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Sewing narratives: engaging in lessons toward an other internationalisation

Costurando narrativas: engajando-se em tarefas para uma outra internacionalização

ABSTRACT

Answering Cavalcanti’s (2006Cavalcanti, M. C. (2006). Um olhar metateórico e metametodológico em pesquisa em linguística aplicada: implicações éticas e políticas. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Por uma linguística aplicada indisciplinar (pp. 233-252). Parábola.) call to an Applied Linguistics enacted at its interfaces with other disciplines, in this paper we are inspired by an other globalisation, a concept coined by the geographer Milton Santos. Having the internationalisation of higher education as a process that embraces both of our studies, we look at it with suspicion in order to start framing an other internationalisation. To pursue that, we present two narrative scenes that took place at University of Campinas with undergraduate international students pertaining to different academic mobility programs who were learning/learned Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL). These narratives index evaluations about the internationalisation process at the university and, in our view, reflect limited experiences of reterritorialisation from different angles. Considering the localities of the context, we propose some lessons to be learned and enacted towards an other internationalisation, including some more specific lessons oriented towards PAL policy.

Keywords:
internationalisation of higher education; academic mobility; Portuguese as an Additional Language; abyssal line.

RESUMO

Pensando uma Linguística Aplicada em interface com outras áreas conforme visualiza Cavalcanti (2006Cavalcanti, M. C. (2006). Um olhar metateórico e metametodológico em pesquisa em linguística aplicada: implicações éticas e políticas. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Por uma linguística aplicada indisciplinar (pp. 233-252). Parábola.), nos inspiramos no conceito de uma outra globalização, cunhado pelo geógrafo Milton Santos, para propor este artigo. Sendo a internacionalização do ensino superior um processo que circunda nossas pesquisas, o investigamos com desconfiança a fim de pensar, ainda que de forma inicial, em uma outra internacionalização. Apresentamos duas cenas narrativas que aconteceram na Universidade Estadual de Campinas cujos protagonistas foram estudantes estrangeiros de graduação pertencentes a diferentes convênios/programas de mobilidade. Todos os participantes faziam/haviam feito aulas de Português como Língua Adicional (PLA) no momento de interação. Tais narrativas indexicalizam o processo de internacionalização da universidade, e a nosso ver, refletem experiências limitadas de reterritorialização por diferentes ângulos. Considerando as localidades do contexto, propomos algumas lições, inclusive relacionadas a políticas de PLA, a serem aprendidas e postas em prática em direção a uma outra internacionalização.

Palavras-chave:
internacionalização do ensino superior; mobilidade acadêmica; Português como Língua Adicional; linha abissal.

1. “Away from certainties, from finished answers”

“(...) in my reading, it [a postcolonialist perspective] opens up to an incomplete, in movement and always problematizing gaze, it is open to radical changes or not. This gaze, away from certainties, from finished answers with which people feel ready and safe, is consistent with the contemporary world, but has not been part of the philosophy that underlies teacher education curriculum, which is still attached to the great narratives of modernity”

Marilda Cavalcanti (2013Cavalcanti, M. C. (2013). Educação linguística na formação de professores de línguas: intercompreensão e práticas translíngues. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Linguística aplicada na modernidade recente: Festschrift para Antonieta Celani (pp. 211-226). Parábola., p. 214, our translation)3 3 In Portuguese: “(...) na minha leitura [uma perspectiva poscolonialista] se abre para uma mirada incompleta, em movimento, sempre problematizadora, aberta a mudanças radicais ou não. Essa mirada que se distancia das certezas, das respostas arredondadas com as quais as pessoas se sentem prontas e seguras, é condizente com o mundo contemporâneo, mas não tem feito parte da filosofia que embasa o currículo de formação de professores, ainda preso às grandes narrativas da modernidade.”

In this special issue dedicated to our dearest Marilda Cavalcanti, we open this text with the quotation above. In our view, it addresses not only the core of our research practice, but also our trajectories as researchers and teacher educators. These trajectories, connecting the three of us, from different generations, owes so much to the encounter with Marilda and her “gaze” towards an Applied Linguistics that is politically engaged with localities and their emergenc(i)es.

We believe the following narrative vignettes are useful to map the intersections of our ways, besides tracing the fabrics (or perspectives) that fashion this paper.

Ana Cecília

Between 1986 and 1994, I completed my undergraduate course and my master’s study at the Institute of Language Studies at University of Campinas. During those years I can say I have witnessed there the birth of an Applied Linguistics that was fairly influenced by Marilda Cavalcanti’s strong stance; a field of investigation not understood as Linguistics applied.

Her seminal article A propósito de linguística aplicada (On applied linguistics, our free translation), published in 1986, as well as her Research Methodologies module, guided my eyes to ethnographic practices and sociopolitical commitment to minorities or minoritised communities. My own commitment was reinforced in 2001, when I had the opportunity of becoming her research assistant in a pioneering teacher education online course which led to academic publications and presentations, and to me, to a unique academic encounter.

During the development of my PhD research under her mentorship, I came in closer contact with postcolonial perspective, then making the decision of working with vulnerable groups. While I took part in a 5-year ethnographic study, just as she warns in her interview to Szundy and Guimarães (2020Szundy, P. T. C., & Guimarães, T. F. (2020). 30 anos da ALAB: desafios, rupturas e possibilidades de pesquisa em Linguística Aplicada. Raído, 14(36), 9-15. https://doi.org/10.30612/raido.v14i36.13240.
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, p. 470), I was continuously challenged to reflect on the “theoretical and methodological traps in studies with vulnerable groups”4 4 In Portuguese: “armadilhas teóricas e metodológicas em estudos sobre grupos vulneráveis”. and on the need of research designs flexible enough that would allow “necessary adaptations and changes (such as in the instruments for data generation) in order ‘to photograph’ the limit-scenarios”.5 5 In Portuguese: “adaptações e mudanças necessárias (por exemplo, nos instrumentos de geração de registros) para conseguir “fotografar” os cenários-limite”.

With her writings, I grasped the meaning of involving myself with what she called “uma pesquisa de dentro” (Cavalcanti, 2006Cavalcanti, M. C. (2006). Um olhar metateórico e metametodológico em pesquisa em linguística aplicada: implicações éticas e políticas. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Por uma linguística aplicada indisciplinar (pp. 233-252). Parábola.) - inspired by Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. Zed. Books Ltd.) “insider research”. That is, not only listening to different voices in the research scenario, but also inviting participants to co-construct interpretations about these scenarios. It is through agentive listening that the study of narratives can be seen as a methodological and analytical tool. It informs the arsenal that dismantle the “great narratives of modernity”, which lingers in education policies and, by extent, in social life, as the quotation that opens this text reminds us.

As a teacher educator and researcher, who often also performs as a teacher in the research context, I can say that my major connection with the thoughts in the work by Marilda is in the continuous movement towards “educação linguística ampliada” (a broadened linguistic education) (Cavalcanti, 2013Cavalcanti, M. C. (2013). Educação linguística na formação de professores de línguas: intercompreensão e práticas translíngues. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Linguística aplicada na modernidade recente: Festschrift para Antonieta Celani (pp. 211-226). Parábola.). Such education goes beyond linguistic knowledge; it is sensitive to the complexity of social issues and practices, in which language emerges. This is where I feel connected to Marilda: as her pupil, reader, supervisee, collaborator, and, as herself, an educator of teachers and researchers.

