Becoming transnational: exploring multiple identities of students in a Mandarin–English bilingual programme in Canada

Abstract

Guided by post-structural perspectives of identities as processes of becoming and transculturation and transnationalism, this study explores how multilingual students in a Mandarin-English bilingual programme form their sense of identities in a dynamic process. Multiple forms of data are collected, including observations, interviews and documents. The findings indicate that multilingual students are mobile, namely, they move across linguistic, cultural and ethnic spaces of interaction. In addition, they challenge the dominant discourse of any fixed and hyphenated identity and take up transcultural and transnational identities that allow their comfortable circulation among different worlds. This study calls for a need to unfold children's multiple and mobile identities and explores new possibilities for life.

Festivals, Festival Foods, and Dietary Acculturation: A Journey of Hybridization and Identity Formation for Chinese International Students in Ottawa

“…Hybridity concerns the mixture of different phenomena such as cultures, nations, ethnicities, and classes while hybridization crosses categories and brings the separate together (Pieterse, 2006). Altered or lost dietary habits are but a common example how hybridity plays out in everyday life of migrants, which might lead to new identity features (Zhang and Guo, 2015). Previous studies tended to frame the role of food consumption in hybridization within the dichotomy of home country food versus host country food (Cleveland, Laroche, Pons, and Kastoun, 2009;Ustuner & Holt, 2007).…”

“…The post-structural perspectives on identities as a process of becoming help us see how identity is "provisional and relational" (Zhang & Guo, 2015, p. 211). Identities are fluid rather than static, because the sense of the self can shift as individuals shift time and space, and identities are formed through the engagement in symbolic systems, such as the use of language and other social interactions (Zhang & Guo, 2015). Individuals strive to acknowledge the gap between "who one is and who one could be" as posited by Zhang and Guo (2015, p. 211), which also suggests the provisionality of identity.…”

Revisioning curriculum in the age of transnational mobility: Towards a transnational and transcultural framework

“…The concept of transculturalism has gained popularity since the 1990s, paralleling the emergence of transnationalism, and suggests a process through which "individuals and societies chang[e] themselves by integrating diverse cultural life-ways into dynamic new ones" (Hoerder, Hebert, & Schmitt, 2006, p. 13). This process of transculturation sees cultures as fluid, and places them in constant interaction with other cultures (Zhang & Guo, 2015). New cultures form; others dissolve.…”

Between striated and smooth space: Exploring the topology of transnational student mobility

“…Thus, the construction of a space for transnational students must be analysed in this relational non-metric and non-linear space, where other places at other times may be more relevant than what is happening in the here and now. The question is not how students connect to a single place but how transnational students construct their assemblages as a mixture of relations to places that they have been, that they are in now, and that want or plan to be in sometime in the future (Zhang and Guo, 2015). Altogether, these assemblages determine the opportunities that transnational students have to develop their geographical life courses.…”

“…In the latter notion of power, we have found the essence of understanding the process of becoming a transnational student, which not only involves historical conditions and contemporary practices but also the consideration of students' expectations and plans. Our concern here relates to how 'power to' makes things happen through assemblages may explain the process of becoming a transnational student (Carlson, 2013;Tran, 2015;Zhang and Guo, 2015), but the possibility of becoming 'something more' than a student since student life is only a temporary situation linked to a larger life course.…”