Curriculum internationalisation: identity, graduate attributes and ‘altermodernity’

Abstract

Internationalisation is a complex and contested term, which UK higher education is only now defining for itself. I focus on specific rationales for internationalisation, arguing that it is to be interpreted as the educational response to globalisation. It is argued that curriculum internationalisation can enable students to situate themselves, and be helped to responsibly navigate the ‘liquid flows’ which challenge their self-identity. This paper proposes that self-identification as a ‘global citizen’ and the ‘attributes’ of cross-cultural capability and global perspectives can form the basis for a values-based internationalised university curriculum across the disciplines, enabling students to make their way in the world.

Keywords:

• internationalisation
• curriculum
• cross-cultural capability
• identity
• graduate attributes

’Universities are places, perhaps above all, for the formation of student identities.’

(Barnett and Di Napoli, 2008a: 161)

Section 1

UK higher education and internationalisation

Since the turn of the millennium, ‘internationalisation’ has become increasingly visible in the discourse of UK higher education (HE). Reports, strategies and research projects (Bourne et al, 2006; Caruana and Spurling, 2007; Fielden, 2007; Fielden et al, 2007; Hudson and Todd, 2000; Lunn, 2006; McKenzie et al, 2003; Middlehurst and Woodfield, 2007; Trahar, 2007; Universities UK, 2005), conferences (Bournemouth University, 2008; British Council, 2004, 2006, 2008; HEA, 2007, 2009; Oxford Brookes, 2008, 2009) and themes within conferences, journal articles (too numerous to cite) including this special edition, books (Brown and Jones, 2007; Atfield and Kemp, 2008; Jones, 2009) and related guidelines, and case studies and training materials spanning the HEA’s subject centres crowd a previously rather barren space. (Note, for example, the absence of internationalisation in Dearing’s report (1997a) on the role of HE in the UK.)

In the year 2008–2009 at least four UK universities launched units dedicated to some aspect of internationalisation (Bournemouth University’s Centre for Global Perspectives, Oxford Brookes University’s Centre for International Curriculum Inquiry and Networking, UCL’s Centre for Applied Global Citizenship and Leeds Metropolitan University’s Centre for Academic Practice and Research in Internationalisation). Given the UK’s comparatively belated interest in this area, we should not be surprised to find contention and confusion surrounding the term, and a tendency hitherto to seek clarification in definitions and descriptions drawn from North America and Australasia is understandable (for example, the many citations for the works of Janet Knight and Betty Leask (Altbach and Knight, 2007; Knight, 1997, 2003, 2004; Leask, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004)). In this historical perspective, it is hard to see the validity of Professor Trainor’s claim that ‘[m]ost observers will agree that the UK higher education sector has been in the vanguard of internationalisation’ (Fielden, 2008: foreword), not least in the context of a report which itself adopts Jane Knight’s (1994) definition of the term.

At the same time as UK HE has been adopting, adapting or ignoring the movement to internationalise, UK schools have been given very strong steers regarding the ‘global dimension’ in the curriculum (DfES, 2004, 2005). This, I believe, is highly relevant to how the HE sector might respond to the globalising world in which its graduates will need to find their place and make their way. There has been an almost simultaneous drive towards ‘citizenship’ education (Crick, 1998), and the ensuing debates around what citizenship can mean in the context of multiculturalism and globalisation are of consequence to the notions of ‘global’ citizenship and ‘altermodernism’ referenced below. Of particular significance to the role universities may play in the (re)location of self-identity is Olser and Starkey’s call for all citizenship education to be directed towards a cosmopolitanism in which ‘educated cosmopolitan citizens will be confident in their own identities’ and will see their responsibilities to others ‘within the local community and at a global level’ (Osler and Starkey, 2003: 276). At the same time, we see issues of identity arising in a number of other discussions in HE: the challenges of supercomplexity (Barnett, 2000); the challenges to disciplinarity (Kreber, 2009a); the blurring of boundaries between the ‘academic’ and the ‘market’ or the ‘consumer’ (Barnett and Di Napoli, 2008c). It is likely that each of these challenges to the identity of the university is also reflected in the ongoing social construction of internationalisation within the academic community.

