Geographies and Cultures of International Student Experiences in Higher Education
Shared Perspectives Between Students from Different Countries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v9i2.271Keywords:
cultural approaches, geographies of international student flow, international student mobility, mobility experiences, probabilistic topic modelAbstract
Updated research is required on the geographies of the cultural issues that shape international students’ experiences. The growing number of students traveling to different countries implies a need to cater to cultures and values from different parts of the world. Apart from cultural and geographical aspects, there is scarce knowledge about similarities between students’ experiences abroad that takes into account their countries of origin (and, to some extent, their cultures) within those mobility flows. Using a probabilistic topic model on 59,662 international student reports from 167 countries on their mobility experiences, we examine links between the students’ experiences and their countries of origin. The results show that the geographical features of the reports are connected not only to cultural issues, but also to other factors that might affect their international experience.
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American Council on Education. (2015). Internationalization in action. Retrieved from https://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Internationalization-in-Action.aspx
Anderson, J. E. (2011). The gravity model. Annual Review of Economics, 3, 133–160. Doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-111809-125114.
Andrzejewski, D., Zhu, X., & Craven, M. (2009). Incorporating domain knowledge into topic modeling via Dirichlet Forest priors. Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, 382(26), 25–32.
Altbach, P. G., Reisberg, L., & Rumbley, L. (2009). Trends in global higher education: Tracking an academic revolution: A report prepared for the UNESCO 2009 world conference on higher education. Paris: UNESCO.
Arnold, T., & Tilton, L. (2015): Humanities data with R. In Exploring networks, geospatial data, images, and text. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Bauer, M. W., Süerdem, A. K., & Bicquelet, A. (2014). Text analysis—An introductory manifesto. In M. W. Bauer, A. Bicquelet, & A. K. Süerdem (Eds.), Textual analysis (pp. xxi–xlvii). London: Sage.
Bekoulis, G., & Rousseau, F. (2016). Graph-based term weighting scheme for topic modeling. 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), Barcelona, Spain.
Beine, M., Noël, R., & Ragot, L. (2012). The determinants of international mobility of students. Economics of Education Review, 41, 40–54.
Belford, M., Mac Namee, B., & Greene, D. (2017). Stability of topic modeling via matrix factorization. Available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.07186
Blei, D. M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 77–84.
Blei, D. M., & Lafferty, J. D. (2009). Topic models. In A. N. Srivastava & M. Sahami (Eds.), Text mining: Classification, clustering, and applications (pp. 71–94). London: Taylor and Francis.
Chang, J., Boyd-Graber, J., Wang, C., Gerrish, S., & Blei, D. M. (2009). Reading tea leaves: How humans interpret topic models. Neural Information Processing Systems, 31, 1–9.
DiMaggio, P., Nag, M., & Blei, D. M. (2013). Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding. Poetics, 41, 570–606.
Findlay, A. M. (2010). An assessment of supply and demand-side theorizations of international student migration. International Migration, 49(2), 162–190.
Findlay, A. M., King, R., Smith, F. M., Geddes, A., & Skeldon, R. (2012). World class? An investigation of globalisation, difference and international student mobility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(1), 118–131.
Graham, S., & Blades, R. (2012). Mining the open web with ‘looted heritage’-draft [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://electricarchaeology.ca/2012/06/08/mining-the-open-web-with-looted-heritage-draft/
Graham, S., Weingart, S., & Milligan, I. (2017). Getting started with topic modelling and MALLET. Available at https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/topic-modeling-and-mallet
Griffiths, T. L., & Steyvers, M. (2004). Finding scientific topics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(1), 5228–5235.
Gu, Q., Schweisfurth, M., & Day, C. (2010). Learning and growing in a ‘foreign’ context: Intercultural experiences of international students. Compare, 40(1), 7–23.
Jockers, M. L. (2014). Text analysis with R for students of literature. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Jöns, H., & Hoyler, M. (2013). Global geographies of higher education: the perspective of world university rankings. Geoforum, 46, 45–59.
King, R., Findlay, A., & Ahrens, J. (2010). International student mobility literature review. London: Higher Education Funding Council for England.
