New developments in internationalisation of higher education

Introduction

Internationalisation has been a strategic vehicle to transform higher education and become a prominent trend in universities across the world in the past decades. Internationalisation of higher education is drawing growing attention from the broader community outside the education sector, especially as its rationales, operations and impacts more closely align with social, cultural, economic and political interests. It is increasingly subject to public policy turbulences related to migration, workforce, post-study work rights and economics. In particular, international education has been growingly used as a mechanism to address skills shortage and support nation-building in some study destination countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Germany and the international education and migration nexus or ‘edugration’ trend (Brunner, 2023) becomes more visible.

Internationalisation of higher education has been affected by the development of digital technologies and both local and global online e-learning markets, while at the same time encountering heightened insecurity and vulnerability to pandemic, financial, geo-political crises and natural disasters. In ‘catching-up’ countries in internationalisation of higher education such as Turkey and Poland, political instability, economic importance, socio-cultural norms and historical legacies, and the country's position as a periphery are seen as national barriers to facilitating international education (Bulut Sahin & Brooks, 2023). These emerging challenges have led to changes and variations in policy frameworks, institutional operations and individual practices in internationalisation of higher education. These issues have significant implications for the quality, recovery, sustainability, and ethical development of international education.

The articles in this Special Issue probe into the re-conceptualisation of international education in diverse ways and to varied extents. However, they underscore a critical need to shed a more humanistic view on internationalisation of higher education. International education should, in essence, be centred around enriching human beings. It is therefore crucial to strive towards humanisation of international education.

Humanisation of international education can take place in various forms. First, humanisation of international education underscores the need for the human values of international education to be more explicitly brought to the fore. Scholars have argued for the critical need to move beyond the discourse framing the value of international students predominantly in economic terms and international education as commercialisation, strongly influenced by reputational status and resourcing (Lomer et al., 2023), to acknowledge international students as human beings with potential to contribute to transnational education, culture, society, local communities and politics (Rizvi, 2020; Soong & Maheepalaa, 2023; Tran, 2020).

Second, humanising international education can be realised through recognising and validating diverse perspectives, experiences, knowledges and ways of building knowledges that students bring to the classroom (Marangell & D’Orazzi, 2023; Sperduti, 2019; Tran, 2013). This enables international education to move away from privileging 'Western' knowledge and dominant ways of thinking, doing and being in the curriculum. Montgomery and Trahar (2023) go further in pointing out that internationalisation could promote coloniality through perpetuating Euro-supremacy or knowledge of former colonisers in teaching, learning and the curriculum while holding (unrealised) potential as mechanism to disrupt the universalisation of privileged knowledges and the coloniality of power.

Third, humanisation of international education underlines institutions’ ethical responsibility to cater for international students and protect their human rights as cross-border subjects who are prone to insecurity, vulnerability and precarity due to their circumstance of temporarily living outside their country of citizenship and residing in another country with limited welfare entitlements and non-citizenship status (Tran, 2020). Placing care and wellbeing at the centre of international education (Deuchar & Gorur, 2023) is intimately interlinked with the promise of creating conditions in which international students as human beings can feel safe and supported to study, live and thrive.

Fourth, humanisation of international education embraces the move to recognise and realise the social responsibility of international education (Brandenburg et al., 2019; Field, 2023; Jones et al., 2021) towards global and local major concerns such as climate changes, inequalities and wars. Fifth, international education can be a powerful vehicle not only for transforming teaching and learning and disrupting elitist mobilities but also for creating a more humanistic and equitable world (Tran & Wall, 2019). This has been illustrated in the research by Matsumoto and Viczko (2023), which highlights the Canadian government policy initiative providing Ukrainian refugees the opportunity to temporarily resettle and engage in education during the war. Another example is the transnational program between Australia’s Western Sydney University, and Vietnam’s University of Economics Ho Chi Minh city, which has educated some refugees, among 90,000 displaced people in nine refugee camps, along the Thai–Myanmar border. As the Australian government does not grant these a student visa because of their displaced status, the Vietnamese government allows them to study in this joint program at the Vietnamese university’s campus and graduate with an Australian degree from Western Sydney University (Field, 2023).

