Telling Small Stories in Big Systems: Student Voices Across Borders

Transnational higher education (TNE) is often analysed through the lenses of global strategy, institutional partnership, or international policy alignment. These macro-level perspectives provide valuable insights into how cross-border education is structured and governed. Yet alongside these structural considerations, it is equally important to attend to the lived, everyday experiences of students living and learning within transnational campuses. What does it mean to be a student in a space shaped by multiple educational systems? How do individuals navigate and make sense of their educational journeys amid the competing demands of national curricula, global metrics, and cultural expectations?

This blog post explores how students construct meaning, express identity, and demonstrate agency in their everyday lives. Rather than starting with institutional frameworks or policy debates, I begin with small stories — conversations and music in campus, study desks in library, a comment made in passing about improve CVs or a moment from everyday life that holds unexpected significance. These micro-level narratives illuminate how global education is lived in local, deeply personal, and often contradictory ways.

Listening to the Everyday

Walking through the campus of a transnational university, I was struck by the layers of language and culture coexisting in a single space. I heard conversations in mother tongue, fluent English, and lively blends of both. Jazz music played from a café nearby. Along the paths, bilingual signs marked buildings and directions. Some students passed by carrying English-language textbooks, while others laughed together with bags of local snacks in hand. In the library, shelves were filled with English written books, and students’ desks were scattered with bilingual notes. These everyday scenes — often overlooked — reflect what Hall (1996) describes as the “production of identity”: a continuous negotiation of selfhood within and across multiple cultural frames. These scenes are not simply descriptive — they signal how students actively negotiate their identities.

For many students, transnational education is not only about acquiring credentials or improving employability but also about crafting a sense of self in a space where cultures intersect and sometimes clash. Their decisions — what to display, what to mix, what to omit — offer insight into how they navigate their educational and social environments. These everyday acts of meaning-making are rarely captured by formal metrics, yet they are central to understanding what international education actually feels like for those living it.

Structures, Metrics, and the Performative Self

These personal stories unfold within larger systems increasingly dominated by audit culture — a world of KPIs, employability statistics, and performance dashboards. In such environments, students often internalise the logic of measurement, constructing what Ball (2003) describes as “the performative self” — a version of identity shaped by metrics, rankings, and the imperative to be constantly improving and visible. One student noted that she selected her university not solely for academic reasons, but because “it will look good on my CV.” Another described choosing her major based less on passion than on recommendations from parents and future career. Such decisions reflect both strategic awareness and the constraints of the global education market; they reflect the hyper-instrumentalised climate in which students must pre-emptively optimise for a labour market governed by visibility, metrics, and efficiency.

Yet even within this highly regulated environment, students exhibit forms of agency. They join student-led societies, launch creative side projects, or document their lives on social media, often blending personal aspirations with strategic goals. In doing so, they practice what de Certeau (1984) famously called “tactics” — everyday acts of resistance and re-signification that transform imposed structures into personalised, meaningful experiences.

Crossing Borders, Crafting Belonging

In many transnational education (TNE) settings, students cross not only national borders but also emotional, cultural, and symbolic ones. While institutional narratives often frame global mobility as a straightforward opportunity for growth, student voices reveal more layered and ambivalent realities. Several described feeling “in-between” — not fully anchored in their home culture, yet not entirely embraced by the imagined “West” that their institution represents. Many students acknowledged that international branch campuses differ from their parent institutions. While they did not hold naive expectations of complete equivalence, they also recognised meaningful similarities in academic norms, campus routines, and institutional values. This awareness reflects a pragmatic understanding of transnational education — one that balances realism with appreciation. For some, the value of TNE lies not in seamless integration, but in navigating the dissonance with maturity, adaptability, and openness. One student, for instance, expressed appreciation for the institutional support that enabled him to study for a year at a partner university in Australia — an experience that expanded his academic horizon while reinforcing his transnational identity. Indeed, most students at international branch campuses will complete their entire degrees without ever physically crossing borders — adding further complexity to the notion of ‘global mobility.

These experiences resonate with notion of the “stratified space” of global education (Marginson, 2014), where not all students enjoy equal access to its benefits. For many, attending a transnational institution is not a seamless glide into cosmopolitanism but a complex process of cultural translation, often accompanied by moments of confusion, adaptation, or quiet resistance. Despite these challenges, students find ways to craft belonging. Some mix local dialects with English slang, forming new hybrid expressions. Others build communities through shared interests in music, gaming, or volunteering. These actions may seem small, but they are deeply significant. They reflect students’ capacities to humanise and personalise their experience of global education, resisting the idea that they are simply interchangeable “international learners” in a borderless system.

Mobility or Relocation?

In policy discourse, mobility is often equated with opportunity — but for students, the experience can be far more ambivalent. Physical relocation does not necessarily translate into intercultural competence, intellectual engagement, or emotional growth (Schartner & Young, 2020). Some students experience international study not as mobility but as dislocation — a movement of bodies without the accompanying development of minds or relationships.

Student narratives often reflect this ambivalence. While many appreciate the opportunities for cross-border learning, others speak of language barriers, cultural fatigue, or uncertainty about how to interpret their hybrid academic environment. Several students described themselves as navigating between institutional expectations and personal aspirations — not just translating between languages, but constantly shifting between different cultural and academic logics. Success in such environments is not always straightforward; students recognised that academic success alone doesn’t guarantee cultural fluency or career advancement. They recognised the need to continually demonstrate their global competence in ways that are meaningful across both local and international contexts. These accounts disrupt celebratory accounts of internationalisation and suggest a more cautious, human-scale perspective: one that considers what types of emotional, academic, and structural support are necessary for students to genuinely thrive in cross-border contexts.

Reclaiming Meaning in a Measured World

Education is not only about what works but also about what it means (Biesta, 2015). What does it mean to ‘succeed’ in global education if the meaning-making process is lost? In an era increasingly dominated by measurement, the affective and existential dimensions of learning risk being marginalised. Yet the small stories students share — their frustrations, dreams, compromises, and moments of joy — reveal the rich inner life of TNE.

These narratives are not simply illustrative anecdotes. They represent a form of critical knowledge: one that challenges the dominant logics of international higher education and offers alternative visions rooted in lived experience. In a time shaped by geopolitical uncertainty, digital transformation, and post-pandemic adjustment, attending to student voices is more vital than ever. Instead of viewing students as data points or institutional outcomes, their small stories tell us not only how transnational education operates on the ground, but how it feels — how it is understood, adapted, and sometimes resisted by the very people it is supposed to serve. Listening to students is not optional — it is essential for shaping the future of global education.

References

Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of education policy, 18(2), 215-228.

Biesta, G. (2015). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Routledge.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.

Hall, S. (2011). Introduction: Who needs ‘identity’?. In Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1-17). SAGE Publications Ltd.

Marginson, S. (2014). Student self-formation in international education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18(1), 6–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315313513036

Schartner, A., & Young, T. J. (2020). Intercultural Transitions in Higher Education: International Student Adjustment and Adaptation (Vol. 1). Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv2f4vpwt