Bruna

Although a decade has passed since then, there is yet one vivid moment of my senior year dissertation’s supervision sessions: the crystal-clear careful words professor Marilda Cavalcanti conjured while I awkwardly struggled to understand my own expectations about the recently completed ethnography in a multilingual Japanese association. These are not the exact words she said, but this is how I remember them:

“Bruna, as a researcher, you will also bring your essentialist views to the study”.

I did not see that coming. To begin with, I was being seen (and treated) as a researcher, despite being in my early twenties. Secondly, yes, I have always spoken from somewhere, betraying my conceptualizations and biases.

During that year, I have had various experiences as a teacher in training on campus and off campus. However, it was those supervision sessions and the questions she posed that intrigued me, for never before had I read about ethnographic-oriented research, nor was I required to reflect and recognize my own role in the research scenario. Built on a postcolonial perspective, nowadays I grasp these attitudes as part of what Marilda called “problematizing the web and its traps” (Cavalcanti, 2006Cavalcanti, M. C. (2006). Um olhar metateórico e metametodológico em pesquisa em linguística aplicada: implicações éticas e políticas. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Por uma linguística aplicada indisciplinar (pp. 233-252). Parábola.). With her guidance, I embarked on a journey towards discursivity, and an Applied Linguistics’ perspective that can only exist bearing its interfaces with other fields, such as Cultural Studies and Geography - a stance she embraced throughout her career.

All these events took place while Marilda supervised Ana Cecilia’s PhD work. Some years later, Ana Cecília would become my mentor during my own PhD journey. Surprisingly I would encounter Marilda again as an invited speaker in one of Ana Cecília’s courses, and then my mentors, the former and the current, would listen to my new research topic, with care, in their particular ways.

Picturing emergent localities

As narrated above, as our mentor Marilda gifted us with her interlocution throughout decisive moments of our academic history. We can say that it was upon the realisation of the implications of this “gaze”, an attitude that permeates her works and which she has taught us, as well as her provocations on how to analyse the complex sociolinguistic scenarios we were involved with, that we decided to follow our paths as researchers and educators - educating language learners and/or language professionals.

This is the reason why we perceive this paper like a quilt. It is sewed with a variety of patches of our personal trajectories, both linked to Marilda Cavalcanti and to being her supervisees. It also unfolds layers of our PhD studies, which are interwoven by internationalisation of higher education (IHE) and its local contexts, particularly focusing on undergraduate student mobility to a Brazilian university and students’ narratives about their process of de(re)territorialization.

One of the study focuses on a group of students from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who participated in a traditional degree mobility program called Programa de Estudantes Convênio de Graduação (PEC-G) funded by the Brazilian government; the other looks at students from China, Japan and South Korea in their year abroad in Brazil. Despite their particularities, both groups can be seen as minorities in the context of IHE in our institution in the sense that they are frequently represented in homogenous and inferior ways by the “language of the West” (Hall, 1993Hall, S. (1993). The West and the Rest: discourse and power. In S. Hall, B. Gieben (Eds.), Formations of modernity (pp. 275-331). Polity Press.), or “the other side of the abyssal line” (Santos, 2017Santos, B. S. (2017). Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice, Cambridge Scholars Publisher.).

In this paper, far from searching for “finished answers”, we joined forces to sew the patches considering their different fabrics, patterns and layers. Having in mind that universities, no matter where they are located, may rest on “epistemologies of the North” (Santos, 2017Santos, B. S. (2017). Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice, Cambridge Scholars Publisher.), by having listened to these students’ voices we sought to identify the abyssal line that permeates this Brazilian university internationalisation’s policy as well as to make students’ existences visible. So, our aim is to discuss how students’ narratives frame evaluations about internationalisation and their own mobility experience in order to propose the first lessons for an other internationalisation.

First, we depart from the idea that IHE, like globalisation, can be perceived both as fable, perversity and possibility. Then, we briefly present our research scenarios and participants. Moving on to two narrative scenes, we rely on indexicality in order to point out how the internationalisation process was perceived by students. Finally, considering the localities of the context, we propose some initial lessons to be learned and enacted toward an other internationalisation.

2. Internationalisation contours

We draw on previous works (see Bizon, 2013Bizon, A. C. C. (2013). Narrando o exame Celpe-Bras e o convênio PEC-G: a construção de territorialidades em tempos de internacionalização. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.; Bizon & Cavalcanti, 2015Bizon, A. C. C., & Cavalcanti, M. C. (2015). Globalização e internacionalização: democracia vertical de um convênio estudantil brasileiro? In B. S. Santos, & T. Cunha (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Colloquium Epistemologies of the South: South-South, South-North, North-South Global Learnings (pp.459-476). https://estudogeral.sib.uc.pt/handle/10316/42148.
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; Bizon, in pressBizon, A. C. C. (in press). “É difícil, mas é bom!” Performances narrativas de estudantes congoleses sobre o exame Celpe-Bras, (i)mobilidade e (des)pertencimento. In J.R. Schoffen & M. Schlatter (Ed.), Impactos pedagógicos, políticos e sociais de exames de alta relevância: o Celpe-Bras em pauta (pp. 1-20). Editora Zouk. ) on IHE in order to support the proposal presented here. When investigating the pathways of IHE, Bizon (2013Bizon, A. C. C. (2013). Narrando o exame Celpe-Bras e o convênio PEC-G: a construção de territorialidades em tempos de internacionalização. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.) pinpoints their intrinsic relationship with the processes of globalisation. To dissect this bond, she refers to some ideas of the framework developed by geographer Milton Santos (2017Santos, M. (2017). Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Translated and Edited Lucas Melgaço, & Tim Clarke. Springer. ). Santos affirms that to grasp globalisation in its complexity, as well as any historical moment, it is necessary to consider two fundamental elements that operate side by side: the state of techniques and the state of politics. Also, regarding the globalisation phenomenon, it would unfold in three dimensions, as fable, perversity and possibility.

According to M. Santos, in light of sociohistorical conditions, different historical phases have produced different systems of techniques. Before, in other historical phases, localities were disconnected by geographic distance and by the absence of instant communication resources. As such, they used to develop and keep, at least partially, different techniques that enabled the handling of their worlds. Throughout late modernity, which began in the end of the 20th century, technological and scientific breakthroughs have been informing a system in which communication and information techniques stand out, bringing together other techniques and “ensuring that the new technical system would be present all across the planet” (M. Santos, 2017Santos, M. (2017). Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Translated and Edited Lucas Melgaço, & Tim Clarke. Springer. , p. 5). People have increasingly been guided by what M. Santos formulates as “unicity of technique”, which would create a “single motor” of history. The unicity of technique, in this case, of information, came to be understood as the globalised surplus value.

Along with that, there would also be politics at play. In other words, globalisation would be the result of this system of techniques controlled by agents or hegemonic actors with authority to legitimise it. Through this dynamic relation, whoever has the power to control these techniques, controls and authorises what is being informed as well as the ways it can/ought to be informed. As M. Santos explains (2017Santos, M. (2017). Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Translated and Edited Lucas Melgaço, & Tim Clarke. Springer. ), the effects of a system of techniques on social life will depend on the state of politics, or in other words, of the political use that we can make of this system.

