This study investigated the teaching and research work of early career Chinese academics in an elite Chinese university after they completed their doctoral studies in English-speaking countries. In particular, the study focused on how this group of academics brought back discipline-specific knowledge and research methods which they acquired during their overseas research studies. Secondly, the study examined how they translated and appropriated such knowledge and methods throughout their everyday work in the Chinese context. Thirdly, this study explored how the academics exercise their agency and construct professional identities while positioning themselves in the international research community and contributing to the Chinese higher education sector via knowledge recontextualising work.
The research problem was contextualised in the policy literature documenting the rapid rise of China in the global higher education arena. This literature noted policies which encouraged Chinese students to complete their research qualifications in the West before returning to work in China. While a number of empirical studies have investigated the experiences of Chinese students who have completed research degrees in the West, these studies have mainly focused on summarising the reasons for their return, the working situations upon their return, the benefits of studying abroad, work challenges encountered, and how they lived up to university expectations. By contrast, this thesis focuses on the specifics of knowledge translation or recontextualisation undertaken by this cohort based on their transnational education experiences.
This thesis draws on concepts from the sociology of education, mainly the work of Basil Bernstein (1971, 1990, 1996, 2000) to analyse the empirical data. In addition, it extended Bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic device by incorporating ideas from theories of educational globalisation (Appadurai, 1996, 2000) to understand the increasing flows of knowledge and knowledge exchanges at an international level. The study adopted a case study approach to explore the research questions. The empirical data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with nineteen early career returned academics working in humanities and social sciences (HASS) faculties of an elite research-intensive Chinese university. The academics provided accounts of their teaching, research and service work, and specifically talked about how their overseas research study had informed their current work. As the beneficiaries of national policies around internationalisation, the academics, upon return to China with their Western qualifications, brought to life such policy discourse through their everyday pedagogic work.
The rich accounts provided by the early career returned academics are analysed and presented in three ways. Firstly, the returned academics’ professional life and the intensification of academic work are portrayed in the format of composite biographies. The analysis draws attention to the conflicts between the academics who returned with Western qualifications and their locally trained colleagues, as well as between the academic work captured in the early career academics’ imaginations and that in reality. The analysis explores the ways in which the early career academics managed the pressures of work and forged their professional identities and trajectories. Secondly, this thesis documents the returned academics’ comments on the formation of disciplinary knowledge discourses in HASS areas and power structures embedded in the knowledge production and reproduction. Additionally, their attempts of referencing and presenting diverse knowledge discourses through teaching and research and empowering themselves and Chinese university students as knowers, as termed by Maton (2014; 2013), formed further topics of discussion. Lastly, the pedagogic practices of the academics as they produced and reproduced knowledge in the Chinese university are detailed. Through introducing the course curricula, pedagogic models and assessment approaches that were widely implemented in elite Western universities, they aimed at preparing their Chinese students for future studies in the West and fuller participation in the global research community. However, they also commented on the resistance to such pedagogic changes from students, their other colleagues, and entrenched institutional practices.
The research makes three major contributions to theory and practice. Firstly, this study extended Bernstein’s theoretical corpus to capture the movement of knowledge/ideas across national borders in the increasingly globalised arena of higher education. In doing so, it allowed an exploration of educational governance beyond the national level as academics recontextualised knowledge from one nation to another, and within the official policy parameters of their employing institution in China. In addition, this study reported the Chinese early career returned academics’ conduct of their teaching, research and service work, and the resulting powerplays as they were positioned in and by the local and international research communities. This research is instructive for the returned academics in navigating their professional development during their early career stage. Lastly, this study presented the ways in which the internationalisation policies of the Chinese government had been translated and recontextualised within a specific university context. To build upon the positive consequences of these policies in recruiting the returned academics, this study suggested further development of the policies to better support this group of academics in relocating back to the academy of their home country and translating and implementing their overseas-attained knowledge, skills and modes of pedagogies in their daily work.