Hitherto, consonant with the marketisation of HE, the predominant approach to internationalisation in the UK has been a single focus on the for-profit recruitment of international students (and possibly also the creation of ’offshore’ or ‘transnational’ delivery of parts of the curriculum to international students in their home countries). For many of us, it is unfortunate but not surprising that this economic and performative driven conceptualisation (Harris, 2008; van der Wende, 2001) seems to have informed not only the first Prime Minister’s Initiative on the international development of HE in 1999, but also PMI2 (see Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2006). Indeed, one feature of the internationalisation movement is the degree to which dimensions beyond that of student recruitment are being driven through unfunded local initiatives, often by chalk-face enthusiasts in individual institutions. There are echoes of other politically driven, centrally funded drives, such as widening participation, where a similarly narrow view focuses on recruitment while the substantive considerations of purpose, impacts, value-added, curriculum, delivery and campus diversity in relation to the student experience are left in abeyance. However, a broader conceptualisation of internationalisation in the UK is now beginning to gain recognition (Caruana and Spurling, 2007), with the global curriculum dimension at subject level specifically perhaps being led in part by QAA benchmark statements (Lunn, 2008). Speaking of the ‘global university’ in the introduction to a recent report from the Observatory on Borderless Education, David Pilsbury acknowledges that ambitions in this direction require ‘[the] “international” to pervade everything a university does and for it to be embedded in a strategic and operational framework. Internationalisation strategies that are simplistic and backward looking are not fit for purpose in a complex world driven by ideas and relationships’ (Observatory on Borderless Education, 2007: 3). While internationalisation and ambitions to become a global university are not synonymous (few will achieve the status of global university, but to survive as a university at all worthy of the name in the twenty-first century requires every institution to engage seriously with internationalisation), the point about pervasiveness is pertinent to both endeavours.

Taking internationalisation to be a long-term process (or, better, a series of interrelated processes) which affects all aspects of an institution (pervasiveness), my intention here is to present a rationale which might underpin the endeavour, along with an associated model of graduate attributes. Although it is possible to find discussion around rationales in the literature, again it is usually necessary to go beyond work published in the UK to find much systematic attention to these (Knight, 1997, Qiang, 2003, Warner, 1992). In most discussions and analyses of rationales, it seems that those concerned with academic/educational outcomes may receive the least attention (Lewis, 2007). Given the potential of internationalisation to transform the student learning experience, and the outcomes of that experience, this seems both unfortunate and to some degree puzzling (though the strong focus on international recruitment along with neglect in supporting colleagues in their responses to often large influxes of international students may well have something to do with the academic community being reluctant to embrace internationalisation as its own).

It is not uncommon to find recognition that the changing shape of the world of the twenty-first century requires a review of our current university provision. However, among those calling for such a review it is often the case that, even when a nod is given to global citizenship or other ethical stances, the focus is principally on issues such as employability and global competitiveness. For example:

‘To respond to these challenges [of globalisation], it is essential that our institutions of higher education graduate globally competent students. Without global competence our students will be ill-prepared for global citizenship, lacking the skills required to address our global security needs, and unable to compete successfully in the global marketplace.’

(Brustein, 2007: 3)

I am not seeking to argue against the importance of graduate employability, but to suggest that it is only part of the picture.

The thrust into ‘skills’ has paralleled the marketisation of HE, with students cast as ‘consumers’ and businesses as our ‘clients’. Universities compete (locally and internationally) for market share, and increasingly ‘sell’ themselves through the broad ephemera of location, facilities, celebrity and brand. This mono-dimensional engagement with globalisation is leaving the university itself, and all members of its community, with a ‘crisis of identity’ (Lapworth, 2008: 163; see also other contributions to the same volume), the descriptions of which entirely echo those in much of the literature on the postmodern condition more generally.

Yet we all know that the challenges of globalisation extend well beyond global markets — and there are certainly more fundamental issues to be addressed if we truly aspire to graduate globally competent students. These challenges require a quite radical review of the student experience, especially, though not exclusively, that offered through our undergraduate curricula (though beware too of the ‘skills’ knocking at the postgraduate door). The fragmenting forces of a globalising world challenge how we shape our identities, how we relate to the growing diversity in those others with whom interaction is inevitable, and how we then envision our responsibilities in relation to those global others. Herein lie fundamental considerations for ‘higher’ education, situated as we are at sites of personal development and learning where values are adopted, ethics explored and identity formation is in process if not completion (Baxter Magolda, 2009). This is the context for the rationale for internationalisation elaborated below.

