In this editorial we briefly introduce starting points for work on internationalisation in UK universities with some thoughts on globalisation. We also comment on the notions of intercultural competences and frameworks for recognising global citizenship before concluding with some highly schematic comments on institutional frameworks. The papers in this special issue speak for themselves and our purpose here is to foreground selected issues and also to indicate areas in the papers that will, we hope, be taken up through the journal blog and through additional research. Our authors come from the UK and the US and this brings with it some specific issues and themes that we anticipate will provide a focus for wider debates about the meaning of internationalisation. It is unfortunate that we were not able to secure papers from other countries for this issue but again we will be encouraging wider debate through the blog and in further issues.
One starting point is to note the range of connections and linkages embedded in the work of all universities but not necessarily across the board within each university. Some of these linkages are referred to in the papers in terms of programmes, curriculum development, research and institutional organisation. We also have examples of how international students can volunteer and work in the local communities in which they may temporarily find themselves. Drawing on agencies such as the Development Education Association and their use of the Oxfam curriculum for global citizenship as a contribution to the development of global citizenship approaches is also a good exemplar. We have a filmed presentation to the C-SAP 2008 annual conference and Philip Garrahan from Sheffield Hallam University brings experience of the connectivity at the level of the British Prime Minister’s Initiative. The range of local employers and social networks for international and other students is also an important form of connection.
Much of the work is now directed towards moving away from internationalisation as student recruitment and student mobility to internationalisation as experience for all, points made in some detail in the papers by Caruana, Jones and Killick. Our authors point to the conceptual, ideological shifts at work here.
There is a question for many in universities — is the development of work such as transnational provision, or international student recruitment something that is of a different order from regular local connections? Can you develop an international presence if you do not already have regular local, regional, national connections and have such across a range of provision at faculty or departmental level? Part of the issue here is that while the range of connections is important these may simply exist below the institutional radar. Certainly a department or course team seeking to respond to requests or requirements to ‘internationalise’ the student experience or to secure new international markets without such pre-existing connectivity is going to find matters very difficult. It will be increasingly difficult because the management and administrative requirements may become unbalanced and may be resented. Anyone limited to experience of single course delivery in a specific location is at a disadvantage if asked to introduce forms of internationalisation. Elspeth Jones shows clearly why Leeds Metropolitan University chose to create a faculty for the international, how that was regarded, and ultimately, how it has succeeded in supporting changing forms of connection across the university. Our point about a starting point is that there has to be recognition of the necessity of working at different levels and such understandings have to be in place if the global and the local are going to connect. It is this basis that Darla Deardorff takes in her approach to intercultural competences.
All the papers in this issue build from and explore a set of themes around internationalisation that we can identify in contemporary UK higher education setting:
The landscapes of all the disciplines in the university as discourses of the local and the international. For social scientists this is at once obvious — all our disciplines deal with the global and the local and the explanations for social structures etc. Hopefully they all position and debate how students engage across the global and the local. Not everyone can be involved in work with different communities, although many are, and often the forms of connection in departments are simply not known about. The paper by Garner and Nollent shows this concern for finding out how far disciplines in their faculty work on the international as a start point for a substantial project. The Leeds Metropolitan University contributors to this special issue all bring in this point. The difficulty in any university arises if people say ‘well of course our discipline says or does. and either that represents an assimilationist approach or knowledge as commodity approach.
The second point is to draw on the sort of work that is being done in the social sciences and humanities but by no means only in those disciplines at the moment. We will expand on this in a minute but it is a requirement to hold both a political and economic analysis that is attuned to recent developments in higher education and an analysis that is what for the moment we can call a postmodern approach. That needs to be fleshed out. David Killick points to this division in his paper and Agnieszka Ignatowicz and her colleagues at Aston address a good part of it in their paper.
There is a point about differences between practices that are aimed at representation and practices that address signifying. This difference is important because it describes though it does not explain some of the slippages and disjunctions in institutional approaches and we will come to this later.
