Seating and Grouping Choices: A Chance for Making Contact

This paper discusses how international students negotiated their chances for making contact with other students in higher education and how such effort affected their educational experiences in Australia. In the past few decades, international students have formed part of the increasingly diverse multicultural student population in Australian higher education. Still, there are concerns about impacts of cultural diversity on pedagogical interactions. The data presented here were drawn from a larger interview study on first year EAL international students' educational experiences in an Australian university. The interviews were interpreted through Pierre Bourdieu's sociological concepts of field and capital. The analyses showed that EAL international students were strategic about selecting seats and group members in the classroom to enable meaningful interactions with peers. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for optimizing students' chances for experiences of diversity, including making contact with linguistic and cultural others.