Internationalising Higher Education

Elspeth Jones, Sally Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134111121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With increasing numbers of international students, this book explores how best to broaden the approaches to learning and teaching in the higher/further education environment. Rather than seeing internationalization as a problem to be addressed, this text embraces the opportunities for the enrichment of the learning environment through a values-driven approach to internationalization.

Taking a positive and practical approach to internationalizing higher education, the book considers a range of questions about how to bring in global perspectives to the learning environment and education provision. Packed with case studies and vignettes from around the globe, the book proposes that the international student lies at the heart of the university as a source of cultural capital and intentional diversity, enriching the learning experience, enhancing staff experience and building a more powerful learning community.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Values, valuing and value in an internationalised Higher Education context

Sally Brown and Elspeth Jones

While the recruitment of international students is nothing new, universities world-wide are increasingly recognising the importance of valuing populations of students who take up Higher Education opportunities outside their home nations. Whereas in the past this has frequently been seen as problematic, as Higher Education institutions (HEIs) get used to competing in a global HE market, a different approach has to be adopted that values the contribution international students make to the learning community as much as being concerned with dealing with the complexities that arise from having a diverse student population. In this volume we bring together the experiences of authors who work with international students in a wide variety of contexts and we draw conclusions about what constitutes best practice.

For many years a neo-colonialist attitude in British Higher Education led to the assumption that an Anglo-centric curriculum and UK-originated teaching approaches were optimum in mainstream Higher Education. This is not just a British issue: other nations experience the same kinds of insular approaches. The time is now ripe for universities and colleges internationally to review how they frame HE curricula and practices. Nowadays, HE in many countries is provided for students who come from an enormous range of cultural backgrounds, not just students who come to study at national universities from abroad, but also students from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds within each nation. Recruitment from outside the home nation is commonplace in many countries, and competition for students is global. Fundamental to the theme of this book is the notion that good practice for internationalisation is good practice for all students.

At the same time, approaches to HE curriculum design, delivery, assessment and evaluation are changing rapidly to take note of new technologies and different perspectives. In a world where global perspectives must be considered in all kinds of contexts, Higher Education can no longer be immune from change and, instead, should be leading it. It is no longer sufficient (if it ever indeed was) for teachers and supporters of learning in Higher Education to assume that the student body can be treated as a homogeneous group, since diversity is now a universal given. Yoni Ryan (2004) suggests that: ‘As academics have sought to handle larger numbers of international students, especially from Asia, the presumption that learning styles and cognitive approaches in higher education were homogenous and universal has been severely challenged.’

This book takes a positive and proactive approach to internationalising Higher Education, positing a range of questions about how best to bring in global perspectives to the learning environment and review our means of provision. This is particularly necessary now that widespread e-learning outreach means that students are likely to be studying at a distance in very different learning environments from those in which learning materials are developed and delivered.

To date, recruitment of international students has been seen by many primarily as a source of income generation, a ‘cash cow’, and often diverse students, once recruited, were problematised by the academy and seen as needy of support in a kind of deficit model. Our approach conversely situates the international student at the heart of the university as a source of cultural capital and intentional diversity, enriching the learning experience both for home students and for one other, expanding staff horizons, building a more powerful learning community and thus deepening the HE experience as a whole.

We provide in this volume a range of responses from a wide variety of authors who address and attempt to resolve some of the dilemmas posed within a rapidly changing environment and argue for an institution-wide approach, strategically implemented, that embodies the values of the institution concerned. This means in practice going well beyond simply changing the content of what we teach to include international perspectives: to a considerable extent this must involve a radical rethinking of all aspects of a university’s work. Our book has been arranged in four parts – ‘Perspectives on policy and institutional cultures’, ‘Perspectives on assessment, learning, teaching and student support’, ‘Perspectives on curriculum enhancement’ and ‘European perspectives’ – before concluding with some thoughts on contextualising international Higher Education.

