Literacy and Identity in Cross-Border Educational Space: Students’ Lived Experience in a Canadian Offshore School in a Metropolitan City in China

Canadian transnational education programs have increased over the last three decades. Extant research suggests such programs may limit students’ opportunities for meaning making and integrating different languages, hence diminishing language diversity in host countries. Exploring the legitimacy of these concerns, this chapter reports on students’ lived experience in a transnational education program certified by the British Columbia Ministry of Education in Canada and implemented in a metropolitan city in China. The program integrated both Chinese and British Columbia secondary school curricula and aimed to integrate educational wisdom from both East and West. Data sources are student interviews and English class and Mandarin class assignments. The study found that the juxtaposition of Chinese and Canadian curricula and students’ exposure to different pedagogical approaches expanded their literacy and identity options. Students also reported limited space for literacy and identity negotiations, as a result of the school’s policy of limiting students’ access to the Internet and digital devices and the bifurcated Mandarin and English curricula. The chapter problematizes the dichotomies that are manifested in the findings, such as the bifurcation of the Chinese and Canadian curricula and the dichotomy of Chinese and Canadian ways of teaching. This chapter also provides pedagogical and curricular recommendations to better support students’ syncretic meaning making and identity construction in globalized schooling contexts.