As we move into the holiday season, many of our international students are preparing to return to their home countries for the first time since last summer. While the reunion with friends and family can be joyful, and the return to their home countries can be restorative, this mid-year journey can also be unsettling for these academic sojourners.
International students often report that visits home make them aware of the ways that they have changed in their time away from home -- and that their relationships with friends and family have changed as a result. These changes can be positive -- students often report that they are more independent and more confident as a consequence of the sojourn, for example. But, lacking a shared experience with people at home, international students can find it difficult to reintegrate into their home communities during vacations. And vacations at home require new experiences of leave-taking from friends and family members, evoking difficult emotions for all involved. The time after the winter holidays can be a challenging period for international students as they return, tired from long journeys, to North American campuses far from their families and home cultures.
It seems to me that one of our responsibilities to international students is to understand the significance of their academic sojourn abroad in their emotional lives and those of their families. In independent schools, we pride ourselves on providing students with support in their social and emotional, as well as academic, development. In the case of international students, this means developing cultural competency in the significance of the international sojourn: understanding what the holiday break at home can mean, in all its complexity. And that means supporting students on their return to campus -- by alerting faculty and staff to the very real physical effects of jet lag, of course, but also to the emotional work of traveling home and back. It may mean comforting a student who misses her family, or one who found that his old friends did not understand his new life abroad. It may mean creating a sense of community for students who find themselves homesick all over again, or celebrating holidays like the Lunar New Year with those who feel especially far from home in weeks after winter break. It may just mean acknowledging with international students that there are times when their complex identities as citizens of one country and residents of another makes them out of sync in both -- and reminding them of the rich rewards of their experience abroad.
What are the ways that your schools support international students through these kinds of adjustments? How do your faculty and staff help these students feel "at home" here and at home?