Explanations have to address these points and taken together that is something this issue of ELiSS does do. We also know how varied and complex the literature is. David Killick is right to say that instead of always starting with acknowledgements of the admittedly central work of Leask and Knight from Australia and Canada we could start with UK work. The Higher Education Academy is a good starting point and Caruana and Spurling’s 2007 review is the sort of starting point we need. Here Viv Caruana develops that analysis within a pedagogic context to pose questions that are critical for all academics and managers.
Globalisation
Social science readers in particular will be familiar with the debates and the rapidly developing research on globalisation. While we do not take all of the ‘postmodern turn’ as a means of differentiating cultural experience in the last 20 years from what went on previously we do not think it can be ignored. What we consider to be sterile is the discussion of ‘digital natives’ and Y2000 young people as being either qualitatively different from previous student generations or as learning in different ways, or even of using technology differently. There are differences of course but these need to be explored through other lenses. We accept that many students do different things with technology and are connected to others in different ways from previous student generations but that is a description and there often is a rush to conflate such description with explanation but often from very little data. Twenty first century workplaces are changing rapidly, as are employer requirements, but that is not met in any way by the claims of the ‘wow aren’t kids doing different things’ brigade who seem to us to confuse data with still to be developed categories for analysis, let alone anything more substantial in terms of explanation. What we are questioning is the assumption that e-learning/eactivity and international provision goes together automatically because all learners are using social software.
A point worth bringing out here is what Appadurai terms the use of ‘scapes’. Dave Killick takes this up in his paper in more detail. While the term ‘scape’ can be over used it is aimed at bringing out the fluidity and mobility and how it is not really expressible in terms of an older sociology of assimilation and accommodation. This is why an analysis of globalisation through textual and cultural practices is worth pursuing. Both Caruana and Killick take up this question, which also underpins Deardorff’s analysis.
We need accounts of globalisation which do not create simple binaries and do not simply juxtapose poles such as hierarchical versus flat structures for instance. That sort of distinction is not useless but equally it is not of much help unless it is incorporated into an analysis that uses categories that actually deconstruct the terms of the debate in order to provide analytic descriptions. One way in which we can take this forward is to make a distinction between instrumental reflections and ontological reflections (Affordances for Learning, 2008) which does seek to ground the constructivist approaches espoused by several of our contributors to support ontological reflection.
Our third point for departure was a distinction between representational and signifying practices. We can suggest that many of the practices associated with modernity are representational. They seek a level of universalisation, a homogenisation of identity rather than recognition of the hybrid and syncretic. Against this we can pose forms of signifying which take seriously contradictory positionings, a destabilising of identities, what Saskia Sassen and others explore under deterritorialisation. A modernist approach to curriculum if confronted with rather troublesome alternatives or questionings might say, ‘let’s see what you want to say and let’s see how we can incorporate such understandings in a public manner’. The ‘we’ of this is interesting! Alternative approaches do not deny a public response of course but what they do is blend academic work and understandings, often using feeling rather than fact.
Of course our three requirements: a synergy between global and local practices even if contradictory, social and cultural understandings of globalisation, a move to signifying rather than representing, are starting points. Potentially they point to a very different curriculum experience for all. Much of the research and project activity held on the HE Academy website provides a basis for such changes. None of the papers in the present issue comes from people working in this new environment as yet. What the papers do is give outlines and guidance on how things might be different. One key area here is that of the intercultural.
Intercultural and global citizenship
We invited Darla Deardorff as an expert on intercultural learning to contribute to this special issue and were very pleased she has done so. Her work has shown how experts do not agree on the terms of the debates although she was able to establish some workable propositions. This in itself may bring out the slipperiness of living and learning in the ethnoscapes of contemporary life referred to earlier. Deardorff uses different cultural perceptions including one from Africa to bring out the taken for granted dominance of western understandings.