The articles reported in this Special Issue showcase nuanced collective understandings of internationalisation and mobilities in higher education which moves beyond the traditional view around dualisms bound to locations or dimensions of mobilities such as home/abroad and local/global, inbound/outbound and physical/virtual. Scholars argue for the need to revisit these positionings largely defined by dualisms because COVID-19 has exposed how the dualisms themselves and the traditional ways of traversing them have been re-shaped (Breaden et al., 2023). Others call for attention to the mobilities of knowledge and ideas without physical movements, facilitated through transnational collaboration, the advancement of digital technologies and digitalisation of education, curriculum, and virtual community (Yue et al., 2023). Transnational knowledge mobilities and connections without physical travel have the potential to make internationalisation of higher education more inclusive and equitable, moving beyond elitist trends in international education which privilege those who can afford to travel and study abroad.

Re-conceptualisation of internationalisation of higher education

Contributions to this Special Issue explore emerging epistemologies, developments, insights and sources of evidence for re-conceptualising internationalisation of higher education in a changing context. Lomer et al. (2023) analyse the mission statements of universities in the UK to understand how internationalisation has been represented and how this has contributed to the creation and communication of institutional identities throughout the sector. Their model frames internationalisation concepts in mission statements using three dimensions: reputation, purpose, and emotional tone, to identify a set of Weberian idealtypen which are used to cluster institutions and identify features associated with each internationalisation mission type. The analysis shows that internationalisation across a national sector is strongly influenced by reputational status and resourcing a finding that makes clear that the internationalisation policy objectives of governments and sectors are likely to sustain or intensify existing inequalities in a sector particularly in marketised environments such as that operating in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

In 'Learning to unlearn: exploring the relationship between internationalisation and decolonial agendas in higher education', Montgomery and Trahar (2023) probe whether juxtaposing internationalisation and decoloniality is generative in understanding race and whiteness, knowledge production, and positionality. Drawing from the narrative dialogue approach, these colleagues and friends consider how they have modified their own approaches to research and practice in the last decades, also drawing ties among geo-political trends, institutional decision-making, and curricular development. Their reflections are compelling and their guide to the relevant literature provides a useful tool for further engagement. The reader is left considering that both things may be true: internationalisation perpetuates coloniality while holding (unrealised) potential as a disruptive tool.

Studies in this Special Issue have reconceptualised the internationalisation of higher education in our turbulent time based on multiple perspectives. Bulut Sahin and Brooks's (2023) article, for example, raises the question of whether all the countries equally benefited from international higher education as national power inequalities undoubtedly exist between countries, and such power structure influenced the internationalisation of higher education. Taking two case countries, Turkey and Poland, as examples of peripheral European countries, the authors analyse the effects of national contexts on international higher education practices. Four common national challenges are identified: political instability, economic importance, socio-cultural norms and historical legacies, and the country's position as a periphery. By pointing out the problem of the standardised approach to internationalisation, the authors show the importance of decentralised internationalisation strategies for international higher education in these countries.

Using the nation-building lens to reinterpret internationalisation is also addressed in Brunner’s (2023) study. The author introduces the concept of ‘edugration’ to explain that the boundary between international student mobility and immigrant recruitment is becoming blurred in some jurisdictions today. Based on the Canadian case, the paper reveals how the higher education institutions instrumentalised international students as immigration actors and used the logic of nation-building and internationalisation to request public financial support. Using the critical discourse analysis, the author extracts two concepts, ‘border imperialism’ and ‘settler-colonialism’, and described how the higher education sector uses the national building idea through immigration. The study also critically analyses the higher education sector’s economic dependence on international students, seeing them as national subjects and immigration actors but excluding them in student support.

Crisis

International education is shaped as much by crisis as it is by other, more intentional reconceptions and by the shifting realities of the sector nationally and globally (Sutherland & Marshall, 2023). The experience of crisis has most recently been framed by the COVID-19 pandemic but other world events have affected the activities and experiences of international education. Roitman (2014, p. 16) described the impact in the following way:

' … the term "crisis" no longer clearly signifies a singular moment of decisive judgements; we now presume that a crisis is a condition, a state of affairs, and an experiential category. Today, crisis is posited as a protracted and potentially persistent state of ailment and demise.'

Many of these challenges have been predicted by earlier work (Feast & Bretag, 2005) but the scale and complexity of the interconnections and pace of crisis have led to the creation of the neologism 'permacrisis' in an attempt to capture the impact on individuals and institutions (Collins, 2022).