In this context, there is, on the one hand, the circulation of centralising discourses that depict globalisation and its “progresses” as a gift from the state of techniques; it fables an ideal, flawless, desired world that can be achieved by anyone. On the other hand, due to the forces of the state of politics, in almost all corners of the planet we experience a reality in which the access to the “advantages” of globalisation are delivered in a selective way. This is a process that, as M. Santos (2017Santos, M. (2017). Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Translated and Edited Lucas Melgaço, & Tim Clarke. Springer. , p. 6) warns, can be perverse, since “an actor who does not meet the conditions necessary to mobilise those techniques considered to be more advanced becomes an actor of minor importance in the present period.” In this sense, the life experience of so many tends to be precarious, (re)producing - and feeding from - inequalities, especially if it is to be taken into account that big corporations, which accumulate the surplus value of the techniques and their own production, are more and more deterritorialised and uncommitted to localities. As a result, they exempt themselves from social responsibilities, such as labour rights and access to education, health and security.

Considering what has been said, we extend these accounts of globalisation, fable and perversity, to the way IHE has been embodied. IHE also came to be understood as a rather stable term, part of an apparently worldwide and homogeneous process that Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002Santos, B. S. (2002a).Os processos da globalização. In B. S. Santos (Ed.), A globalização e as ciências sociais (pp. 25-102). Cortez.a) called globalised localism. In what seemed to be the drop of a hat, the fable of internationalisation encapsulated university world rankings (assessing the “best” universities), “free” academic mobility, the promise of “diversity” and access to “knowledge”. This fable turns into perversity if we look closer, though.

Bizon (2013Bizon, A. C. C. (2013). Narrando o exame Celpe-Bras e o convênio PEC-G: a construção de territorialidades em tempos de internacionalização. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.), drawing on Milton Santos’ concepts to conceptualise the architecture of globalisation,6 6 This architecture would be constituted by the unicity of techniques, the convergence of moments, the knowability of the planet, and the existence of a single motor of history, represented by globalised surplus value. argues that, as a consequence of globalisation, corporatisation has achieved different spheres of society, including education and, particularly higher education institutions. In the past, guiding principles of renowned universities used to be linked to curiosity and scientific knowledge. Nowadays, strategic and capitalised interests may dictate what is being taught and researched. Institutions have been forced to adapt their goals and procedures to meet the “rules” of production, imposed by corporations either financing research or financing bibliometrics through globalised rankings and/or mainstream publishing circuits. Higher education institutions, especially in the Global North, have been seeking growth and acknowledgement while operating more and more as big management centres, what Slaughter and Leslie (2001) called academic capitalism. More often than not, this approach undermines education’s fundamental ethical aspects, such as citizenship, participation and care for the Other. In other words, following corporations, universities have been increasingly less responsible for educational and inclusion policies, which are crucial when we think of education in a broader sense.

Even in public universities in the Global South these processes do not go unnoticed. Although in different quantitative proportions, many of these institutions usually try to respond to this globalised localism that internationalisation became by fostering one of its most popular aspects: academic mobility. Martinez (2019Martinez, C. A. F. (2019). ¿Por qué Chile? Un análisis post crítico sobre los discursos de escala en la movilidad académica internacional. Educação, 42(1), 117-126. https://doi.org/10.15448/1981-2582.2019.1.30148.
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, p. 120) observes that it is a “complex geopolitical game” (Martinez, 2019Martinez, C. A. F. (2019). ¿Por qué Chile? Un análisis post crítico sobre los discursos de escala en la movilidad académica internacional. Educação, 42(1), 117-126. https://doi.org/10.15448/1981-2582.2019.1.30148.
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, p.120). As such, academic mobility comprehends, we would say, hegemonic discourses, knowledge spatialities, migration policies and imperatives of quantification, just to mention a few elements. As Bizon and Cavalcanti (2018Bizon, A. C. C., & Cavalcanti, M. C. (2018). Narrating Lived Experiences from the Margins: The Voices of Two Undergraduate Students from the Democratic Republic of Congo at a Brazilian University. In: M. C. Cavalcanti, T. J. M. Maher (Eds.), Multilingual Brazil: Language resources, Identities and Ideologies in a Globalized World (pp. 225-239). Routledge., p. 226) stated:

It is within this global scenario that the internationalization processes of universities are being inserted. Universities are seeking recognition, prestige and visibility as forms of symbolic capital as they put in place policies to consolidate their positioning within the globalized knowledge economy.

However, just as Milton Santos sees globalisation not restricted to fable and perversity, so we see the IHE processes. While affirming that “the politics of companies and the politics of states, together or separately” (p. 7), have produced unicity, he also emphasises that it is the political use of this state of politics that can be transformed into resistance and alternatives forms of agency, thus building a third dimension of globalisation, as an other globalisation or as a possibility.

So, conceived, on the one hand, on the terms of what Milton Santos (2017Santos, M. (2017). Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Translated and Edited Lucas Melgaço, & Tim Clarke. Springer. ) coined as “an other globalisation” and, on the other, on what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002bSantos, B. S. (2002b). Para uma sociologia das ausências e uma sociologia das emergências. Revista Crítica das Ciências Sociais, 63, 237-280.) called “counter-hegemonic globalisation”, an other internationalisation commits to resisting the guidelines of hegemonic centralities and neoliberal capitalism; it has in its architecture the Epistemologies of the South. Among its actions, it anticipates the establishment of multilateral, transcultural and plurilingual cooperation with partners from different localities with the aim of constructing spaces of belonging through more just and dignified processes of territorialisation.

More explicitly, having the Epistemologies of the South as the basis for an other internationalisation means resisting the lazy reason; that is, resisting a reason that builds presences as absences (Santos, 2002Santos, B. S. (2002b). Para uma sociologia das ausências e uma sociologia das emergências. Revista Crítica das Ciências Sociais, 63, 237-280.b). Lazy reason disregards and deauthorizes time-spaces, bodies, languages, cultures and knowledges, and as an effect, creates an erasure of differences in favour of a fabricated unicity that puts the lives of many on stand-by, exchanging their present for a future that never comes. Such a residual life experience can be related to what Haesbaert (2004Haesbaert, R. (2004). O mito da desterritorialização: Do “fim dos territórios” à multiterritorialidade. Bertrand Brasil.) developed as a “precarious (re)territorialisation” or even a “deterritorialisation in reterritorialisation”.