To begin with I set out six propositions leading into what I refer to as a ’developed’ view of internationalisation (Killick, 2007).

Propositions underpinning a ‘developed’ view of internationalisation

1. A university should seek to provide an education for all its students that is ‘fit for purpose’.

2. An education offering ‘fitness for purpose’ today is one which will enable our students to make their way in the world of today and the worlds of tomorrow.

3. The world we inhabit is undergoing rapid changes in many dimensions, through processes broadly grouped under the term ‘globalisation’.

4. These changes involve technological, economic, material, cultural, social, environmental and personal connectivity, spanning globally differentiated life-worlds.

5. To make our way within this globalising world, we must constantly engage in extending the horizons of our life-world. To facilitate that process, graduates need both a ‘global identity’ and attributes which take them beyond the knowledge and skills traditionally delivered within a narrowly discipline-focused curriculum.

6. Internationalisation in this context is about delivering a student experience (principally but not exclusively through the formal and informal curriculum) that will enable our graduates to develop such a global identity along with attributes to enable engagement (agency).

Being ‘beyond’ the traditional subject discipline and ‘across’ the university may be seen to pose a difficulty in the context of UK three-year degrees, which are typically tightly structured and focused, with little room for ’additional’ knowledge or skills. However, this also offers an advantage over contexts (for example, the USA) where longer programmes with less rigid credit requirements have tended to allow the international or intercultural to be dealt with as a peripheral subject area rather than being situated in the subject itself. In relation to diversity, Kreber (2009b: 6) makes the point that ‘it stands to reason’ for all those engaging with students to ‘respond positively to different dimensions of diversity and employ inclusive practices’. While incontestable in itself, surely such behaviour must also extend to interrogating how the discipline itself responds to diversity. This has been most prominently explored through feminist critiques, but there are other voices to be heard, geographically, culturally, racially and temporally distributed. For this and other reasons, I propose that curriculum internationalisation must be taken on as the responsibility of each discipline area, rather than left as a matter to be dealt with centrally. Nonetheless, to guide the process of internationalising the curricula within the disciplines, it may be helpful to outline some of the core attributes which all our students might find beneficial as they move on to make their way in the supercomplex world of ‘continual challenge and insecurity’ (Barnett, 2000: 167). The nature of those attributes is in part determined by the world we anticipate our graduates inhabiting, and in part by the nature of the role they might play within that world. This second implies a consideration of the part which universities can or should play in enabling students to take action (‘agency’) based upon ethical or values-based positions.

However much those within academia and many of those ‘looking in’ may think otherwise, universities do not stand outside the world and cannot hide behind flags of academic ‘neutrality’; we are ‘more than a spectator of society’ (Green and Barblan, 2004: 15). As already alluded to, in the wake of market forces, universities have in recent decades been driven to play their social role out through a shift to key skills and employability (dumbing down by skilling up). Barnett and Di Napoli (2008c) offer a host of perspectives to suggest that this process has stripped the academy of its identity. However, it is a mistake to attribute this loss solely to our ‘local difficulties’. Universities, disciplines, staff and students are also located in the global flows and associated uncertainties of postmodernity. Shifting our focus from skills to values, from performing to being, might be an appropriate way to help us reestablish some common core. It must be acknowledged that assigning to HE a role of encouraging or developing values seems anathema to some (see, for example, Shephard, 2008). Yet a view of knowledge and education which believes it can be value-free is naive; the question is ‘not whether, but which values ought to be promoted’ (Case, 1993: 320). In defending the inclusion of the values of a global perspective in the curriculum, Collins invites academics to ‘explore the sometimes hidden values and exclusiveness that underpin their practice’, refuting ‘the notion that any academic activity is value free’ (Collins, 2005: 224). As obvious examples, consider the value positions taken by the academy in respect of scholarship, intellectual property, academic freedom or research ethics; more broadly, we actively oppose racism and sexism, and espouse tolerance and the validity of human rights. Barnett goes so far as to assert that ‘a university cannot, with dignity, retain the title of ‘university’ unless it upholds the collective virtues of tolerance and respect for persons’ (Barnett, 2000: 27).

Mayo (2003: 42) cites Richard Shaull’s foreword to Friere’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, asserting there are only two stances for education:

‘Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.’

