Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

in China, containing their initial employment data, sounds as a very
promising source of information.
Institutional improvement is also a by product of this as the
universities themselves pursue on-going development. Those in
China had the chance to improve their teaching methods and teaching
quality as the government set assumption is that amongst the rules for
Chinese-foreign cooperation in running schools, only the advanced
should be adopted and only the best must be learned. The universities
in the Far East of Russia are also becoming more experienced
and professionalized in terms of cooperation with international
partners, thus creating much more realistic grounds for real fullscale
collaboration. However, the cultural grounds remain vulnerable.
The researcher and the interviewees suggest several reasons for the
situation. For example, often the individuals who are responsible for
improvement of the ‘cultural climate’ are the policy-makers, who did
not go beyond declarations, while claiming they were working on
creating these grounds. Also Russian society might have not sown
enough multicultural seeds. To what extent the people at both sides
of the border and those in power are aware on future development
of multicultural communities is a task for another research, within
educational aspects, or much beyond.
Overall, for stakeholders at levels below the state, for the current
period of time, two related but contradicting tendencies have been
observed:
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Today, as different from four or five years ago, Chinese
students pursuing the joint degree programs in Russia are
much better oriented towards the acquisition of specific (or
even unique) cross-cultural, or transnational skills, useful not
only for survival, study and (future possible) work in Russia,
but also for continuing cross-cultural expertise in-service,
while back in China.
However, there is a growing concern that Russian society
which was expected to welcome Chinese students, not only
due to economic rationales but for political reasons as well, is
becoming less tolerant of foreign (Asian, Chinese) sojourners,
thus undermining the very principles of success in presence of
the international students in Russia’s educational institutions.
It is believed that comparatively studying how educators define
and solve problems, gives certain shortcuts towards findings about
complex issues, which are difficult to discover by other research tools.
The interviews incorporated such a strategy though several highly
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