Relying on the scenes presented in this paper, we discuss student’s academic mobility particularities that, in our view, reflect limited experiences of reterritorialisation from different angles. Even if not in the same terms, other studies on IHE and student mobility in Brazil (see Miranda, 2016Miranda, Y. C. C. (2016). Projeto “Pelo Mundo”: a configuração de uma política linguística em um curso de Português como Língua Adicional para candidatos ao Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação (PEC-G). [Master Thesis]. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.; Cândido, 2019Cândido, M. D. (2019). “Eu vejo o PEC-G como uma teia”: narrativas de professoras do curso de Português como Língua Adicional para candidatos ao Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.; Bizon & Cavalcanti, 2018Bizon, A. C. C., & Cavalcanti, M. C. (2018). Narrating Lived Experiences from the Margins: The Voices of Two Undergraduate Students from the Democratic Republic of Congo at a Brazilian University. In: M. C. Cavalcanti, T. J. M. Maher (Eds.), Multilingual Brazil: Language resources, Identities and Ideologies in a Globalized World (pp. 225-239). Routledge.; Diniz & Bizon, 2021Diniz, L.R., & Bizon, A. C. C. (2021). Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação: vozes documentadas em favor de um outro PEC-G. In: A. C. C. Bizon, & L. R. A. Diniz, (Eds.), Português como Língua Adicional em uma perspectiva indisciplinar: pesquisas sobre questões emergentes (pp. 151-171). Pontes Editores.) and elsewhere (see Stein & Andreotti, 2016Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. O. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: international students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72, 225-239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9949-8.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9949-...
; Stein, 2017Stein, S. (2017). Internationalization for an uncertain future: tensions, paradoxes, and possibilities. The Review of Higher Education, 41(1), 3-32. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2017.0031.
https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2017.0031...
; O’Connor, 2018O’Connor, S. (2018). Problematising strategic internationalisation: tensions and conflicts between international student recruitment and integration policy in Ireland. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 16(3), 339-352. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1413979.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.14...
) also investigated the matter. Before analysing the scenes, we present in the next section a brief contextualisation of the research studies conducted by each of us at University of Campinas.

3. Inbound mobility to a Brazilian university

Our studies concern two different types of mobility, credit mobility (usually a one year- or six month- stay) and degree mobility (King & Raghuram, 2013King, R., & Raghuram, P. (2013). International Student Migration: mapping the field and new research agendas. Population, Space and Place, 19(2), 127-137. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1746.
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) of international undergraduate students to Brazil. Both studies took place at University of Campinas (hereafter Unicamp), a state-funded7 7 In Brazil public universities are state- or federal- funded and there are no fees of any kind. university in the Southeast region, where the language of instruction is predominantly Portuguese. Unicamp is one of the most prestigious universities in Brazil and Latin America, besides being a research hub.

Following a national trend, outbound mobility at Unicamp has been targeting the Global North (see Granja, 2018Granja, C. D. (2018). Internacionalização e mobilidade estudantil: o programa Ciência sem Fronteiras na Universidade Estadual de Campinas. [Master Thesis]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.), whereas the flows of inbound mobility, particularly when it comes to degree mobility, reside in the Global South.8 8 Here we consider Japan, South Korea and China as part of Global South, given that the academic, geopolitical and historical relationships established between these countries and Brazil, including representations about East and West, exceed the space for discussion. It was a credit mobility program funded by the Brazilian government and called Science without Borders (2011-2014) that produced the rise of internationalisation discourses around the country. It was responsible for the mobility of 100,000 Brazilian students (mostly undergraduate students), and for triggering official language policy documents in many universities and language courses (Frazatto, 2020Frazatto, B. E. (2020). Português como língua adicional no programa Idiomas sem Fronteiras na Unicamp: internacionalização e políticas linguísticas em foco. Revista X, 15(5), 288-310. http://dx.doi.org/10.5380/rvx.v15i5.73034.
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). It is not exactly a surprise, then, that internationalisation acquired a more official tone at Unicamp from 2014 onwards, what can be perceived, for example, by the first-time occurrence of a Program of Internationalisation heading in the Statistical Yearbook in that year.

Although our studies took place in different moments (from 2008 to 2013, and then from 2018 to 2022), we would risk saying that not much has changed at Unicamp when it comes to what has been offered to international students in terms of Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL) and their inclusion. Historically, Unicamp set the benchmark in the field of PAL in Brazil when it provided lessons for newly-arrived professors who had been invited to work there a few years after its foundation in 1967. Nonetheless for the past 20 years at least, the regular PAL modules have been mostly the same: all those who come from non-Spanish-speaking countries are divided into Portuguese I, II and III. In the last decade, a new module (Practices of Textual Production) was added; it has had as a requirement Portuguese III.

In other work (Frazatto & Bizon, in pressFrazatto, B. E., & Bizon, A. C. C. (in press). Tensions among Portugueses in metacommentaries from East Asian international students in Brazil. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada.), we already highlighted the importance of making linguistic diversity and language resources visible on campus. However, when it comes to linguistic diversity and official language policy tackling undergraduate courses, we observe that language courses, offered primarily to home students by the Language Centre, seem to be Unicamp’s main language policy - a policy that has been proving itself as rather insufficient, as there are usually not enough places to meet the demand. Also, it is important to call attention to the fact that linguistic repertoires do not exist per se; there are bodies manoeuvring these resources.

Study 1 (2008-2013): Degree mobility via PEC-G

Before explaining the aims of Study 1, we provide essential information about Programa de Estudantes Convênio de Graduação (PEC-G) (for more details about the research scenario, see Bizon, 2013Bizon, A. C. C. (2013). Narrando o exame Celpe-Bras e o convênio PEC-G: a construção de territorialidades em tempos de internacionalização. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.). It is a traditional program funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, and it has been in place for more than 50 years. Places are offered to students from countries in the Global South so that they can attend undergraduate and graduate courses in Brazilian universities (for a critique regarding the intertwinement between this cooperation agreement and language policy, see Diniz; Bizon, 2015Diniz, L.R., & Bizon, A. C. C. (2021). Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação: vozes documentadas em favor de um outro PEC-G. In: A. C. C. Bizon, & L. R. A. Diniz, (Eds.), Português como Língua Adicional em uma perspectiva indisciplinar: pesquisas sobre questões emergentes (pp. 151-171). Pontes Editores.). Most students come from African and Latin American countries.

One of the requirements of the program is that candidates should pass the official Brazilian Portuguese proficiency exam (Celpe-Bras) in order to receive their place at a university. In case the candidate resides in a country where there is no test centre - such is the case of the country of the participants of the study - they come to Brazil one year prior to the official start of the degree in order to take a Portuguese preparatory course in a certified institution and then be able to sit the exam - no expenses are covered, though. This period of preparation has recently been referred to as pre-PEC-G.

It should be pointed out that students are usually hosted by federal universities, although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs may yearly ask for help from state institutions. In 2008, Unicamp accepted to host for the first time four pre-PEC-G students from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Since then, Unicamp has never again hosted pre-PEC-G students.

The aim of the study was to investigate how these students narrated the Portuguese proficiency exam and the mobility program, considering the preparatory course and their experience, later on, as PEC-G students.

Upon the students’ arrival, the institution guaranteed their places on a regular 60-hour PAL module in the first semester. In terms of mobility goals and the level required from them in the language certificate, this was rather insufficient. The expected preparatory course load would have on average 180 hours. Due to students’ initiative and complaint, as we will present here, a PAL instructor had to be hired under extraordinary terms, and additional modules were offered specifically to them, adding up to a 180-hour course load.

Ana Cecilia became the instructor in charge, so she accompanied their trajectories at university mainly during the preparatory course, but also kept in touch with them after they were accepted to start their degrees. The scene analysed here depicts a recorded informal conversation between two students, Jabali and Pinfo, and the researcher, talking about the precarious learning situation they had to face.

Jabali,9 9 The actual names of the participants have been replaced to maintain confidentiality. aged 23 when he arrived in Brazil, was accepted as an Electrical Engineering student after passing Celpe-Bras. As for the other student, his name was Pinfo and he was 25. He entered the Media Studies program. In Jabali’s communicative repertoires, there were Lingala, Tshiluba and French; Pinfo’s repertoire concerned the four national languages of the DRC, Lingala, Swahili, Tshiluba and Kikongo, and the official language, French. Due to a series of hardships (see Bizon, 2013Bizon, A. C. C. (2013). Narrando o exame Celpe-Bras e o convênio PEC-G: a construção de territorialidades em tempos de internacionalização. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.), neither Jabali nor Pinfo completed their studies.

