Students, disciplines and ‘Internationalisation-at-home’

Image: Drawings by PierLeb, GNU Free Documentation License.

That higher education should engage with global challenges and promote international collaboration is both a commonplace within the rhetoric of university marketing strategies and more importantly, a core belief for many of us working in HE learning and teaching which fundamentally underpins our academic practice.

Debates around internationalisation within the sector often centre mobility and the flow of students and academics from one national context to another. Yet recent events such as the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the Pandemic, have focussed increased attention on the concept of internationalisation-at-home. The term is defined by Beelen and Jones (2015, 76) as ‘the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the curricula and experiences of students during their studies’. The concept originated in Sweden in the late 1990s. As noted above, the notion of internationalisation-at-home is particularly salient in the context of restricted mobility of students. In line with idealist claims around the broader concept of internationalisation, perceived benefits of internationalisation-at-home include enhanced opportunities for learning, an increase in students’ intercultural competences and the formation of global citizens (Alexiadou et al., 2023, 1.)

In the paper to be discussed at our forthcoming journal club, authors Alexiadou, Kefala and Rӧnnberg (based at the centre for Applied Educational Studies in Umea University), explore how disciplinary contexts influence students’ perspectives on internationalisation-at-home. Drawing on 67 semi-structured interviews, they note clear connections between student understandings of internationalisation and their disciplinary backgrounds and argue that future initiatives to foster internationalisation-at-home should draw on subject-specific approaches and the particular insights of lecturers and subject experts.

Questions to consider

• As the paper notes, the term ‘internationalisation-at-home’ originates from the Swedish context and the late 1990s. Have you come across the term previously? Is this a useful concept/means of framing potential changes to curricula and student experiences? If so, how and for whom?
• What do you consider to be the key findings of the paper? What, if any, are their significance in terms of your academic and teaching practice?
• Which further questions were raised by the paper? What kind of SoTL method or inquiry might best address these?

Set reading:

Alexiadou, N., Kefala, Z., Ronnberg, L. (2023) ’Through the eyes of the disciplines – student perspectives and positionings towards internationalisation at home’, European Journal of Higher Education.