By Vera Spangler (University of Surrey)
I find that employing creative methods in research with international students holds immense possibilities in fostering inclusive and dynamic research environments. By using creative approaches researchers can foster deeper understanding and active engagement within their studies, enhancing the depth of academic inquiry and unlocking new dimensions of knowledge exchange. In this blog post, I will thus explore the importance and potential of creative approaches in engaging and collaborating with international students. I hope to show that these approaches not only facilitate richer data collection but also empower international students to express themselves authentically, cultivating empathy and inclusivity. Drawing on examples from my current doctoral project, I will introduce zine-making as a potential tool for participatory research with international students, while also outlining ideas for exercises that I have designed and used as part of a ‘creative space group’ during my previous ethnographic master’s project with international students.
Creating stories through zine-making
Zines are small (maga)zines and have their roots in underground movements of marginalised communities, serving as a platform to document and disseminate their narratives. This persists today, with zines serving as a fusion of activism and artistic expression. Often, zines are associated with feminism, queer culture, and anarchist ideals, offering a voice to countercultural groups sidelined by mainstream discourse. Covering a diverse range of subjects, zines employ various mediums such as drawing, collage, or writing. The structure can be journalistic, narrative-driven, or entirely abstract.
For my PhD research project, I understand zine-making as a chance to do research with, rather than on international students. I wish to encourage international students to express themselves through the active process of creating and hope to open spaces that feel much more tangible, material, and immediate to the students. Doing zines is about individuality rather than perfection, empowering the students to express their individual stories and feel confident to share their experiences and emotions. Zine-making can be a participatory way for research with international students in which their voices emerge much differently; they enjoy a significant degree of agency during the creative workshop, which encourages deep engagement, and, in this way, I would say that zine-making can serve as a potent method for self-reflection, fostering awareness and understanding of one’s narrative and place within a particular context over time.
The following zine is from Lily, an international student studying her master’s degree in the UK. The zine details her enthusiasm for engaging in sports and exploring new activities. It illustrates her eagerness to venture away from home to pursue further learning and personal growth. However, it also addresses the emotional impact and attachment involved in leaving behind family and friends.
Engaging international students through regular creative meetings
During my master’s project, I offered a ‘creative space group’ and met with a small group of international (credit mobility) students every other week to work on creative tasks around the themes of space, place, and people. I sought to learn about their experiences during their time abroad and thereby develop a (more) holistic picture of their individual worlds and everyday lives in and across places. Regular meetings with the students enabled me to follow their journeys over the course of their entire stay abroad and visually capture their thoughts and emotions.
For each session, I prepared an introduction in form of, for example, a landing, imaginative journey, or poem, followed by a creative task, and a short round-up. We began the first week with the topic of ‘home’. Throughout the week before the workshop session, I sent little prompts in our group chat, asking the students to reflect on questions such as, what is home, where is home, what makes a home a home, or is home a place, person, or feeling, and invited them to also visualise their thoughts and reactions to the questions in some form. When we then met for the creative session, we shared what we had done in relation to the prompts sent out. Susan from Ireland had written a poem about her family, describing feelings of separation yet also independence and growth while being ‘away from home’, and Hanna from Switzerland had created a Spotify playlist with songs that she named ‘dehei’ (Swiss German for ‘at home’). We then created maps of our home countries together:
Susan explained how she missed home and her family but that studying abroad now also enabled her to build new relations and bonds with people from different places, visualised in the colourful streams beaming out of her home country. Hanna mentioned conflicting and confused feelings about her home country, mirrored in the pictures with which she tried to partly cover it up. We can see some images showing personal bonds to, for instance, her parents or cat that are, how she said, her home, providing comfort and safety, but then again, there is also a picture of an open car window, signalling adventure and freedom, and little cars travelling through (or away) from her home place.
During the last session of the semester, we then reflected on the students’ time abroad and their associations and feelings towards this distinctive place. We began by writing down questions, we wanted to ask the specific city that became home for the students over the past months:
Why does it now feel like I have two homes? What’s there for me when I return home? Why is it home to all my favourite people but soon it’ll be home to none of us? Why does the idea of leaving breaks my heart but so does the thought of staying? Is it bad to feel guilty for loving it here? How can I be so happy here when I know things aren’t great at home? Help me to heal and grow, will you? How is it that one city in five months can change a life?
After this exercise, I handed out free tourist maps of the city. The intention was to cut and put them together in new ways, illustrating individual and unique maps of each our own city. The maps below (from Maeve and Ana) show, for example, hearts around the places where their accommodation was located, particular city districts that became their local home area, or a bike as a new way to commute every day.
The potential of creative methods for research with international students
Both the zine-making and regular creative workshops’ inherently open and informal structure allowed for the natural flow of everyday conversations among the students regarding their study programmes, social activities, and interests, without requiring my active facilitation. In this capacity, as the researcher, I could comfortably recede into an equal participant role (apart from guiding the introductory activity and round-up of the sessions). Seeking such ‘positional spaces’ where the positionalities of participants and researcher complement each other certainly helps to traverse the landscape of power relations, enabling one to recognise the existence of multiple viewpoints and alternative ways of knowing. Eventually, this may enable us to value students’ individual capabilities and foster new ways of co-constructing meaning with them.
By employing techniques such as arts-based approaches researchers can uncover individual experiences and viewpoints that conventional methods may not capture, ultimately enhancing the quality and relevance of research outcomes. Based on my own experience, I enjoyed how the creative workshops encouraged meaningful dialogue and allowed diverse expressions to flourish. Using creative methods with international students not only expands the horizons of research but also cultivates more inclusive and equitable spaces, and I hope, as researchers doing work with international students, we can continue inviting them (more) actively into the research process to develop nuanced and comprehensive understandings of the students’ narratives.