Study 2 (2018-2022): Credit mobility

Among the undergraduate students interested in credit mobility at Unicamp, there are East Asian students who, in their home countries - usually China, Japan or South Korea -, have been studying in the Modern Languages or Area Studies Program, thus focusing on Portuguese language and the Portuguese-speaking world. As part of the Program, students are expected to depart on a year-abroad experience, and many of them, depending on the cooperation agreements established between each home university, choose Brazil.

Bruna’s study started in 2018 and will finish in 2022. During 2018-2019, she conducted semi-structured interviews, which were recorded, with six undergraduate students about their experiences. The research’s main focus is on how East Asian students narrate Unicamp’s inclusion policies and their lived experiences with Portuguese learning during their sojourn.

When it comes to credit mobility, there are no language requirements at Unicamp, even though in the past years most students have displayed a basic level of Portuguese. East Asian students who come to Unicamp have a particular profile: they usually had attended lectures in Portuguese for around ten hours weekly in their home countries during the first two years of their program before travelling to Brazil. As explained above, the PAL modules available at Unicamp to these students are Portuguese I, II and III, besides an extra module if the student completes Portuguese III.

The scene presented in the next section involves Nina, a Japanese student, and the researcher. Nina was in her early twenties when she arrived in Brazil for her one-year sojourn. As part of her communicative repertoire, she mentioned Japanese and Spanish. She added that as a teenager, she had had an exchange experience in Spain. During the conversation, which took place three months after her arrival, Nina talked about her personal yearnings and expectations towards her mobility and PAL classes, as well as the hardships and distastes she experienced.

4. Two scenes at play

De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2015De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (Eds.). (2015). The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. John Wiley & Sons., p. 3) affirm that their approach to the study of narratives takes into consideration not only the “local level of interaction”, but also

how the telling of stories shapes and is shaped by ideologies, social relations, and social agendas in different communities, times, and spaces. Narratives are shaped by contexts, but they also create new contexts by mobilizing and articulating fresh understandings of the world, by altering power relations between peoples, by constituting new practices.

The scenes we present here are fragments of the internationalisation process that has been undergoing at Unicamp and that was lived by students in mobility. We start with a scene that took place on July 11, 2010, from the study by Bizon (2013Bizon, A. C. C. (2013). Narrando o exame Celpe-Bras e o convênio PEC-G: a construção de territorialidades em tempos de internacionalização. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.). Curiously, in that month, the Football World Cup was being held. At the moment of the conversation, students recalled their arrival at the university and the beginning of the preparatory Portuguese course. As already stated, this course constitutes the main responsibility institutions have regarding language policy and the reception of Pre-PEC-G students.

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Jabali: It* seems tha:::t when we arrive::d, we found a coach who was not capable! Pinfo: There’s something fu::nny, when we got here::: Jabali was the first person that arrived, then Ntangu, then me and then Mananga... We only had the lesson for two hours, it’s OVER, it’s each to their own... so I said, because I have a somewhat revolutionary spirit, so I said, wa:::it people got to be kidding, huh, man? [laughter] Do you think that with TWO hours of lessons we’ll be able to pass that thingy? Take it easy, let’s think of something, like, to solve... We wrote a letter to the coordinator of the center, we wrote her a letter, we wrote her a letter! Jabali: If you read that letter, you’d EXPLO:::DE out laughing! Pinfo: We wrote her a letter without speaking Portuguese, but it was a VERY bra::ve act, you know? We complained like, no, no, no… Jabali: Thanks to this letter we wrote, things CHANGED! Pinfo: YES! Otherwise, we would be SCREWED! Ana Cecília: Becau::se in fa::ct, it was a misunderstood situation, right? Jabali: Misunderstood! Unicamp did not know about Celpe-Bras… Pinfo: It doesn’t make se::nse! The ONLY thing I think they’re PRETENDING, man! An institution like Unicamp, that does not know about an exam like Celpe-Bras! I think that was a LI::E, Unicamp was NOT really prepare::d to receive us! It seems tha:::t when we arrive::d, we found a coach who was not capable! Jabali: Who wasn’t able to IMPOSE his work! Pinfo: I’ll give an example, ri:::ght a team... we got here, the team a:::nd Jabali: Unicamp was a coach for us! The:::n we were the PLAyers, but we arrived on the field to train, the coach didn’t HAve anything to show us, new things... but it was when we made the revolution tha::t things have changed! Jabali: Parece que::: quando a gente chego::u, a gente encontrou um técnico que não era capaz! Pinfo: Você sabe de uma coisa engraça::da, quando a gente chegou aqui::: o Jabali foi a primeira pessoa a chegar, depois a Ntangu, depois eu e depois a Mananga... A gente assistia a aula mesmo só duas horas, acaBOU, cada um no seu canto... Eu falei assim, porque eu tenho um espírito um pouco revolucionário, assim, eu falei, peraí::: as pessoas tá de sacaNA::gem com a gente, né, cara? [risos] Você tá penSANdo que com DU::as horas de aula a gente vai conseguir passar mesmo naquele bagulho? Calma, vamos pensar em alguma coisa, assim, pra ver... A gente escreveu uma carta para a coordenadora do centro, a gente fez uma carta pra ela, a gente fez uma carta pra ela! Jabali: Se você lesse aquela carta, você ia exploDI:::R de dar risada! Pinfo: A gente fez uma carta pra ela e sem falar português, mas foi um ato MUIto corajo::so, sabe? A gente reclamou assim, não, não, não… Jabali: Graças a essa carta que a gente escreveu que muDOU! Pinfo: SIM! Senão, a gente ia se fo-DER! Ana Cecília: Porque:: na verDA::de, foi uma situaçã::o mal entendida, né? Jabali: Mal entendida! A Unicamp não sabia do Celpe-Bras… Pinfo: Não faz senTI::do! A Ú::nica coisa eu acho que eles estão finGINdo, cara! Uma instituição como a Unicamp, que não sabe dum exame como o Celpe-Bras! Eu acho que isso foi menTI::ra, a Unicamp NÃO estava prepaRA::da mesmo pra receber a gente! Parece que::: quando a gente chego::u, a gente encontrou um técnico que não era capaz! Jabali: Não era capaz de imPOR o trabalho dele! Pinfo: Vou dar um exemplo, né::: um time... a gente chegou aqui, o time e::: Jabali: A Unicamp era um técnico pra nós! Aí::: a gente era os jogaDO:res, só que:: chegamos no campo pra treinar, o técnico não TInha nada pra mostrar as coisas novas pra gente... só que:: quando a GENte fez a revolução é que:: muDOU!


