Learning as Socially Constructed Practices: Exploring Chinese International Graduate Students’ Publishing Experiences

Publishing is one of the important learning experiences for graduate students in academic studies. For international graduate students, there is an added expectation to also publish. As an important component of the international student body, the learning experiences of Chinese international graduate students in publishing can be challenging. Hence, it is vitally important to explore how this learning process in publishing is created, developed, and perceived. The existing studies on learning in publishing focus on students’ access to publishing recourses and the institution’s role in the students’ publishing experience, neglecting to explore how international students’ learning in publishing can be socially constructed. Thus, this study intends to adopt a sociocultural approach to examine the learning process of Chinese international graduate students in Canada. Through the narratives of three students who attended a higher educational institution in Alberta, research findings reveal that learning can be a relational, cultural, and institutional phenomenon integral to the students’ every day practices. This research challenges the deficit model applied to international students in their publishing-related teaching and learning, and calls for diversity in the teaching and learning approach by understanding students’ relational, cultural, and institutional needs to refine their publishing learning experience in Canada.