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ELiSS, Vol 2 Issue 1, July 2009 ISSN: 1756 848X 1

Curriculuminternationalisation: identity, graduate attributes and alter-

modernity

David Killick

Leeds Metropolitan University

G14 Macaulay Hall

Headingley Campus

Leeds LS6 3QS

UK

Tel: 0113 283274

Email: [email protected]

Biography

Since joining Leeds Metropolitan University in 1991 after a career in EFL,

David has played a significant role in developing the universitys distinctive

approach to curriculum internationalisation through cross-cultural capability

and global perspectives. His publications, workshops and conference

presentations in this area have significantly added to internationalisation

debate and practice across the UK. David is currently researching the lived

experience of students undertaking international mobility and how this relates

to learning and development theory.


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Abstract

Internationalisation is a complex and contested term, which UK higher

education is only now defining for itself. I focus on specific rationales for

internationalisation, arguing that it is to be interpreted as the educational

response to globalisation. It is argued that curriculum internationalisation can

enable students to situate themselves, and be helped to responsibly navigate

the liquid flows which challenge their self-identity. This paper proposes that

self-identification as a global citizen and the attributes of cross-cultural

capability and global perspectives can form the basis for a values-based

internationalised university curriculum across the disciplines, enabling

students to make their wayin the world.

Keywords: internationalisation, curriculum, cross-cultural capability, identity,

graduate attributes


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Universities are places, perhaps above all, for the formation of student

identities.

(Barnett and Di Napoli, 2008a: 161)

Section 1

UK higher education and internationalisation

Since the turn of the millennium, internationalisation has become

increasingly visible in the discourse of UK higher education (HE). Reports,

strategies and research projects (Bourne et al, 2006; Caruana and Spurling,

2007; Fielden, 2007; Fielden et al, 2007; Hudson and Todd, 2000; Lunn,

2006; McKenzie et al, 2003; Middlehurst and Woodfield, 2007; Trahar, 2007;

Universities UK, 2005), conferences (Bournemouth University, 2008; British

Council, 2004, 2006, 2008; HEA, 2007, 2009; Oxford Brookes, 2008, 2009)

and themes within conferences, journal articles (too numerous to cite)

including this special edition, books (Brown and Jones, 2007; Atfield and

Kemp, 2008; Jones, 2009) and related guidelines, and case studies and

training materials spanning the HEAs subject centres crowd a previously

rather barren space. (Note, for example, the absence of internationalisation in

Dearings report (1997a) on the role of HE in the UK.)

In the year 20082009 at least four UK universities launched units dedicated

to some aspect of internationalisation (Bournemouth Universitys Centre for

Global Perspectives, Oxford Brookes Universitys Centre for International

Curriculum Inquiry and Networking, UCLs Centre for Applied Global

Citizenship and Leeds Metropolitan Universitys Centre for Academic Practice

and Research in Internationalisation). Given the UKs comparatively belated

interest in this area, we should not be surprised to find contention and

confusion surrounding the term, and a tendency hitherto to seek clarification

in definitions and descriptions drawn from North America and Australasia is

understandable (for example, the many citations for the works of Janet Knight


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and Betty Leask (Altbach and Knight, 2007; Knight, 1997, 2003, 2004; Leask,

1999, 2001, 2003, 2004)). In this historical perspective, it is hard to see the

validity of Professor Trainors claim that [m]ost observers will agree that the

UK higher education sector has been in the vanguard of internationalisation

(Fielden, 2008: foreword), not least in the context of a report which itself

adopts Jane Knights (1994) definition of the term.