*Transcription Conventions:

We start drawing attention to the metaphors related to the football lexical field that Jabali and Pinfo turned to. There are 4 moments in which they relied on a football metaphor to explain the fragile situation they endured:

  1. It seems tha:::t when we arrive::d, we found a coach who was not capable! (lines 1-2)

  2. It seems tha:::t when we arrive::d, we found a coach who was not capable! (lines 33-35)

  3. I’ll give an example, ri:::ght a team... we got here, the team a:::nd (lines 37-38)

  4. Unicamp was a coach for us! The:::n we were the PLAyers, but we arrived on the field to train, the coach didn’t HAve anything to show us, new things... (lines 39-42)

Agreeing with Mey (2006Mey J. (2006). Metaphors and activity. D.E.L.T.A. 22(spe), 45-65. , p. 47), we see metaphor as a construction that emerges from contextualised specific needs, that is, as an “anchor” to our actions in the world and to the pragmatic emergence of our activities. In this sense, the metaphors that are part of our everyday life in every discourse do not operate as mere stylistic devices but as tools for indexicality. They help compose our identitarian discursive positionings and performances, once they “impact the understanding we have about ourselves and others”10 10 In Portuguese: “impactam a compreensão que temos de nós mesmos e dos outros”. (Zanotto, Cameron & Cavalcanti, 2008Zanotto, M. S., Cameron, L., & Cavalcanti, M. C. (Eds.). (2008). Confronting metaphor in use: An applied linguistic approach. John Benjamins Publishing Company., p. 1).

Following Blommaert et al. (2015Blommaert, J., Westinen, E., & Leppänen, S. (2015). Further notes on sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12(1), 119-127. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2015-0005.
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, p, 121), we understand indexicality as

the dimension of meaning in which textual features ‘point to’ (index) contextually retrievable meaning. More concretely: every utterance carries apart from “pure” (denotational) meanings a range of sociocultural meanings, derived from widespread assumptions about the meanings signaled by the features of the utterance.

As Fabrício (2016Fabrício, B. F. (2016). Mobility and discourse circulation in the contemporary world: the turn of the referential screw. Revista Da Anpoll, 1(40), 129-140. https://doi.org/10.18309/anp.v1i40.1022.
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, p. 136-137) clarifies, indexicality “carries with it a non-referential dimension which indicates expectations, sociocultural rituals, and subject positions that are racialized, genderized, sexualized, nationalized, etc.” It is possible to say, then, that the metaphors mobilised by Pinfo and Jabali index the existence of a game of power and authority represented by the university. At the same time, this game positions the young Congolese in inferior spaces or even in non-places in the very institution, given the erasure they narrate they were both victims of, as well as had to fight against.

Jabali and Pinfo index the authority of the university through these metaphors. Blommaert (2007Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis: Orders of Indexicality and Polycentricity, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2(2), 115-130. https://doi.org/10.2167/md089.0.
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) points out that indexicality is ordered, which means, for example, that the metaphor above triggers stratified ideas present in the social world about universities. So, the institution would be hierarchically positioned as more responsible (as the coach of a team) whilst the students would be somewhat subject to the institution’s decision (as team players).

It is Jabali’s statement (“It seems tha:::t when we arrive::d, we found a coach who was not capable!”, lines 1-2) that triggers the sequence of metaphorical images. By predicating the university as “not capable”, this evaluation encloses Unicamp’s language and internationalisation policies. More than that, it is an affirmation that discloses various feelings about the host university, such as frustration and disappointment, given that a coach should know, for example, what is best for the players, draw strategies for the game, decide on the best solutions, and instruct the players.

Thus, in this narrative, considering the position of the university both as a site of knowledge and as partner of a foreign affair’s policy of the Brazilian government, the images of a “coach who was not capable” and that “wasn’t able to IMPOSE his work!” (line 36) indicates a role reversion between the institution and the students, and an unlikely situation: a university that does not provide education, a coach that does not enhance his team.

Such a situation generates indignation and distrust, as can be perceived by Pinfo’s positioning: “It doesn’t make se::nse! The ONLY thing I think they’re PRETENDING, man! An institution like Unicamp, that does not know about an exam like Celpe-Bras! I think that was a LI::E, Unicamp was NOT really prepare::d to receive us! It seems tha:::t when we arrive::d, we found a coach who was not capable!” (lines 28-35). Pinfo refuses the evaluations made by the researcher/instructor (line 24-25) and his fellow student (lines 26-27) when they attribute the situation of not having enough PAL courses to a possible misunderstanding. Instead Pinfo criticises Unicamp’s stance by using the verb “pretending”, and refers to its attitude of claiming unfamiliarity with the process as a “lie”. The choice of words, on the one hand, deepens their indignation about the institution not delivering a proper language policy for Pre-PEC-G students; on the other, they contribute to indexing Unicamp as careless towards these students, who are candidates from an African country who had applied for a mobility program aimed at non-hegemonic countries. It is worth remarking that students were completely dependent on the PAL courses the university provided, as displaying a successful proficiency certificate was mandatory for staying in Brazil and starting their degrees.

Then, to counteract the university’s careless attitude, these students really reversed roles. According to Pinfo, they had “to make a revolution (line 43)” and to “have a somewhat revolutionary spirit” (line 8). With their attitude of writing a letter to the Language Centre coordinator to complain about the insufficient course load, which is predicated as an act of braveness by Pinfo (lines 18-20), students defied the hierarchical social norm. It was due to this radical counter-positioning (“but it was when we made the revolution tha::t things have changed!”, lines 42-44) that, according to Jabali, they were given the minimum required - a 180-hour Portuguese course load - in order to sit the exam and, then, receive their places in an undergraduate course.

Unicamp is positioned by the narrators as responsible for the erasure of the PEC-G program. At the same time, they are positioned as the ones who had to take a collective resistance action (Cavalcanti & Bizon, 2020Cavalcanti, M. C., & Bizon, A. C. C. (2020). Threads of a Hashtag: Entextualization of Resistance in the Face of Political and Sanitary Challenges in Brazil. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 59(3), 1966-1994. https://doi.org/10.1590/010318139041011120210107.
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). This was a reaction to the deterritorialising process they suffered and which was inflicted (deliberately or not) by the university. By the end, the university repositioned itself by providing specific course offerings to the group.

We also consider it important to point out that the choice of writing the letter in Portuguese could also be read as a transgression. Even though Jabali playfully comments on the letter (“If you read that letter, you’d EXPLO:::DE out laughing!”, lines 16-17), which indicates their low proficiency in Portuguese for such a task as they had been learning Portuguese for a very short time, in our view, the language choice can be perceived as a metastrategy. It makes clear both the abandonment and drama they were going through as well as addresses the urgent need of the institution’s language policy tackling a proper preparatory language course for their context.