(Freire, 1970: 13–14)

It may not be clear whether he was advocating most stongly for education for conformity or for freedom, but Dearing proposed that good HE in the UK ‘can impart tolerance, openness, and the capacity to inject positive forms of social interaction’ (Dearing, 1997b: 23) (my italics). Dewey (1916/1966), the founder of much educational thinking, saw education as the basis for healthy democracy. At the other extreme, Mao Tse Tung ousted the academy for its anti-revolutionary conservatism. Education and values cannot be dissociated, and so it is important to recognise universities as ‘not simply sharing values with the rest of society but also helping to shape society’ (Robinson and Katulushi, 2005: 256). This line is, of course, replete with well-rehearsed difficulties — who decides (and on what authority) what shape ‘we’ want? How do we mediate between those whose preferred shapes are opposed? And so forth. Opening the debate is a can of worms which cannot be avoided once we embark on the process of curriculum internationalisation. At a time of such global change (and local ‘threat’), it is a debate we should welcome.

Taking this view of value-driven rather than value-free HE, enabling students to make their way implies engaging responsibly with the world. Enabling graduates to take a responsible stance is a value position which underpins this paper and the model of curriculum internationalisation advocated within it. In the next section I briefly explore particular features of the world our graduates may inhabit and how these relate to issues of identity and the graduate attributes which may be relevant to HE students regardless of their disciplinary home. In this, I recognise the danger of positioning myself among the ‘wrongheaded’ by perhaps offering ‘unrealistic and totalitarian responses’ (Barnett, 2000: 45), but I hope it will be possible to see that, in arguing for a location of the self which offers greater personal security as a co-citizen in a globalising world and some of the attributes which will enable dialogues and less ethnocentric critical engagement with alterity, I am attempting a model to open up rather than close down ontological and epistemological horizons.

Section 2

Global identity and graduate attributes in a globalising world

Baxter Magolda correctly proposes that our students ‘require a transformation from dependency to self-authorship, or the capacity to internally define one’s beliefs, identity and social relations’ (Baxter Magolda, 2009: 143). However, we also need to recognise that the challenges of identity formation have dimensions beyond a relinquishing of dependency. The discourses of globalisation present a complex and confusing montage of causes and consequences; this is hardly surprising given the multiple sites in which it is enacted. Indeed, this complexity and its surrounding uncertainties are themselves the prominent feature of the globalisation process as much as they are of its critiques. Liquid modernity (Bauman, 1991, 1998) is a context which bounds the life-worlds of our students, and should therefore inform the interpretations of our disciplines. One significant dimension to this is constructed by the shifting ethnoscapes (Appadurai, 1997, 2006/1966) which increasingly add complexity to our lived experience: ‘the landscapes of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals’ (Appadurai, 2006/1966: 182). Hall proposes that in the postmodern world, far from seeking to achieve fixed identity or identities, our problem is ‘primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open’ (Hall, 1966: 18). Ray goes so far as to propose that in the globalising world we can (or must) accept eclecticism in our ‘choice’ of identities (Ray, 2007). Whether or not we accept that we can make our way in the world under such a fluid state of identity, it is clear that living with alterity challenges our self-identity (constituted at least in part through essentialised constructs of the ‘other’) and can lead us to close down the horizons of our life-world in defence of the socialised ethnocentrism which helps secure the self. The notion of ethnocentrism is a prominent one in discussions of self within the literature on intercultural identity, sensitivity and adaptation (Bennett, 1997, 2008; Bennett, 1986, 1993a, 1993b; Matsumoto, 2001; Matsumoto and Juang, 2004; Matsumoto et al, 2001, 2004; Matsumoto and Yoo, 2005). Kim asserts that it is our culture which ‘allows us to define who we are and what is meaningful’ (Kim, 2001: 58). Experience which leads us to question our cultural norms and values, and thereby to shift our sense of self-identity, is seen to be psychologically disturbing, requiring:

‘… a disappointment of the narcissistic assumption of the superiority of ‘us’ over ‘them’. It challenges us to be willing to become involved with otherness, to take up others’ perspectives by reconstructing their perspectives for ourselves, and understanding them from within.’

(Alred et al, 2006: 2)

Education, as one of the most powerful forces of socialisation, can be seen to have a role to play in helping us swim rather than sink among this liquid tide of local and global others. If we are to help students cope with their disappointed narcissism and readjust their ‘inner compass … away from the concentration on the polarity of the own and the foreign to an attentiveness for what might be common and connective whenever [they] encounter things foreign’ (Welsch, 1999: 201), this will require active attention to identity formation, including deliberate focus within the mainstream curriculum.