In Chapter 2, the opening chapter of Part I on ‘Perspectives on policy and institutional cultures’, Simon Robinson and Simon Lee set the context for the work as a whole by addressing the subject of ‘Uneasy global ethics and the university’ in a wide-ranging chapter, reflecting on the ethical complexities of a modern university. Many courses and programmes will include discussions of internationally orientated and other ethical dilemmas within their curricula, but this is only part of the story. The authors also explore what an ethically serious university can look like, and how a values-driven approach can underpin the working life of the university as a whole.

The next chapter, Chapter 3, by co-editor Elspeth Jones, shows how this holistic approach can be followed through within an institution. Leeds Metropolitan University undertook a number of initiatives to support its values-driven approach to internationalisation. These included establishing an International Faculty with responsibility not only for a range of courses and subjects but also for fostering internationalisation across the University. Part of this role is to help deliver the University’s international aim in its Corporate Plan, which seeks to ensure that ‘an international ethos pervades the University’. A section of the website, established in September 2003 and updated daily, includes reflections, written by staff, students and friends of the University, on international issues. This has had an impact across the whole University, in terms of changing staff and student perspectives and reflecting a fully internationalised community. This chapter considers the particular experience of one HEI and provides evidence of a range of actions that can be implemented in other contexts.

In the final chapter in this part, Chapter 4, ‘Globalisation and sustainability: global perspectives and education for sustainable development in Higher Education’, Dorron Otter investigates the external factors helping to shape the debate about the role of global perspectives and educational sustainable development in terms of their impact within Higher Education in the UK and explores the relationship between global perspectives and education for sustainable development. He also uses the most recent research to suggest ways in which practitioners might want to implement global perspectives and education for sustainable development in the institutional and curriculum context of Higher Education. He concludes with an optimistic view of the future for education for sustainable development and global perspectives and a challenge to the HE sector to move forward ambitiously.

Part II on ‘Perspectives on assessment, learning, teaching and student support’ commences with a chapter on assessment, Chapter 5, since this is at the heart of the student learning experience. In ‘Assessment and international students: helping clarify puzzling processes’, co-authors Sally Brown and Gordon Joughin strive to unpack some of the complexities that both home and international students encounter when being assessed in unfamiliar contexts. Academics, administrators and students all tend to assume that assessment systems, methods and approaches are pretty much universal, whereas in actuality there are significant variations from nation to nation, which can cause substantial problems where students do not understand the local rules of the game and staff make assumptions about student ability and achievement potential based on a variety of misconceptions which are culturally located. As Janette Ryan argues:

Issues to do with assessment in relation to international students can be complex and frustrating for both sides. Students often feel disadvantaged by the methods used and by their lack of background knowledge, implicitly assumed by lecturers to be in place. Teachers are concerned about maintaining standards and about practical implications, such as the amount of energy involved in doing things differently for international students.

(Ryan, 2000)

For this reason we argue that a fuller understanding of international assessment systems will have substantial benefits for all concerned.

In Chapter 6 on ‘Support and guidance for learning from an international perspective’, Jude Carroll and Jo Appleton review students’ needs for support and guidance and suggest a variety of approaches to helping students decode and make sense of new academic cultures. They offer a range of alternative tactics, including pre-arrival, post-admissions and ongoing support and guidance, as well as pragmatic advice on enabling students to understand the rules of the new game throughout the life cycle of a learning programme.

There are many facets to internationalisation of Higher Education, including the knowledge, skills and approach of teaching staff and how they use their skills and knowledge to support student learning. It has been common to focus on the characteristics of international students and how institutions can assist them to adapt to the teaching and learning environments they encounter so that they get the most they can out of their experience. In Chapter 7 on ‘International teachers and international learning’, Betty Leask focuses on international teachers and the characteristics they need to facilitate international learning in international and intercultural settings. She uses as a basis her international qualitative research looking both at how teachers themselves see their roles and at some of the expectations students have of their teachers. She also provides some really useful tasks related to her findings for teachers to try out to ensure that their own practice is international in its approach.