The majority of research tends to explore and conceptualise international education in politically, socially and culturally stabilised contexts while how internationalisation of higher education might take place in war-torn contexts is under-researched, as Oleksiyenko et al. (2023) point out. This article offers critical insights into the premises of internationalisation and identifies challenges facing Ukraine’s universities during a war time. Drawing on interviews and survey responses from Ukrainian professors and administrators in charge of internationalisation at their universities during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this article brings to the fore both the problems and transformative powers of crisis-driven internationalisation of higher education. Findings show the ways in which crisis-driven internationalisation is reshaping the motives, operations and orientations of universities. The study illustrates how university stakeholders adapt their work to reduce human vulnerability and how solidarity and support from international communities are at play to assist them in mitigating fragility in a war-affected country.

International education brings economic and educational contexts together in ways that have important political consequences, not the least of which is the intersection with immigration policy, an area that has become even more complex through the disruption caused by different crises including the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Matsumoto and Viczko (2023) examined how the Canadian higher education system has experienced this since 2021, focusing on how international education is influenced by considerations of race, economics and public safety. They analysed two separate government policy initiatives, one focused on supporting student mobility during the pandemic, the other enabling Ukrainian refugees to temporarily resettle and engage in education during the war. The study shows how international education policy conception and application is influenced by neoliberal economic models and unequal perceptions of desirability regarding different immigrant populations in the Canadian context.

Diverse mobilities

Articles in this Special Issue also showed the new approaches to international mobility in the context of internationalisation, and the increasingly nuanced way that 'mobility' is being framed to respond to the ongoing evolution of educational systems. Despite this, mobility as ‘internationalisation abroad’ is still a dominant concept, although it appears differently in the specific national context. Dai et al.’s (2023) study focuses on why international doctoral students choose Chinese universities to study. Such students’ motivations can be explained by the push and pull factor theories, including macro, meso, and micro factors from nation, institution, and individual levels. The study shows how the choice of destination for studying abroad has changed in recent years and provided implications for quality improvements in emerging hosting countries for international students.

Other articles have shown that mobility in international education does not necessarily mean ‘internationalisation abroad’. Mendoza et al. (2023) focus on ‘internationalisation at home’ and described domestic and international students’ experiences in integration in Finnish higher education. Compared to most studies that exclusively focused on the international students’ experiences, this paper shows both local and international students’ meaning-making on integration and emphasises that integration is not a one-way process. Their expressions of ‘guests with more privilege’ from the domestic students’ perspectives and ‘guests with less opportunities’ from the international students’ perspectives outline the ways in which internationalisation at home should be implemented.

Yue et al. (2023) argue that mobility does not necessarily involve human mobility; knowledge mobility is more common in internationalisation at a distance. Although internationalisation has been challenged by the significant decline in international student mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has given new possibilities for knowledge mobility without human mobility. Based on the ethnographic case study, Yue et al. (2023) identify knowledge mobility without physical movements, including the ICT, curriculum, and virtual community. The findings show that digitalisation is a primary driver of creating knowledge mobility in the context of internationalisation at a distance. However, the authors also suggest the importance of understanding different types of knowledge and their applications in virtual knowledge mobility.

Virtual mobility has become a critical dimension of student mobilities as universities have moved to embrace the digitalisation of higher education, especially since COVID-19, and gone beyond the traditional modalities of mobility. Yet, how to optimise student agency in designing and delivering virtual mobility programs has been largely ignored in the existing scholarship. Drawing on a qualitative action research project, Breaden et al.’s (2023) article analyses the experiences of adopting a Students as Partners (SaP) approach to virtual mobility and involving students in co-designing virtual intercultural exchange experiences which replicate real-life scenarios. The study shows students’ perceptions of growing empowerment, authenticity and self-actualisation which in turn leads to deeper and more conscious appreciation of inclusivity and reciprocity. Findings also suggest the ways in which intercultural capabilities are cultivated through students’ agentive partnerships in virtual intercultural exchanges, beyond simple participation in these programs, that enable them to practise and embody new forms of intercultural communication and behaviours. Endorsing Green (2019) and Cook-Sather et al. (2021), the authors of this article argue for the wider adoption of the SaP approach in the design and delivery of virtual student mobilities and for the re-conceptualisation of the positioning of students in the internationalisation of education.

International students

One of the more enduring issues in international education pertains to student wellbeing and how it shapes directions of the sector. Deuchar and Gorur’s article (2023) considers the potential of care as a guiding principle for focusing on wellbeing and reframing the direction of international education. It draws on the contexts of international education in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia to analyse how both human and non-human actors shape learning, teaching and connections within and beyond classrooms, as key spaces for international education to take place. It discusses three key tennets of how an emphasis on care and wellbeing might offer possibilities to re-think international education policy, institutional support, and research about international students. The authors argue that a focus on care will be crucial to create an environment to enhance the wellbeing of international students and support the quality of international student experiences. Adopting care as a guiding principle is also regarded by the authors as being crucial to redefining and realising the goals of international education itself.