As multiple others nudge the borders of our life-world whenever we enact our daily lives, images of the differentiation in their lived experiences also flash into consciousness and force upon us a recognition of the impacts we have on the lives of geographically and socially distant others. These others have always been with us; some of ‘us’ have always been in the position of living at the expense of those others, but the global financescapes of postmodernity have positioned so many more of us in the role of the consumer/exploiter, while the ethnoscapes and global mediascapes continuously assert these global others into our consciousness. In such a context, I suggest, it becomes increasingly difficult to consider ourselves ethically as anything other than co-citizens of a single planet. Yet Bauman argues that postmodern ‘life strategies’ are fragmentary forces, leaving human connection distant and vague, and leading us to ‘cast the Other primarily as the object of aesthetic, not moral, evaluation; as a matter of taste, not responsibility’ (Bauman, 1996: 33). This is inadequate, not only as a response to the challenges to selfidentity indicated above, but also as a response to the global ethical issues posed by the juxtaposed other (Dower, 2003; Dower and Williams, 2002). Additionally, the complexities of the globally interconnected world can lead to a sense of impotence; agency is threatened by the lack of security, fixity, knowledge and procedural schema, which may enable us to make our way in the world. My suggestion here, then, is that universities have a legitimate role to play in helping students engage with the processes of identity formation (or ’life-world becoming’) (Barnett, 2000:14). Specific dimensions to this are:

• in the context of personal development amidst the turbulence of alterity — locating their sense of self among the complexities of living with and between global others

• to challenge the ethnocentrism of socio-cultural socialisation processes as a basic underpinning for a global ethic — understanding their role as co-inhabitants of the planet with those global others

• as underpinning to a sense of personal agency — enabling them to act effectively and responsibly in their personal lives and through the professional practice arising from their discipline.

Such aspirations form the rationale for the interpretation of internationalisation presented here. I believe that they are at least suggestive of a positive response to the limiting visions which frame the marketisation agenda on the one hand and much of the discourse on postmodernism on the other; perhaps enabling a global identity in which the other and the self are both defined less through the kaleidoscopic lenses of what they are not. Holding a value, being responsible, is a matter of identity (I am) and the underpinning to wanting or being inclined to act. Self-identification as a global citizen, then, is a prerequisite, but on its own does not enable me to enact my values (I can). Below, I propose two clusters of abilities, or attributes, which might be integrated into any discipline.

A starting point for constructing the ‘I can’ dimension in an internationalised curriculum, and for making our objectives transparent to ourselves, our students and other legitimate stakeholders in HE, is through developing and publishing university statements of graduate attributes. While there may appear to be little distinction to be drawn between attributes and skills, and certainly within a marketised HE discourse there is a danger of attribute statements being limited and limiting, I believe the two can be fundamentally distinct when attributes are crafted with attention to making our way responsibly in a globally interdependent world. Suggestions for outcomes relating to global perspectives can be found in the literature on sustainability and development education (Case, 1993; McKenzie et al, 2003; Shiel, 2006; Shiel and Takeda, 2008), and relevant objectives are comprehensively elaborated in the World Declaration on Higher Education (UNESCO, 1998). Australia has a national requirement for universities to articulate graduate attributes, (Barrie, 2004, 2007). As an example, Leask (1999) has reported on the University of South Australia’s comprehensive set of graduate attributes. The seventh set of attributes is reproduced below.

A graduate who demonstrates international perspectives as a professional and a citizen will:

• 7.1 display an ability to think globally and consider issues from a variety of perspectives

• 7.2 demonstrate an awareness of their own culture and its perspectives and other cultures and their perspectives

• 7.3 appreciate the relation between their field of study locally and professional traditions elsewhere

• 7.4 recognise intercultural issues relevant to their professional practice

• 7.5 appreciate the importance of multicultural diversity to professional practice and citizenship

• 7.6 appreciate the complex and interacting factors that contribute to notions of culture and cultural relationships

• 7.7 value diversity of language and culture

• 7.8 appreciate and demonstrate the capacity to apply international standards and practices within the discipline or professional area

• 7.9 demonstrate awareness of the implications of local decisions and actions for international communities, and of international decisions and actions for local communities.

Looking at each of these, I think it is clear how it is possible to propose notions of ‘graduateness’ through attributes which transcend skills and signal aspirations far beyond employability.