A university or college does not only need excellent strategies and policies; it also needs to assure itself that these are implemented on the ground. Chapter 8, ‘Using a quality enhancement audit approach to review provision for international students: a case study’, by Harris et al., builds on the work of a team of colleagues who undertook an internal quality enhancement audit of the international student experience at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2006. The methodology, developed by Holmes and Brown in 1998–9, involves asking an internal review team to scrutinise closely published papers and e-documentation and then to talk to staff, students and others about how far principles are evident in practice. The chapter presents the findings from this review and concludes with some recommendations that have wide applicability to HEIs of all kinds.

Part III on ‘Perspectives on curriculum enhancement’ opens with a chapter by Elspeth Jones and David Killick, Chapter 9, entitled ‘Internationalisation of the curriculum’, examining a wide-ranging, whole-university approach to transforming the curriculum to provide a truly internationalised approach. The authors argue that tinkering with the taught content is insufficient: what is required is a substantial re-engineering of the curriculum which impacts on the work of every member of staff in the organisation. To support this approach, a cross-cultural capability guidelines document has been produced, which is referred to extensively in this chapter and forms the final appendix of this book. The originators make no claim that this can be universally applied nor that it solves all problems in relation to internationalisation, but offer it here as an instrument that can be customised and adapted to suit other contexts, building as it does on extensive groundwork in a university highly committed to a holistic approach, as exemplified in the approach of Chapter 2 in this volume.

Next in Chapter 10, entitled ‘Internationalisation and employability’, Dawn Leggott and Jane Stapleford consider how best we can enable students to develop the range of skills they need to enhance their employability on graduation. The term ‘employability’ is itself contested, and the authors provide some useful pointers here, before outlining the outcomes of a five-year research study of students’ perceptions of their employability skills, which can vary substantially depending on their originating contexts.

The following chapter, Chapter 11, ‘Internationalisation and engagement with the wider community’, by David Killick, reviews the interactions between international students and the communities in which they study. Using a variety of case studies of international practice in community engagement, the author argues that, when purposefully established, such engagement has benefits both for the local community and for the students concerned, especially where there is institution-wide commitment to the internationalisation agenda. He concludes by arguing that strong links between a university and its community that are informed by sound experience and make use of the expertise of staff, students and local stakeholders can significantly impact on both student learning and the life of the community in which the work is located.

Much has been written in recent years on the topic of internationalising Higher Education, but this literature has rarely been brought together in a systematic and helpful way. In Chapter 12, ‘Taking stock: an appraisal of the literature on internationalising HE learning’, Glauco de Vita provides readers with an overview of relevant work organised in three key thematic groupings: the learning experience of international students; culturally inclusive teaching and assessment practices; and different conceptualisations of curriculum internationalisation. This provides a sound intellectual basis for this book and for subsequent productive work in the field. His approach challenges much conventional wisdom in the field of internationalisation and indeed offers a welcome diverse and contrasting perspective to that found in other chapters in this volume.

In Part IV, we concentrate on European perspectives to internationalising Higher Education. First, in Chapter 13, ‘Approaches to services for international students’, Maria Kelo takes a European perspective on exploring some of the principles that underpin approaches by Higher Education institutions to providing support to international students. Her work is based on a large-scale study on support for international students in Higher Education undertaken by the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) between October 2005 and October 2006, looking at good practice in international student support in Australia, Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent France. This useful review provides those of us working in the field with a valuable synthesis of international approaches.

Next, in Chapter 14, ‘European and European Union dimensions to mobility’, Tim Birtwistle guides readers through the complex world of European legislation and policy in relation to Higher Education. Following the signing of the Bologna Declaration in June 1999, universities across Europe (for it is a pan-European project) have needed to address a number of relevant internationalisation issues to ensure, for example, transferability of qualifications and mobility for staff and students. Former EU developments such as the Socrates and Erasmus programmes were set up to foster student mobility and de facto create an international learning community, as well as to foster European rather than merely national citizenship. There is a substantial imbalance in take-up of the mobility opportunities. with far fewer UK students taking up the opportunity to study abroad than European students wishing to study in the UK. This has meant that alternative strategies have needed to be adopted to provide virtual mobility for the static majority, giving home students a taste of Europeanisation while studying within Britain. Additionally, there was a commitment by government for all HE students to be provided with the Diploma Supplement on top of their national awards by 2006. Following an outline of the key issues, guidance is provided on what HEIs in Europe need to do in order to address these requirements.

