Institutional approaches for building intercultural understanding into the curriculum: an Australian perspective

Abstract

Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. Since World War II, seven million immigrants from more than 150 countries have settled in Australia. Since that time, Federal governmental changes to its policies on immigration has recognized the importance of cultural diversity in its population. Educational institutions have also responded by initiating a variety of strategies and developing curricula aimed at achieving equitable education and social outcomes and promote the acceptance of people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. This paper first examines how Australia has developed policy that has enabled education to become its third largest export market worth more than AUD$18 billion in 2014–2015. It focuses on some of the state and federal government policies that have encouraged the internationalization within the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors and then gives an overview of some of the institutional strategies and policies that have been implemented at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) at university level and geospatial science undergraduate discipline level. A range of challenges at the governmental, institutional and discipline level faced by those individual academics wishing to incorporate internationalization into their respective curricula are investigated.

Keywords:

• Internationalization
• intercultural understanding
• curricula
• global mobility

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded under grant number LP120200319 for the work related to ICU at primary and secondary school level.