She raises questions over how all in HE or schools can assess their openness, their ways of going about learning and teaching and how they might respond in different situations. Her respondents reflect on the intercultural in ways that suggest the level of ontological reflection referred to earlier — they are reviewing their lives and their professional understandings. The questions she poses can be answered in different ways. In the UK, as elsewhere, we are familiar with specific training and educational programmes for cultural awareness, which extend back to at least the early 1980s. But such programmes may have limited impact unless they are located within institutional cultural understandings to create value. Institutions have to recognise the possibly hybrid forms of existence that so many have. Thus our sense of signifying rather than achieving agreed textual representation is important in this work.
Darla Deardorff’s teaching is of course in the US and the results with students will be echoed by many in the UK. One thing we need to take from her paper is to ask about comparison across sectors and institutions. How do programmes and debates on the intercultural compare and contrast between countries and regions? Within the UK, for instance, following devolution we have several differences over what is expected of our newly qualified schoolteachers. Thus Northern Ireland expects newly qualified teachers to demonstrate mission, ethical understanding and to engage in value-based approaches. Scotland requires teachers to engage with philosophical ideas in a changing society and to demonstrate ability to discuss principles. Meanwhile England only requires its newly qualified teachers to demonstrate positive values, attitudes and behaviour they expect from children and young people. It is hardly fanciful to suggest these requirements contribute to the shaping of the intercultural experiences of children and young people who go on to enter higher education.
We can also raise questions over global citizenship, what it means and how we can achieve it. Both Caruana and Killick address this theme directly. Both authors bring out potential problems if standards for the recognition of such global citizenship become fossilised and become part of either an assimilationist programme or an uneasy form of institutional accommodation to changing policies. We need a fusing of work on globalisation with ethical approaches and requirements. Thus work on cultural understandings should no longer be a bolt on, or special part of a course. This raises challenges for institutions.
Institutional approaches
Our comments here are schematic. We suggest the papers can be seen as a whole. Simon Sweeney writes here from the viewpoint of a specific course and that is helpful. He brings out how tutors can work with different understandings. Largely concerned with textual representation as a necessary requirement of effective learning he brings out the level of work and effort that is required. The paper from Iain Garner and Andrea Nollent moves up to a faculty level and covers the first part of a large and demanding intervention project. The work outlined here shows how internationalisation is not simply a matter of building student numbers or projects. Rather, they show there has to be a catalyst for change and such catalysts need to be able to communicate directly with others with senior responsibilities. This particular Sheffield Hallam work takes an approach through curriculum design and module building. However, what the authors bring is not an externalised set of modules suddenly made available, but rather, work which builds on the achievements of many over a long period of time. Finally, Leeds Metropolitan brings an institution-wide perspective where both small-scale and major changes worked together. Not always in harmony of course as Elspeth Jones brings out. But the comparatively simple device of a daily reflection caught on, had an impact way beyond the classrooms of the university. In their different ways the authors of papers on faculty and institution-wide developments show that change takes place over different time-scales. We have to pose beside this the time and space requirements that social and cultural shifts and changes require. Thus to ask questions over learner identity in higher education today, and how much more so in 20 years time, is no longer a simple matter of data collecting in a few classrooms. It is not just that the classroom experiences are distributed globally, though they are, it is far more about the ways by which experiences and sense of self are mediated, signified, and re-worked.
Relationships and approaches to teaching
The final theme we point to here is about teaching and student teacher relationships. Much has been written in different pedagogical research contexts about the nature of the student-teacher relationships, but exploring learning and teaching within international contexts brings with it some additional sets of questions and themes. Teaching international students requires a tutor to reflect upon their own notion of the student-tutor relationships, as evidenced through Kevin Nield and Viv Thom’s discussion of ‘empathy’ and ‘heart’. They point in their own research to the mismatch of expectations between tutors and students about respective roles. They point to a need for the accommodation of each others starting points in these relationships and necessary shifts in approach to make learning and teaching relationships viable.
We hope you enjoy reading these papers and would like to invite readers to comment either on specific papers or on the issue as a whole through the ELiSS blog.