Leeds Metropolitan University’s guidelines for curriculum review document (Killick, 2006a) proposes three attributes around the notion of graduate as global citizen:

• the awareness, knowledge and skills to operate in multicultural contexts and across cultural boundaries

• the awareness, knowledge and skills to operate in a global context

• values commensurate with those of responsible global citizenship.

This document has informed a university-wide curriculum review project at Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Met), and is based upon the twinned concepts of cross-cultural capability and global perspectives (see Jones and Killick, 2007 for a full case study). Cross-cultural capability, originally conceived in the context of the capability movement in HE (Stephenson, 1998), and informed by Sen’s conceptualisation of ‘the substantive freedoms — the capabilities — to choose a life one has reason to value’ (Sen,1999: 74), is essentially concerned with the attributes which may help us make our way as co-citizens of a globalising world; some of these will be generic, others subject-specific. A global perspective offers a worldview to extend the normally ethnocentric horizons which can bound the life-world, and provides the basis for a global ethic which sees individual responsibility as extending beyond the frontiers of my country, my ethnicity, or my culture.

To explore these further, I return to one of the propositions which I suggest underpin a developed view of internationalisation:

• These changes involve technological, economic, material, cultural, social, environmental, and personal connectivity spanning globally differentiated life-worlds.

The personal is highlighted because, as indicated in earlier discussions, this is the frontline of that global connectivity: the site where flowing ethnoscapes eddy through the life-world of every individual, regardless of location or occupation. It is a prerequisite for engagement with civil society, political processes, our colleagues and our masters, our neighbours, and all those at a distance with whom we enact our everyday business of living, establish the planetary systems and processes which shape our environment and our capacities to feed ourselves, seek to resolve conflict by ‘jaw not war’ and engage in every other dimension of the evolving complex global-social world. Negotiating the boundaries which inhibit successful communication in this highly interconnected world requires complex and not always ‘natural’ attributes: precisely the theatre of a supercomplex higher education.

Cross-cultural capability concerns being with cultural others. In addition to identification, it encompasses the abilities to communicate effectively across cultures, and to locate and recognise the legitimacy of other cultural practices in one’s discipline and subsequent personal and professional lives. In a globalising world, these are forms of freedom. Global perspectives is suggestive of a global ethic and notions of global social justice. These offer a life one has reason to value. Each of these has applicability wherever we encounter alterity and wherever we are responsible for inequity. And so, in the communities of multicultural nation states, it has local as well as global relevance.

Embedding such overarching objectives within the curriculum, however, requires complex shifts in content, delivery and assessment. A piecemeal approach, or one which relegates internationalisation to the silos of key skills or PDP, is an inadequate response. A major contention of this paper is that each of us with responsibilities for student learning needs to interrogate the programmes we offer to see how we can better facilitate the identity formation discussed earlier, along with cross-cultural capability attributes and an appreciation for how each of our personal and professional choices impacts upon the highly differentiated life-worlds of those others with whom we share the planet (a ‘global perspective’).

Internationalisation of the curriculum along the lines proposed here supposes a level of ‘intercultural sophistication on the part of the faculty’ (Yershova et al, 2000: 67), along with a personal identification with its underpinning rationales. Not unreasonably, Gunn raises the question of the ability of academic staff ‘to influence the broader personal capabilities of our students’ (Gunn, 2009: 172). This highlights the issue of enabling academic staff to transform themselves and their practice, something ‘which requires significant attention and support’ (Leask, 2008: 64). The process of curriculum review at Leeds Met has been accompanied by an impressive number of initiatives to raise the profile and understanding of internationalisation activity (see, for example, Jones, 2007; Killick, 2008a), and by targeted staff development opportunities. The topic areas of staff development workshops and seminars reflect the kind of focus which might be included in an internationalised curriculum: intercultural communication, culture in professional practice, stereotypes and misattribution, inclusivity, working in intercultural groups, schemas and worldviews, etc. Embedding each of these, incidentally, helps develop generally more inclusive practice which can support diverse students (home and international) in their successful integration into university life. Internationalisation at Leeds Met has also had high-level support, and is strongly evidenced in related university policies and strategies. However, it cannot be argued that internationalisation work is completed. Indeed, in many areas of the university, it has barely begun, and progress is only made when academic colleagues identify with the values, support the objects and are fully supported in their efforts to achieve them. As noted in the opening section of this paper, internationalisation is a long-term process.