Soong and Maheepalaa (2023) centre international students’ wellbeing as they draw from Sen’s capability approach to evaluate a possible humanisation of internationalisation of higher education. Working alongside a non-profit in South Australia to recruit participants, 75 survey responses and 18 interviews were analysed by the authors. Here, indicators of wellbeing include university community connections; importance of affiliations, respect, and recognition; standard of living; socio-emotional belonging for everyday survival; and spiritual connections. Implications for universities include the necessity of considering the cross-border lives of students as student services are developed and iterated, as well as the imperative of providing ongoing professional development to staff engaging with international students (in short: all staff). Finally, embedding long-term engagement with various non-profit entities in order to co-design effective support mechanisms for international students is positioned as vital.

There have been repeated calls for understanding diversity and social responsibility dimensions of internationalised universities in re-conceptualising international education. Drawing on a social-constructivist lens, Marangell and D'Orazzi's article provides insights into students’ conceptualisation of an ‘internationalised university’. Their study analyses the influence of COVID-19 on students’ perceptions by comparing the responses of those who commenced their studies pre-pandemic, at the start of the pandemic, and mid-pandemic. The findings show that internationally minded strategies and graduate skills are identified as important elements of an internationalised university. The study raises an important point about how diversity was perceived in an ‘active’ manner, beyond simply the presence of diversity, to include fostering effective collaboration, embedding inclusive teaching and learning practices, and being actively anti-racist. Echoing scholars such as Jones et al. (2021) and Brandenburg et al. (2019), the authors of this article urge institutions to pay more attention to and take action to address the social dimensions of internationalisation.

Curriculum, teaching and learning

van den Hende and Riezebos (2023) examine the organisational context and strategies used to embed international perspectives into curriculum. Using a Dutch university as a case study, they present four different disciplinary experiences of internationalisation of curriculum. The work focuses on the way that the change process has been influenced by organisational features experienced individually by academics, as disciplines, and in the context of their institution and its resourcing constraints. A major theme in the results was the tension between individual and disciplinary drivers for internationalisation of the curriculum and the strategies and resources enacted by the institution in support of this. The paper explores the challenges that arise from research and education in fields disciplines with important drivers for internationalisation while operating in national contexts that impose their own priorities and dominant world views. The analysis argues for the adoption of high-engagement holistic change processes that actively consider the diverse identities of academics as well as the norms, values and priorities of disciplines, while also working within the context of the institution, its context, resources, and strategies.

In their contribution highlighting university teachers as units of analysis, Zou et al. (2023) draw from 34 interviews with teachers in a range of disciplines across three Hong Kong universities. Importantly, the authors highlight that the work of instructors must be placed in context: Hong Kong’s political environment is imbued with tension around intersections of the local, regional, and global. Like several other articles in this issue, the authors draw upon Leask’s (2015) framework on Internationalisation of the Curriculum to focus on how instructors engage ‘knowledge’ and facilitate ‘knowing’ throughout their instructional practice. Further, the authors engage their previous work, which indicated five approaches to IoC, ranging from 'focused on course content' to 'focused on "being" in the curriculum'. The data analysed here reveals a typology across disciplines: instructors in 'hard-pure' sciences reflected on the application of science in varied contexts as significant to their instruction whereas the 'soft-pure' disciplines emphasised ‘knowing’ as a practice engaging the lived experiences of learners and the assumptions of knowledge in a given curriculum. This work indicates clear areas for future research, and also poses new questions about time, space, being, and knowledge in relation to the established IoC framework.

Nachatar Singh and Kaur (2023) consider in their piece 'Is teaching and learning in Chinese higher education classrooms internationalized?' how international students at Tsinghua and Wuhan Universities perceive teaching, learning, and internationalisation on their campuses. Their findings show that a range of concerns emerge, including – and resonant with the extant literature on international students across national settings – limited support for connection with Chinese domestic students at the same institutions. Applying thematic analysis to 30 interview transcripts, the authors also identify a language barrier as a key concern (for example, in communicating with instructors and in interpreting assigned texts) and an unmet desire for interactive, dialogic learning as well as for practical and experiential learning. In sum, at the level of the university/higher education institution, this article identifies various areas of interest spanning policy and practice. It suggests interventions in faculty development and student services, both of which play vital roles across the formal, informal, and hidden curricula.