The Global American Studies Classroom: International Students and Critical Pedagogy

In 2012 the UC Davis American studies program began collaborating with the Extension program and its Center for International Education on the Global Study Program (GSP). As advanced graduate students, we were invited to design and implement American studies courses for students visiting UC Davis from abroad. This collaboration resulted in courses such as Occupy (and) the University of California, Davis; The Cultural Politics of the 2012 Presidential Election; Consumption and American Popular Culture; and Images of America(ns) in Popular Culture. While the initial classes restricted enrollment to students participating in GSP’s short-term exchange program, later courses experimented with intentionally mixed classrooms. During our two years of participation in this effort, we designed courses that were tailored to introduce GSP students to the foundational ideas of American studies with the aim of conceptualizing alternatives to prevalent models of teaching international students that tend toward assimilation and “Americanization.”

One of the central challenges of introductory American studies (AMS) courses is bringing students into critical conversation about how the historical production and contemporary effects of “American” nationalism, culture, and politics manifest both domestically and transnationally. We were committed to both valuing international students’ perspectives and retaining a complex and rigorous frame for thinking about the United States and the idea of America. Our pedagogy was shaped by our own scholarly work in transnational American studies, where Boggs focuses on representations of international students and their impact on the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and knowledge production on US campuses, and Owens focuses on the imperial subjectivity of US migrant English teachers in contemporary Japan. Because our work collectively builds on the insights of transnational feminist cultural studies and critical ethnic studies, we centered these perspectives in our classrooms. Here, we reflect on the increasing presence of international students on our campuses and in American studies classrooms and how this change affects our approach to teaching, and then provide practical strategies that were especially successful in this context and for anyone wanting to get students to position themselves within a critical American studies framework.

Political and Institutional Contexts and Consequences

Targeted efforts to serve the needs of the increasingly large international student populations on US campuses are part of much broader neoliberal trends toward the internationalization and marketization of US higher education. An increasing number of universities dedicate substantial resources to recruiting international students because they contribute to the diversity and intellectual prestige of the campus and, in many cases, because international students frequently pay nearly twice the amount of tuition and fees as in-state students at public universities. For instance, according to a recent New York Times article, 18 percent of the University of Washington’s freshman class was from overseas and half of that group was from China.¹ The article reports that UW came to rely on “full-freight Chinese students to balance the budget.” While this shift was a boon for the coffers, some Chinese students complained that if they wanted to attend a university with all Chinese students they wouldn’t have left China: “I paid to study abroad, and it was almost like I was studying in China.” This trend shows no signs of abating—recent data show that in 2014–15, international students increased 10 percent over the prior year, the highest rate of growth since 1978–79.²

In addition, many universities fail to provide adequate courses or services for the international students whom they eagerly recruit and then profit from. Since the implementation of new federal policies for the management and surveillance of international students in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the workload of dedicated international student advisers has been overwhelmed by new data-driven security efforts required by the Student Exchange Visitor Information System.³ At the same time, some campuses, such as UC Berkeley, the University of Georgia, and the University of Southern California, have experimented with “America 101” courses to help international students acclimate to life in the United States.⁴ While there may be a place for workshops that teach international students about US body...