shows that they perform differently in each stage and experience different development trajectory.(2)The construction and negotiation of scholarly identity for international doctoral students is challenging and complex.They perceive that academic competence,academic recognition,professional role identification and academic community belongingness as four components of their scholarly identity,among which much emphasis is placed on getting recognition.In order to cope with stress brought on by identity conflicts and tensions between their scholarly identity and student role and foreigner label,they would take advantage of their intercultural position and international resources to get involved in various community of practice learning.They negotiate their scholarly identity through participation in community of practice in three different fields,including Chinese shimen community,home-country academic communities,and the international academic communities.(3)Their development of scholarly identity is influenced by macro-level factors(including academic discourse power,and sociocultural context),meso-level factors(including doctoral education environment)and micro-level factors(including personal academic capital,agency,intercultural competence and identity negotiation ability).Based on the findings,this study proposes practical suggestions to stakeholders including policy makers,institutions and supervisors,as well as international doctoral students in China to better support the development of international doctoral students’ scholarly identity development.