Section 3

Summary

UK HE is gaining ground in its own social construction of the concept of internationalisation, fundamentally as a response to the various pressures of globalisation and one which contests the marketisation agenda. In this context, I have presented a rationale for internationalisation as a process of taking forward the university experience to better meet the needs of our students in the turbulence of a globalising world. These needs are both developmental in terms of emergent senses of self-identity based on an ethic of global responsibility, and educational in terms of enabling attributes and of locating disciplines and professional practice in a global perspective. I have sought to demonstrate how appropriate graduate attributes can derive from a university experience which is ‘fit for purpose’, and suggested that such attributes are articulated in the constructs of cross-cultural capability and global perspectives. I have focused on the internationalised curriculum as the principal mechanism through which such attributes may be developed, and suggested that, given this direction, individual disciplines have the responsibility to interrogate the learning experiences and outcomes they offer and demand of their students. Although I have not developed the point, I have also noted that institutions have responsibilities to enable this work through their own practice and the provision of support and staff development opportunities. I should note that I have argued for the importance of a ‘whole institution’ approach to internationalisation elsewhere (for example, Jones and Killick, 2007). Such a pervasive approach is essential. However, all the other dimensions of institutional internationalisation cannot be effective without curriculum, or where it is sidelined to additional or optional modules, as it is the core curriculum which frames learning and thereby opens the horizons of the life-world to the potential of alterity (Bond, 2003; Kehm and Teichler, 2007; Killick, 2006b, 2008b; Paige, 2003).

Bourriaud (2005, 2009) proposes a shift from postmodernism as a new era of altermodernism, which is identified and identifies as ‘global from scratch’, begins to take form. Similarly, in one sense, the project of curriculum internationalisation, as envisaged here, is an educational response to its commodification on the one hand and to the somewhat nihilistic visions of postmodernity on the other, and one through which we might (re)construct fragmenting identities in the self as global citizen. I am proposing that internationalised curricula conceived around this notion may better enable our students to make their way in the world(s) of the future. Perhaps not coincidentally, the university conceived with this at its core may enable academic leadership to pull back from its advancing role of ‘translating between mutually non-comprehending communities’ (Barnett and Di Napoli, 2008b: 204) and establish a new integrity to underpin the identity of the ’academic’, regardless of either discipline base or position on the teacher- researcher continuum. In this regard, internationalisation offers institutions the opportunity to be transparent about their own stance on issues of social justice, global citizenship and the like — for the sake of prospective students, staff, and society more generally.

Biography

Since joining Leeds Metropolitan University in 1991 after a career in EFL, David has played a significant role in developing the university’s distinctive approach to curriculum internationalisation through cross-cultural capability and global perspectives. His publications, workshops and conference presentations in this area have significantly added to internationalisation debate and practice across the UK. David is currently researching the lived experience of students undertaking international mobility and how this relates to learning and development theory.

Appendix

Generic learning outcomes devised by participants in the workshop ‘Graduate attributes for a globalising world’ at the Higher Education Academy Annual Conference, Harrogate, 2 July 2008.

Skills

Students will be able to:

• demonstrate the ability to think critically in a global context

• operate in a diverse and multicultural context

• demonstrate critical self-awareness in inter/multicultural global contexts

• successfully demonstrate the ability to translate ideas of responsible global citizenship into action in terms of:

  • work

  • society/community

  • personal development

• analyse a problem with a global dimension from at least three different perspectives

• communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds.

Knowledge

Students will be able to:

• demonstrate an understanding of the potential of their discipline to unite and divide cultures and communities

• demonstrate knowledge of the relationship between their own culture and that of another culture

• demonstrate a critical understanding of cultural diversity/responsible global citizenship

• demonstrate an understanding of the value of a range of perspectives in their disciplinary field

• identify intercultural issues relevant to professional practice

• demonstrate an understanding of perspectives on globalisation as a contested concept

• demonstrate a knowledge and an understanding of different cultures

• compare systems, contexts and environments from different countries and cultures

• identify intercultural issues relevant to professional practice.

Values and attitudes

None were identified as it was generally felt that these would be problematic to assess.

Note

The thrust of this paper formed the introduction to a workshop on learning outcomes at the 2008 Higher Education Academy Annual Conference. The appendix summarises proposals arising from group work at that workshop.