THE FORUM The TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession It also welcomes responses to rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly Students of the New Global Elite STEPHANIE VANDRICK University of San Francisco San Francisco, California, United States doi: 10.5054/tq.2011.244020 & Universities in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly enrolling an elite group of international students who not only are able to pay the high tuition and other expenses of U.S.-based universities, but also are personally familiar with several countries and cultures These students are part of a new global economic and cultural elite They have lived, studied, and vacationed in various places throughout the world; they may carry passports or permanent visas from more than one country; their parents may have homes and businesses in more than one country; they may speak several languages; they have often been educated at Western high schools—frequently boarding schools—and colleges There have always been affluent, well-traveled international students studying in the United States and other Western, Englishdominant countries.1 However, the students on whom I focus here are distinguished and defined by, first, having lived and studied in at least three countries; second, being affluent and privileged; and third, exhibiting a sense of global membership Some of the contributing factors to the growth of this group are the increasingly wealthy upper class in some non-Western countries, increased ease of world travel, and increased freedom of female students to live and study far from home For this group of students, the world is their home They often feel somewhat untethered, belonging both everywhere and nowhere I call these young people students of the new global elite (SONGEs, for convenience) 160 I am aware that the term Western is a problematic construct, but I use it because it is easily recognized and understood, and for lack of a better term TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 45, No 1, March 2011 These SONGEs can also be defined in contrast to (although they may overlap with) international students, who go outside their own countries to study and then generally return to their home countries; immigrant students, who relocate from one country to another; and, finally, Generation 1.5 students, who move from a non-English-predominant country to an English-majority country such as the United States when they are in the midst of their schooling, and thus miss out on a thorough schooling in either language Students in these three categories (international, immigrant, and Generation 1.5) experience two nations and cultures: their nations and cultures of origin, and the nation and culture where they go to study and (except for the international students) live SONGEs, on the other hand, are generally both more affluent and more mobile than the other groups; they have lived or studied in at least three countries Other somewhat similar groups have been called global nomads (a term originally coined by McCaig, 1992) and third culture kids (TCKs) (this label first used by Useem, Donaghue, & Useem, 1963); these terms are often used interchangeably Typical representatives of global nomads and TCKs are so-called missionary kids, military kids, and diplomatic kids However, TCKs and global nomads differ from SONGEs in at least three ways: their initial and primary ties are generally to the West; they may have lived in ‘‘only’’ two cultures, but the combination of the two is termed a third culture; and their families are usually middle-class, not highly affluent This new category of students that I am proposing, SONGEs, like most categories, has permeable boundaries and is not absolute; in addition, students within this category vary in their backgrounds and characteristics, so it is important not to essentialize them Despite these caveats, I argue that these students have become a distinct enough category to warrant examining their distinguishing qualities and the resulting implications They are in university classrooms, and their backgrounds and attitudes affect their classmates, instructors, and institutions, as well as the places where they live and work after graduation This category helps us think about patterns of equity/inequity and privilege SOCIAL CLASS, HYBRIDITY, RECOMBINANT IDENTITIES, AND COSMOPOLITANISM A major aspect of these students’ identities is their social class privilege Social class is a topic that is underaddressed in the field of TESOL Even when TESOL scholars discuss social class, the focus is generally on the less privileged classes; for example, immigrant students are often underprivileged, and these students’ needs have been fairly extensively documented and addressed (e.g., Auerbach & Burgess, 1985; Benesch, 2001; Morgan, 1998) One of the very few publications to THE FORUM 161 address the role of privileged students in ESL settings is Vandrick (1995) The SONGEs are a particularly elite group even within the broader group of privileged students Three theoretical concepts that may be helpful in looking at SONGEs are hybridity, recombinant identities, and cosmopolitanism At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the layers of meaning adhering to the term hybridity, let me extract the part of the term I believe is useful in this context The term basically indicates mixture and, in the past, generally had negative connotations, but now has taken on—courtesy of postcolonial theorists—a mostly positive tone For example, Homi Bhabha, a theorist closely identified with the term hybridity, posits that mixtures of cultures can lead to a Third Space in which we may avoid the politics of polarity and the binarisms that frame our beliefs about culture (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1995; Bhabha, 1994) The students examined here are not merely combinations of several identities, but exhibit hybridity in uses of language and culture; in some ways they are truly global, incorporating aspects of various languages and cultures into their lives For example, one SONGE I spoke with, Lars, from Indonesia, characterized the English he used when he studied in Singapore as ‘‘Singapore English, mixed with English slang and with Malaysian.’’ Yet because of their privilege, this incorporation of various cultures and languages does not happen at as deep a level as one might imagine, considering their life circumstances; these students still have a firm sense of their privileged identity that is rooted in their countries of origin This strong sense of privilege, despite all the students’ travels and worldliness, helps them ignore or deflect negative experiences such as racist comments Andrew, a Korean student, said that when he was in Russia, a storekeeper once told his family, ‘‘We don’t sell to Asian people’’; Andrew remembered this, but was not very disturbed by it, as his other memories of playing with Russian kids outweighed the few negative memories Similarly, Celeste, a Taiwanese student, stated that she had chosen her West Coast university over two well-known East Coast universities where she had also been accepted, because she had heard from her friends that there was racial discrimination at those universities; one of her Taiwanese friends at one of the East Coast universities said, ‘‘I’m invisible to my fellow students.’’ Celeste decried such racism, but did not spend time worrying about it; she simply made the pragmatic decision to go to a university where she felt such racism would be less pervasive In both cases, these students were not very emotionally affected by racism, because they were secure in their own sense of being part of a privileged class, and did not much value the opinions of those who thought otherwise Andrew responded by ignoring the racism, and Celeste responded with a calm, rational, practical decision to avoid situations where she would encounter it It 162 TESOL QUARTERLY should be acknowledged here, too, that the combination of these students’ privilege (e.g., economic capital, mobility), on the one hand, and their hybrid status that gave them a comfort level with various places in the world, on the other hand, allowed them the luxury of having an array of available options from which to choose There is always another store to patronize, another university to attend The concept of recombinant identities also seems to apply to these students As Jacquemet explains, ‘‘recombinant identities produce communicative practices based on multi-presence, multilingualism, and decentered political/social engagements spread over transnational territories’’ (2005a, p 8; see also Jacquemet, 2005b) Although this term is most commonly used to apply to refugees, it applies at a quite different level to these more privileged students as well, in that each experience in a different country or culture, and each border crossing between and among these countries and cultures, adds a layer to an identity that is constantly shifting and re-forming These students will never be the same as if they had not lived in several different countries, learned several languages, and experienced several cultures and combinations of cultures They are rooted in one place, yet they have acquired roots elsewhere; they feel comfortable and connected almost everywhere, because they carry their privilege with them, and yet not feel they completely belong anywhere Andrew, for example, said that because he lived in Russia for part of his childhood, he never felt truly comfortable in his home country of Korea, and wanted to come to the United States; then in the United States, he was pulled in two directions, not sure whether he wanted to live his adult life in Korea or in the United States The rootedness and privilege that protected him in some ways was sometimes contradicted by his feeling of being torn between identities and countries The literature on cosmopolitanism may, in addition, shed some light on this group of students The concept of cosmopolitanism has many different definitions and is used in many different ways in such fields as philosophy and sociology, but when referring to individual identities, it can be defined as ‘‘feeling at home in the world’’ and ‘‘interest in and engagement with cultural diversity by straddling the global and the local spheres in terms of personal identity’’ (Gunesch, 2004, p 256) Most SONGEs seem to fit this model EXAMPLES AND CHARACTERISTICS To shed further light on the characteristics of students of the new global elite, here I share some of the results of my informal observations of, and interviews with, several students who can be placed in this category I have been noticing the existence of this type of student for THE FORUM 163 some years now and have become particularly familiar with them in my own English for academic purposes classes at a private university in the United States I eventually started calling them students of the new global elite, and I started gathering information and ideas about them from my own direct observation as well as from their conversations and their writings I informally interviewed a few such students, and after explaining my research project to them, I focused on four students; I chose these four because they seemed to fit my definition of students of the new global elite very well, and because I already knew them somewhat from my former classes, so I had some context for the interviews At the time of the interviews, all of the students were in their late teens or early twenties, and were full-time undergraduates at a U.S university I had known all of them at least several months I initially spoke with each of them for about an hour and a half, using a common set of questions about their lives and beliefs as a starting point, and branching off into other questions and topics as our conversations led us The interviews included questions about where they had lived and studied and for how long, how they felt when they moved to each new country, and what they saw as the advantages and disadvantages of living in several countries I hoped to learn more about whether and how they had developed a sense of privilege and entitlement In addition to this one semi-structured interview with each student, I spoke with each of them informally several other times I share information from the interviews and conversations with their permission All names are pseudonyms Although this is a small sample, I believe that these four students provide useful examples of the category of students of the new global elite that has increasingly appeared in universities in the United States and in other Western countries Andrew is from Korea He spent a year in Russia when he was 11 years old, because his father was working there There he attended a Korean language school, a private English language school, and a public Russian school Then when he was 15, he moved to the United States with his mother and two brothers so that the three brothers could study in the U.S educational system He attended high school there