Challenging Deficit Constructions of the International Student Category in Canadian Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The trend toward internationalization on Canadian campuses has been simultaneously lauded as an opportunity for promoting campus diversity and criticized for creating a campus environment that is segregated along linguistic and ethnic lines. As a result of these tensions, students labelled as “international” have become the focus of increasing amounts of media attention. In this article, drawing on interviews with undergraduate students (n = 13) from one postsecondary Canadian institution, I examine how the seemingly neutral labels applied to diverse students, such as the category “international,” operate in talk to reproduce deficit understandings of these students, particularly in regard to their English language abilities. I then provide evidence that students also construct more positive representations of international students through references to their experiences of migration and their expertise interacting with speakers of different Englishes. I offer the notion of “language brokers” as a helpful conceptual lens for interpreting this categorization and for reflecting on the contributions that international students make to Canadian higher education. La tendance de l’internationalisation dans les universités canadiennes a simultanément été louée comme une occasion de promouvoir la diversité sur le campus et critiquée pour la ségrégation qu’elle opère dans l’environnement universitaire en fonction de l’appartenance linguistique et ethnique. Ces tensions ont pour effet d’attirer progressivement l’attention des médias sur les étudiants dits « internationaux ». Dans le présent article, je m’appuie sur des entrevues avec des étudiantes et étudiants de premier cycle (n = 13) inscrits dans un établissement postsecondaire canadien pour examiner la façon dont des étiquettes apparemment neutres accolées à des étudiants diversifiés, comme par exemple la catégorie des étudiants « internationaux », crée un langage qui reflète certains déficits de compréhension de tels étudiants, particulièrement en ce qui concerne leurs compétences linguistiques en anglais. J’apporte ensuite la preuve que les étudiants construisent également des représentations plus positives des étudiants internationaux à la lumière de leur expérience migratoire et de la compétence avec laquelle ils interagissent avec des interlocuteurs qui s’expriment dans les multiples variations de l’anglais. J’offre la notion de « courtier en langues » comme lentille conceptuelle utile pour l’interprétation de cette catégorisation et pour une réflexion sur les apports des étudiants internationaux à l’enseignement supérieur au Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".