Abstract
International higher education (IHE) is more than obtaining credentials and studying within the four walls of university buildings in the host country. An important aspect of IHE, which is understudied, is that international students form more nuanced civic beliefs and attitudes as they agentially navigate between their host and home societal cultures during IHE. This chapter calls this phenomenon apprenticeship in new worldviews and positions it as part of student self-formation. The chapter proposes three temporal stages for this phenomenon: encountering the new, interacting with the new, and agential elaboration. Apprenticeship in new worldviews is a cyclical process that involves feedback loops between the mentioned temporal stages. The framework proposed in this study builds on Archer’s theoretical work and is further developed by empirical evidence building on international-comparative fieldwork in five countries that involved in-depth interviews with 50 international students.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the British Association for International and Comparative Education under Grant [number 20181101] and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies [Ref. SFF1718_OCIS_1108067]. The author is a Hong Kong Research Grants Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Lingnan University, and his Fellowship is being funded by Hong Kong University Grants Committee.
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Oldac, Y.I. (2023). The Civic Aspect of Student Self-Formation in International Higher Education: Apprenticeship in New Worldviews. In: Oldac, Y.I., Yang, L., Lee, S. (eds) Student Agency and Self-Formation in Higher Education. Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44885-0_8
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