As other studies focusing on PEC-G show (Miranda, 2016Miranda, Y. C. C. (2016). Projeto “Pelo Mundo”: a configuração de uma política linguística em um curso de Português como Língua Adicional para candidatos ao Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação (PEC-G). [Master Thesis]. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.; Ruano et al., 2016Ruano, B. P., Diniz, G. L., Raggio, I. Z., Oliveira, L. C., & Ferreira, R. M. S. (2016). O Programa Estudante-Convênio de Graduação (PEC-G) no Celin-UFPR: uma experiência de ensino. In B.P Ruano, J. M. P. Santos, & L. M. L. Saltini, (Eds.), Cursos de português como língua estrangeira no CELIN-UFPR: práticas docentes e experiências em sala de aula (pp. 199-228). UFPR.; Cândido, 2019Cândido, M. D. (2019). “Eu vejo o PEC-G como uma teia”: narrativas de professoras do curso de Português como Língua Adicional para candidatos ao Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação. [Doctoral dissertation]. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.; Diniz & Bizon, 2021Diniz, L.R., & Bizon, A. C. C. (2021). Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação: vozes documentadas em favor de um outro PEC-G. In: A. C. C. Bizon, & L. R. A. Diniz, (Eds.), Português como Língua Adicional em uma perspectiva indisciplinar: pesquisas sobre questões emergentes (pp. 151-171). Pontes Editores., to name a few), the abyssal line between institution and students is present even in universities that have traditionally hosted Pre-PEC-G students. There are various challenges faced everyday by them and by others involved with the Program, such as PAL teachers. It is, then, of importance to highlight that this continuous lack of preparation and importance given to Pre-PEC-G and PEC-G does not seem uninterested if we take into consideration that the Program is running for more than 50 years and that Celpe-Bras exists for more than 20 years. As a matter of fact, it can be perceived as following the perversity of internationalisation once techniques that inform the internationalisation agenda of a wide range of higher education institutions are deeply embedded in competitiveness and quantity. The “complex-spatio-temporal lens” that pertains to academic mobility, which, as Gunter and Raghuram (2018Gunter, A., & Raghuram, P. (2018). International study in the global south: linking institutional, staff, student and knowledge mobilities. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 16(2), 192-207. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1401453.
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) emphasise, requires the interaction between educational, migratory and political policy-making, is ignored. As a result, we see academic mobility detached from policies that cater for (re)territorialisation.

The next scene endorses our stance that IHE cannot be reduced to access to university. It is part of a semi-structured interview recorded on June 12, 2019 for Frazatto’s ongoing study. As happens with all existing credit mobility programs at Unicamp, there is no proficiency test requirement of any sort that would impede students’ sojourn - unlike the gatekeeper policy present in most countries in the Global North. This could look like an encouragement for students to study Portuguese, but it may not turn out to be so, as there are few PAL courses available, as discussed in the previous section. In Nina’s case, after a placement test at Unicamp, she attended Portuguese II, which she described as a “very easy module” that fell short of moments of interaction between students. When asked about the expectations she had had about her sojourn in Brazil, Nina said:

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Nina: It’s just that/ I wanted to improve my Portuguese [laughs], yes, as I study is my specialty and I also wanted… right… to travel and I also wanted to be friends with many Brazilians and…[long pause] yes… a::nd travel to other countries, that sort of thing. Bruna: And everything went well so far? Nina: More or less because/ [laughs] since I’m poor, so since I can’t, it’s not possible for me to travel a lot, and also how/ it’s just that here, at Unicamp, there are many exchange students who speak Spanish, so as I ended up speaking Spanish here in Brazil, so a:nd I don’t have many Brazilian friends, I have more Mexican, Mexican and Colombian friends, so that’s why... I don’t think it works out very well, but... yes, I’m enjoying it a lot because I’m here too/ as I talk to my friends at the lodging, they’re all Brazilian, so I practise Portuguese and also as I am with Mexicans I can practise Spanish too, so I’m enjoying it a lot, right, yes. Nina: Só que/ eu queria melhorar meu português [ri], sim, como eu estudo é minha especialidade e também queria… é… viajar e também queria fazer muitos amigos brasileiros e…[pausa longa] sim... e:: viajar outros países, essas coisas. Bruna: E por enquanto deu tudo certo? Nina: Mais ou menos porque/ [ri] como eu sou pobre, então como eu não posso, não dá para eu viajar muito, e também como/ só que aqui, na Unicamp, tem muitos intercambistas que falam espanhol, então como eu acabei falando espanhol aqui no Brasil, então, e: não tenho muitos amigos brasileiros, eu tenho mais mexicanos, amigos mexicanos e colombianos, então por isso… acho que não dá muito certo, mas... sim, estou aproveitando bastante porque eu estou aqui também/ como eu converso com minhas amigas no pensionato, que todos são brasileiras, então eu pratico português e também como eu estou com mexicanos e posso praticar espanhol também, então estou aproveitando bastante, né, sim.

To Nina, an ideal mobility experience would be constituted by enhancing her Portuguese skills, travelling and interacting with Brazilians in Portuguese (lines 1-7). From lines 9 to 24, there are two elements that call our attention: the covert university presence and the overt presence of diverse/multilingual repertoires on campus. Contrary to what happened in the first scene, when Jabali and Pinfo explicitly positioned the university as an incapable agent, in this scene Unicamp appears quite discreetly, but ubiquitously. To put it in other words, once they happen on the campus and its surroundings, the events Nina narrates can be interpreted as a depiction of the internationalised scenario at Unicamp.

Given the profile of the student, who has a very clear mobility goal towards learning Portuguese, language is obviously at the core of the sojourn. As a result, in this first moment, Nina’s plans are not exactly going well (“more or less”, line 9) because her expectations were broken - she is interacting more in Spanish than in Portuguese on campus (lines 11-14), despite her year abroad being in Brazil. In her narrative, she indexes a circulating idea about student mobility and language: the educational space (and her sojourn) would be strictly attached to learning a country’s language of instruction or its official language - what is often made explicit and reinforced through application forms and language requirements before a student departs for her academic mobility. What she indicates is that her mobility to Brazil would then be restricted to Portuguese at Unicamp, ruling out repertoires and knowledges that are part of the academic community.

However, Nina makes it very clear during the conversation that her sojourn at Unicamp is not restricted to language of instruction or lectures. She underscores how her experience in Brazil entails interaction with other peers, perceived in the scene by the repetition of verbs talk, speak and practise. By positioning so during the interaction with the researcher, Nina reframes her experience. At first, she attributes a negative sense to speaking Spanish in Brazil: “I don’t think it works out very well”. This is opposed by the conjunction “but” as she goes on speaking: “I don’t think it works out very well, but... yes, I’m enjoying it a lot because I’m here too” (lines 17-20). As a matter of fact, as she concludes, it is because she can enter meaning-making practices not only in Portuguese, but also in Spanish, that she enjoys her sojourn. In a broader sense, Nina ends up drawing a much more plurilingual picture of the campus than the university in reality enacts through its official discourse and its language policy.

With this scene, instead of focusing, for example, on Nina’s difficulty of getting to know Brazilian peers (line 15), we made the choice of stressing her individual initiative. We notice, by her positioning of realising the plurilingual potential on campus, that her positive evaluation, constituted by her getting along with other peers, is dependent on her agency alone. This is an attitude she downplays. Nina says that because she is in Brazil, she is having a good experience, but that could turn out completely different had she not been able to speak Spanish or not been successful in befriending Latin American students. She would be stuck with Portuguese lessons that, as she criticised, do not meet her needs for developing oral skills.

Even though the campus is visited by home and international students from different backgrounds (e.g., regions of Brazil, nationalities, ethnicities), most of the time diversity goes on ignored and unaddressed by the university’s internationalisation policies and agenda, except for the start of every new academic year, when communication media brings the topic to the fore, focusing on the quantity of students being welcomed. At the same time, PAL policies oriented towards inbound mobility could also contribute to providing more specific assistance to students according to their mobility goals, also not being restricted to general lessons and courses. From our point of view, the scene evidences that lack of attention to diversity and PAL policy is a serious neglect when it comes to providing possibilities of territorialisation to students.