Our final chapter, ‘Contextualising international Higher Education’, by the editors, draws together twenty key factors in internationalising Higher Education illustrated in this volume that are features of institutions that take international diversity seriously and that adopt a strategic approach to the implementation of cross-cultural approaches.

We conclude in the Appendix with an illustrative example of what such a strategic approach might look like, taken from the editors’ own institution, Leeds Metropolitan University, in the form of a cross-cultural capability guidelines document. In the Higher Education community in the global age, sharing of good practice is a necessity, not an option, so we welcome comments and suggestions from readers, both on our own approach and on the ideas expressed within this volume as a whole.

Part I
Perspectives on policy and institutional cultures

Chapter 2

Global ethics on the ascent

Simon Robinson and Simon Lee

Introduction

This chapter, by a Professor of Applied and Professional Ethics and the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University, sets out an approach to global ethics that permeates the life of our University. It is not our contention that Leeds Met is unique in seeking world-wide horizons or in the study of ethics or in the practice of partnerships. We do, however, think that there might be some wider interest and significance in Leeds Met’s thorough-going commitment to the refreshing perspectives that come from the creative combining of these three elements of partnerships, world-wide horizons and ethics.

This might seem surprising to those who, for instance, might have described our part of the university sector as ‘secular’ or who interpret ‘regional’ or ‘community-based’ to mean ‘parochial’ but we regard Leeds Met as being a university which embraces students of many faiths alongside those of no particular religious belief and which reaches out to serve local communities without stereotyping and ghettoising neighbours. We try to be a bridge between diverse individuals and communities. Leeds Met intends to become the equivalent on this side of the Atlantic of a great American state university system, linking local opportunities for foundation degrees in partner colleges with opportunities for progression to honours degrees and masters at our own campuses. We are going beyond some American precedents by placing a greater emphasis on doing this in a global context. We have students in Hong Kong, Africa and even Antarctica. Far from isolating students in their localities, our university has the potential to bring diaspora communities together with students from the countries of their family origins.

The vision set out by Leeds Met governors is to strive to become ‘a worldclass regional university, with world-wide horizons, using all our talents to the full’. Inaugural lectures and publications by Leeds Met staff indicate that there is a running stream of ethical thought and action flowing through this commitment to world-wide horizons.

The University’s educational, cultural and sporting partnerships reflect the same attitude, and student volunteering is increasingly happening abroad. Research, including our own into such matters as ‘uneasy ethics’, is of course committed to global ethical concerns. War and peace are now very much on the curriculum as well as being explored in books such as Cyberwar, Netwar and the Revolution in Military Affairs, edited by four of our colleagues, Edward Halpin, Philippa Trevorrow, David Webb and Steve Wright (2006). We have attracted researchers and teachers of the highest quality in such international spheres as responsible and sustainable tourism, with a focus on ethics and the impact of cultural change.

Students from all backgrounds seem increasingly to share some moral intuitions, even if their application of broad concepts to particular contexts will show that their specific conceptions of virtues and values vary. In particular, the student body has an engaging concern with the sustainability of our world environment and with helping the most marginalised human beings in this world. One of our inaugural lectures (Lee, 2003) quoted Onora O’Neill reflecting on this concern for people, but the spirit of this approach applies also to students’ concerns for the environment:

Over the last fifty years boundaries have become more porous. It has happened gradually, selectively and in faltering ways, and has transformed both political and economic life for countless people. For example, most boundaries in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Perspectives on Policy and Institutional Cultures
• Part II Perspectives on Assessment, Learning, Teaching and Student Support
• Part III Perspectives on Curriculum Enhancement
• Part IV European Perspectives
• Part V Conclusions
• Appendix
• Bibliography