King, R., & Raghuram, P. (2013). International student migration: Mapping the field and new research agendas. Population, Space and Place, 19, 127–137.
Leask, B. (2009). Using formal and informal curricula to improve interactions between home and international students. Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(2), 205–221.
Madge, C., Raghuram, P., & Noxolo, P. (2014). Conceptualizing international education: From international student to international study. Progress in Human Geography, 39(6), 681–701.
McCallum, A. K. (2002). MALLET: A machine learning for language toolkit. Retrieved from http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/
Montgomery, C., & McDowell, L. (2009). Social networks and the international student experience: A community of practice? Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(4), 455–466. doi:10.1177/10283153083221994
Murphy-Lejeune, E. (2002). Student mobility and narrative in Europe: The New Strangers. London: Routledge.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2017). Education at a glance 2017: OECD indicators. Paris, France: Author.
Perez-Encinas, A. (2015). The role of student associations in providing community involvement and integration between domestic and international students. Proceedings of the ISANA Conference, Pullman on the Park Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Perez-Encinas, A. (2017). International student exchange experience: Formal and informal support services in the host university (Doctoral dissertation). Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain.
Perez-Encinas, A., & Rodriguez-Pomeda, J. (2018). International students’ perceptions of their needs when going abroad: Services on demand. Journal of Studies in International Education, 22(1), 20–36.
Perkins, R., & Neumayer, E. (2014). Geographies of educational mobilities: Exploring the uneven flows of international students. The Geographical Journal, 180(3), 246–259. doi:10.1111/geoj.12045
Raghuram, P. (2012). Theorising the spaces of student migration. Population, Space and Place, 19(2), 138–154. doi:10.1002/psp.1747
Ramage, D., Rosen, E., Chuang, J., Manning, C. D., & McFarland, D. A. (2009).Topic modeling for the social sciences. NIPS 2009 Workshop on Applications for Topic Models, Whistler, BC, Canada.
Riaño, Y., & Piguet, E. (2016). International student migration. Oxford Bibliographies. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0141.xml#firstMatch. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199874002-0141.
Rodriguez-Pomeda, J., & Casani, F. (2016). Legitimating the world-class university concept through the discourse of elite universities’ presidents. Higher Education Research & Development, 35(6), 1269–1283.
Rodríguez-González, C., Bustillo Mesanza, R., & Mariel, P. (2011). The determinants of international student mobility flows: An empirical study on the Erasmus programme. Higher Education, 62(4), 413–430. doi:10.1007/s10734-010-9396-5.
Sá, C., Florax, R. J. G. M., & Rietveld, P. (2004). Determinants of the regional demand for higher education in the Netherlands: A gravity model approach. Regional Studies, 38(4), 375–392.
Steyvers, M., & Griffiths, T. (2007). Probabilistic topic models. In T. K. Landauer, D. S. McNamara, S. Dennis, & W. Kintsch (Eds.) Handbook of latent semantic analysis (pp. 427–448). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Verbik, L., & Lasanowski, V. (2007). International student mobility: Patterns and trends. London: The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education.
Ward, C. A. (2001). The impact of international students on domestic students and host institutions: A literature review. Wellington, NZ: Export Education Policy Project, New Zealand Ministry of Education.
Wolf, D., Freedman, V., & Soldo, B. (1997). The division of family labor: Care for elderly parents. Journal of Gerontology, 52B, 102–109.
Yue, C. (2013). International student mobility: China. In J. Hyung Kim & S. Strandberg (Eds.), The international mobility of students in Asia and the Pacific (pp. 18–28). Bangkok: UNESCO.
Zhou, Y., Jindal-Snape, D., Topping, K., & Todman, J. (2008). Theoretical models of culture shock and adaptation in international students in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 33(1), 63–75. doi:10.1080/03075070701794833
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2019-05-15
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Geographies and Cultures of International Student Experiences in Higher Education: Shared Perspectives Between Students from Different Countries. (2019). Journal of International Students, 9(2), 412-431. https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v9i2.271