5. An other internationalisation

We started this text in compliance with Marilda Cavalcanti’s idea that there are no finished answers, the reason why we believe it is important to reaffirm the complexity of factors involved in the processes of internationalisation. We also reaffirm that looking at the localities and listening to those who are living the processes of internationalisation is an essential condition to an other internationalisation. Quoting M. Santos (2017Santos, M. (2017). Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Translated and Edited Lucas Melgaço, & Tim Clarke. Springer. , p. 83), “The point of departure for thinking about alternatives, then, would be the practice of life and the existence of everyone”.

The scenes discussed here throw light to very different undergraduate students’ profiles and mobility experiences. Nonetheless, both scenes showed that students sensed the lack of internationalisation policies (language policy included) in their own sojourns.

In the first scene, we saw Pinfo and Jabali narrating a complaint about Unicamp’s neglect in relation to the Program and to the faulty hosting of the students in terms of PAL lessons, especially considering that their stay in Brazil and access to university depended on passing the proficiency test. It was their collective action that triggered a shift, at least temporarily, in what the university was providing as language policy. In the second scene, it is the lack of language policy (few PAL modules and chance of interaction with other peers) that led Nina to realise that her sojourn should not be restricted to Portuguese. Manoeuvring other communicative repertoires, however, is not really endorsed on campus, except for the expectation that home students display a good performance in English, the “language fit for science” (Silva & Signorini, 2021Silva, D. N., & Signorini, I. (2021). Ideologies about English as the language of science in Brazil. World Englishes, 40(3), 424-435. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12454.
https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12454...
). Nina’s narrative, in which the university is ubiquitous but in a covert way, may also operate as a complaint; in this case, related to how multiplicities, specificities and (not only linguistic) diversity are not covered by the internationalisation policies of this university.

In sum, neither of the profiles of academic mobility depicted here were a novelty to the institution. Yet, twelve years ago policies had remained unaltered until students organised themselves collectively (scene 1) to change them; almost 10 years later (scene 2), we can say that international students seem to remain non-existent, which unpacks ongoing features of the perversity of internationalisation.

Considering the data and discussion presented here, an other internationalisation would require, in our view, a “committed, polyphonic university” (Santos, 2017Santos, B. S. (2017). Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice, Cambridge Scholars Publisher.), so we propose some very initial lessons to be learned and enacted when looking for alternatives:

  • (i) identifying, valorising and making visible different ontologies and epistemologies on campus through affirmative policies, workshops, linguistic landscape and non-conventional academic practices;

  • (ii) implementing a common curriculum to home and international undergraduate students from different fields, such as a mandatory module, that at the same time exposes the abyssal line and supports awareness towards incompleteness;

  • (iii) acting collectively, as researchers and part of faculty and staff, in order to expose the institutions’ perversities.

Particularly in terms of PAL, actions towards an other internationalisation would include:

  • (iv) considering that an internationalisation policy ought to present a reterritorialisation policy, in which, obviously, there is language policy (Bizon, in pressBizon, A. C. C. (in press). “É difícil, mas é bom!” Performances narrativas de estudantes congoleses sobre o exame Celpe-Bras, (i)mobilidade e (des)pertencimento. In J.R. Schoffen & M. Schlatter (Ed.), Impactos pedagógicos, políticos e sociais de exames de alta relevância: o Celpe-Bras em pauta (pp. 1-20). Editora Zouk. );

  • (v) outlining language policies that speak to contemporary conceptualisations of language and literacy, besides not dealing with students and their mobility goals in a plain generic way;

  • (vi) expanding and strengthening PAL degrees, with the aim of educating teachers, researchers and those responsible for internationalisation and language policies.

What we understand as an other internationalisation is a component of a broadened linguistic education (Cavalcanti, 2006Cavalcanti, M. C. (2006). Um olhar metateórico e metametodológico em pesquisa em linguística aplicada: implicações éticas e políticas. In L. P. Moita-Lopes (Ed.), Por uma linguística aplicada indisciplinar (pp. 233-252). Parábola.) agenda, the reason why we are underscoring the role of PAL degrees. At the same time, this conceptualization of linguistic education should be the structure of PAL teacher education and PAL researchers committed to an other internationalisation. In Cavalcanti’s words (2013, p. 213, emphasis added), the education of a language teacher is a complex one:

Drawing on a broadened linguistic education, I understand that a teaching degree in a world of diaspora, immigration, migration and of emergent social mobility has to focus its task on the education of a responsible positioned teacher; someone who is a critical reader, who is sensitive to cultural, social, and linguistic diversity and plurality; someone who is in tune with her time, be it in relation to technology, be it in relation to conflicts that cause any type of suffering or rejection. It is necessary to remember that these are all changing and fluid issues as well as the identitarian constructions in the classrooms.11 11 In Portuguese: “Nessa visão de educação linguística ampliada, entendo que um curso de licenciatura neste mundo de diáspora, imigração e migração, de mobilidade social cada vez mais emergente, precisaria enfatizar a formação de um professor posicionado, responsável, cidadão, leitor crítico, com sensibilidade à diversidade e pluralidade cultural, social e linguística etc., sintonizado com seu tempo, seja em relação aos avanços tecnológicos, seja em relação aos conflitos que causam qualquer tipo de sofrimento ou de rejeição a seus pares, lembrando que essas questões são cambiantes, fluidas, assim como as construções identitárias nas salas de aulas”.

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  • 3
    In Portuguese: “(...) na minha leitura [uma perspectiva poscolonialista] se abre para uma mirada incompleta, em movimento, sempre problematizadora, aberta a mudanças radicais ou não. Essa mirada que se distancia das certezas, das respostas arredondadas com as quais as pessoas se sentem prontas e seguras, é condizente com o mundo contemporâneo, mas não tem feito parte da filosofia que embasa o currículo de formação de professores, ainda preso às grandes narrativas da modernidade.”
  • 4
    In Portuguese: “armadilhas teóricas e metodológicas em estudos sobre grupos vulneráveis”.
  • 5
    In Portuguese: “adaptações e mudanças necessárias (por exemplo, nos instrumentos de geração de registros) para conseguir “fotografar” os cenários-limite”.
  • 6
    This architecture would be constituted by the unicity of techniques, the convergence of moments, the knowability of the planet, and the existence of a single motor of history, represented by globalised surplus value.
  • 7
    In Brazil public universities are state- or federal- funded and there are no fees of any kind.
  • 8
    Here we consider Japan, South Korea and China as part of Global South, given that the academic, geopolitical and historical relationships established between these countries and Brazil, including representations about East and West, exceed the space for discussion.
  • 9
    The actual names of the participants have been replaced to maintain confidentiality.
  • 10
    In Portuguese: “impactam a compreensão que temos de nós mesmos e dos outros”.
  • 11
    In Portuguese: “Nessa visão de educação linguística ampliada, entendo que um curso de licenciatura neste mundo de diáspora, imigração e migração, de mobilidade social cada vez mais emergente, precisaria enfatizar a formação de um professor posicionado, responsável, cidadão, leitor crítico, com sensibilidade à diversidade e pluralidade cultural, social e linguística etc., sintonizado com seu tempo, seja em relação aos avanços tecnológicos, seja em relação aos conflitos que causam qualquer tipo de sofrimento ou de rejeição a seus pares, lembrando que essas questões são cambiantes, fluidas, assim como as construções identitárias nas salas de aulas”.

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    19 Dec 2022
  • Date of issue
    2022

History

  • Received
    10 June 2022
  • Accepted
    25 June 2022
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