Internationalization at home: time for review and development?

ABSTRACT

Internationalization is a key contemporary debate within Higher Education (HE). Many universities worldwide proclaim their ‘international’ status, citing quantitative indicators, particularly international student and staff recruitment and outbound student mobility data to illustrate this. In this paper, we focus on the non-mobile majority of the academic community. We foreground internationalization at home (IaH) and the underlying social, academic and intercultural learning benefits of an internationalized university experience. We explore how IaH is understood and operationalized in two universities in the United Kingdom and Portugal via a multiple case study. Qualitative data from 12 stakeholder interviews are analysed, generating five themes about operational understandings and practices of IaH. Findings identify relevant explanatory factors that may assist other institutions to understand, enact and communicate about IaH. We highlight the need for further empirical research to provide insights into how this key dimension of internationalization is being operationalized across other European HE institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Internationalization
• at home
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sue Robson is Professor of Education at Newcastle University where she leads a Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Research Group. Her research interests include the internationalization of higher education and its impacts on teaching, learning and university culture and values.

Joana Almeida is a Research Associate at Newcastle University where she develops research in the internationalization of higher education and intercultural communication. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Aveiro, Portugal, and was a visiting scholar at SIT Graduate Institute, USA. She is a former Erasmus student and member of the Erasmus Student Network Aveiro.

Alina Schartner is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University where she teaches and researches intercultural communication. Her research interests include the internationalization of higher education and the social psychology of communication. She is currently serving as Secretary of the International Association of Language and Social Psychology (IALSP).

ORCID

Joana Almeida http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6647-5960

Notes

1. The XIX Portuguese Democratic Government introduced in 2014 the longed-for International Student Status which fixes a special regime for international student access to undergraduate and integrated Master's studies in public HEIs in Portugal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Erasmus+Strategic Partnerships Grant 2016–2018 [grant number 2016-1-UK01-KA203-024354].