for years and, at the time I knew him, had attended college in the United States for year He was very happy in his high school, where, despite his limited English language ability, he found a community and an identity as a valued member of the school football team The second of the four students, Celeste, is from Taiwan She majored in Arabic in college there, and then studied in Jordan for one semester She had been studying in the United States for a year when I interviewed her She had also spent several months each in England, where she attended music school, and in Australia, where she had relatives 164 TESOL QUARTERLY Although she sometimes projected a sense of entitlement, Celeste worked hard in her classes, and assumed she would be highly educated and have a successful career as well as a family She presented herself as one of the least self-questioning or self-doubting students I have met Errol, the third student, is from Indonesia, of Chinese heritage After high school in Indonesia, he studied for years at a U.S college He then returned to Indonesia for a vacation, planning to come back to the United States, but when the events of September 11, 2001, took place, Errol was denied re-entry and told to reapply He did so, and while he was waiting for his new visa, he studied Japanese in Japan for 1.5 years He then studied Chinese in Beijing for months but had to leave because his school there was closed due to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) Finally, Errol received his new visa for the United States, and was continuing his undergraduate studies at the time I spoke with him Errol is a sweet, serious, but easygoing young man, seemingly very comfortable with himself and his life; he did acknowledge that when he first moved to a new place, especially the first time, he felt homesick and sad and missed his parents, with whom he was very close, but then he would get used to and like his new place Lars is also from Indonesia; his ethnicity is half-Chinese Like Errol, Lars comes from the privileged Chinese upper class in Indonesia He attended a boarding school in Singapore for a year when he was 10; then he studied in Australia for almost years during middle school and high school, living partly with his parents, who moved there temporarily, and partly in boarding school At the time of our interview, he had been studying in the United States for one semester After Lars completed his bachelor’s degree in the United States, he planned to get a master’s degree either in the United States or in the UK; after that, Lars’s father planned for him to study Chinese for year in China Like Errol, Lars said that the first move was hardest and that he got homesick in new places but got used to it; he did not miss Indonesia too much, because he could ‘‘go back to Indonesia any time easily.’’ Interestingly, Celeste said something similar; here I note that the affluence of both families allowed these two students access to this easy sense of mobility PATTERNS AND THEMES In the course of reviewing the interviews and other information about these students, I found several patterns All four students came from affluent families and felt very secure financially All four were close to their families and felt a strong sense of responsibility toward them Errol, for example, said that he wanted to ‘‘make his parents proud’’ of him Three of the students had only one sibling each; the fourth had two siblings; these small family sizes are similar to those of affluent families THE FORUM 165 in Europe, Japan, and the United States In another pattern that perhaps reflected the parents’ connections with the West, and their decisions to send their children there for their education, three of the four were Christian, and the fourth had some family connections with a Christian church All had, in addition to living in three or more countries, already traveled widely, and assumed as a matter of course that they would continue to so Note that all four of these students used Western names: two were given these names at birth, and two adopted them when they began living and studying in Western countries Although this is becoming more common among Asian students studying in the United States and elsewhere, the trend seems particularly dominant among SONGEs, as they come from families who have always traveled and been exposed to Western cultures, and as the elite in many non-Western countries often look at Western names and practices as signs of affluence, prestige, and sophistication The two main themes that emerged from these interviews were, first, the students’ privilege, and their sense of responsibility regarding that privilege, and second, the students’ sense of where they belonged in the world Regarding the first theme, their relationship with their own privilege, I observed that all the students had the self-assured, comfortable demeanor usually found among young people who are used to financial security and privilege Although they did not completely take this security for granted, and all expressed appreciation of their parents’ financial support of their studies, and although the students were charming and not arrogant, there was a clear sense of entitlement, of feeling that it was natural and given that they would be among the affluent and elite They did not question why they and not most other people should be in this position; it was as if this were part of the natural order of the universe Lars, for example, stated that in Indonesia, ‘‘rich are rich and poor are poor and no one is in between’’ and ‘‘people who are educated and have a good family background have a higher status,’’ and he didn’t see this as a problem, or at least not one that concerned him personally Regarding the second theme, the students’ sense of where they belonged in the world, three of the four students definitely planned to return to their countries of birth, and the fourth said he probably would The three who definitely planned to return would be working in their parents’ businesses, so they needed to be in their home countries They seemed quite comfortable with that; however, they also assumed that they would travel often and perhaps live in other countries for short periods The fourth student, Andrew, was a little more conflicted, perhaps because, as mentioned earlier, he became very much a part of 166 TESOL QUARTERLY his high school life in the United States, largely based on his membership in the football team; his experience stood out as facilitating more assimilation than the other students’ experiences did Note that athletics often provide a sense of belonging and acceptance for nonnative students (McKay & Wong, 1996) Andrew stated that he did not miss Korea, had not been back there in years, and did not care whether he ended up living in the United States or Korea In college in the United States, his best friends were not Koreans but rather Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese, and Americans However, in a telling aside, Andrew did say that living in a foreign country was ‘‘tiring and tense.’’ In an indication of how much these students took for granted the naturalness of, and advantages of, living and studying outside their countries of birth, all four students stated unambiguously that they would send their own children to study abroad Celeste suggested that her future children’s going abroad earlier than she did—going in junior high school or high school—would be even better Errol concurred, believing that if children went to the United States or elsewhere during their high school years, they would adapt more quickly to the new culture than if they waited until the college years Lars, on the other hand, thought that his children should first go to high school in Indonesia, where they could make connections that would be useful in the future, and then study abroad during their college years So these students reacted to their own experiences—including negative experiences such as culture shock, in Errol’s case, and feeling cut off from home by leaving so early, in Lars’s case—by fine tuning plans for their future children’s education on the same path but with slight variations When I asked these young people what they saw as the advantages of living in several countries, all four spoke of learning about different languages and cultures and interacting with different types of people; when I asked why that was a good thing, three of the four (all but Andrew) emphasized that it was good because it would help them in their businesses and their careers; their purposes were very instrumental There was likely another reason for their valuing learning about different languages and cultures that they may not have been consciously aware of, or may have felt it impolite to state directly: knowing other languages and cultures is generally perceived as a sign of class privilege Lars indirectly alluded to this factor when he said that ‘‘successful business people send their kids to study overseas; a degree from a foreign university is better.’’ There were indications of other, perhaps more altruistic, motives too; Celeste, for example, stated that an advantage of living abroad was that ‘‘it helps me to think different ways’’ and that ‘‘I won’t have stereotypes about a group of people’’ (this last quotation specifically referred to the effects of her stay in Jordan on her perceptions of Arab people) THE FORUM 167 ISSUES FOR EDUCATORS The increase in this category of students—students of the new global elite—raises issues of social class and privilege in this world of increasing gaps between the haves and the have-nots, both within many countries and among the nations of the world These students have enormous privilege; they also have enormous responsibility to use their privileged positions for good Although it may appear that these students are aware of their status, they often not question why they should have this status while others not, and often not understand or explore the ramifications of such stratification Those who educate such students have the responsibility to educate them to be analytical, critical, and aware, and to help them understand their own privileged positions and the related implications and consequent responsibilities Such education about, reflection on, and critical problematization of these issues may help students prepare for their possible future roles as leaders in government, business, and international organizations Although it might appear that this group that I am labeling students of the new global elite is a relatively small one, perhaps found mainly in certain educational institutions, I believe they are a unique group worth identifying and studying First, they will likely have disproportionate power and influence in the world Second, their numbers are growing, and they may represent a wave of the future, as representatives of a certain kind of globalization, so TESOL professionals, as well as other faculty who teach them, need to try to understand these students as well as our roles in educating them THE AUTHOR Stephanie Vandrick is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Language, University of San Francisco, in the United States Her research interests include feminist and critical pedagogies, social class and other forms of privilege as manifested in educational settings, narrative in academic writing, and the use of literature in language education REFERENCES Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H (Eds) (1995) The post-colonial studies reader London: Routledge Auerbach, E R., & Burgess, D (1985) The hidden curriculum of survival ESL TESOL Quarterly, 19(3), 475–495 doi:10.2307/3586274 Benesch, S (2001) Critical English for academic purposes Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Bhabha, H (1994) The location of culture London: Routledge Gunesch, K (2004) Education for cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitanism as a personal cultural identity model for and within international education Journal of Research in International Education, 3, 251–275 doi:10.1177/1475240904047355 168 TESOL QUARTERLY Jacquemet, M (2005a, October) Refugee: Ethnolinguist identities in the age of deterritorialization Paper presented at a meeting of the Communication Studies Department, University of San Francisco Jacquemet, M (2005b) Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in a globalized world Language and Communication, 25(3), 257–277 doi:10.1016/ j.langcom.2005.05.001 McCaig, N M (1992) Birth of a notion Global Nomad Quarterly, 1(1), McKay, S L., & Wong, S.-L C (1996) Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students Harvard Educational Review, 66(3), 577–608 Morgan, B (1998) The ESL classroom: Teaching, critical practice, and community development Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Useem, J., Donaghue, J D., & Useem, R H (1963) Men in the middle of the third culture Human Organization, 22(3), 169–179 Vandrick, S (1995) Privileged ESL university students TESOL Quarterly, 29(2), 375– 381 doi:10.2307/3587629 THE FORUM 169