At the same time as UK HE has been adopting, adapting or ignoring the

movement to internationalise, UK schools have been given very strong steers

regarding the global dimension in the curriculum (DfES, 2004, 2005). This, I

believe, is highly relevant to how the HE sector might respond to the

globalising world in which its graduates will need to find their place and make

their way. There has been an almost simultaneous drive towards citizenship

education (Crick, 1998), and the ensuing debates around what citizenship can

mean in the context of multiculturalism and globalisation are of consequence

to the notions of global citizenship and altermodernism referenced below. Of

particular significance to the role universities may play in the (re)location of

self-identity is Olser and Starkeys call for all citizenship education to be

directed towards a cosmopolitanism in which educated cosmopolitan citizens

will be confident in their own identities and will see their responsibilities to

others within the local community and at a global level (Osler and Starkey,

2003: 276). At the same time, we see issues of identity arising in a number of

other discussions in HE: the challenges of supercomplexity (Barnett, 2000);

the challenges to disciplinarity (Kreber, 2009a); the blurring of boundaries

between the academic and the market or the consumer (Barnett and Di

Napoli, 2008c). It is likely that each of these challenges to the identity of the

university is also reflected in the ongoing social construction of

internationalisation within the academic community.

Hitherto, consonant with the marketisation of HE, the predominant approach

to internationalisation in the UK has been a single focus on the for-profit

recruitment of international students (and possibly also the creation of

offshore or transnational delivery of parts of the curriculum to international

students in their home countries). For many of us, it is unfortunate but not


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surprising that this economic and performative driven conceptualisation

(Harris, 2008; van der Wende, 2001) seems to have informed not only the first

Prime Ministers Initiative on the international development of HE in 1999, but

also PMI2 (see Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2006). Indeed,

one feature of the internationalisation movement is the degree to which

dimensions beyond that of student recruitment are being driven through

unfunded local initiatives, often by chalk-face enthusiasts in individual

institutions. There are echoes of other politically driven, centrally funded

drives, such as widening participation, where a similarly narrow view focuses

on recruitment while the substantive considerations of purpose, impacts,

value-added, curriculum, delivery and campus diversity in relation to the

student experience are left in abeyance. However, a broader

conceptualisation of internationalisation in the UK is now beginning to gain

recognition (Caruana and Spurling, 2007), with the global curriculum

dimension at subject level specifically perhaps being led in part by QAA

benchmark statements (Lunn, 2008). Speaking of the global university in the

introduction to a recent report from the Observatory on Borderless Education,

David Pilsbury acknowledges that ambitions in this direction require [the]

international to pervade everything a university does and for it to be

embedded in a strategic and operational framework. Internationalisation

strategies that are simplistic and backward looking are not fit for purpose in a

complex world driven by ideas and relationships (Observatory on Borderless

Education, 2007: 3). While internationalisation and ambitions to become a

global university are not synonymous (few will achieve the status of global

university, but to survive as a university at all worthy of the name in the

twenty-first century requires every institution to engage seriously with

internationalisation), the point about pervasiveness is pertinent to both

endeavours.

Taking internationalisation to be a long-term process (or, better, a series of

interrelated processes) which affects all aspects of an institution

(pervasiveness), my intention here is to present a rationalewhich might

underpin the endeavour, along with an associated model of graduate

attributes. Although it is possible to find discussion around rationales in the


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literature, again it is usually necessary to go beyond work published in the UK

to find much systematic attention to these (Knight, 1997, Qiang, 2003,

Warner, 1992). In most discussions and analyses of rationales, it seems that

those concerned with academic/educational outcomes may receive the least

attention (Lewis, 2007). Given the potential of internationalisation to transform

the student learning experience, and the outcomes of that experience, this

seems both unfortunate and to some degree puzzling (though the strong

focus on international recruitment along with neglect in supporting colleagues

in their responses to often large influxes of international students may well

have something to do with the academic community being reluctant to

embrace internationalisation as its own).

It is not uncommon to find recognition that the changing shape of the world of

the twenty-first century requires a review of our current university provision.

However, among those calling for such a review it is often the case that, even

when a nod is given to global citizenship or other ethical stances, the focus is

principally on issues such as employability and global competitiveness. For

example:

To respond to these challenges [of globalisation], it is essential that our

institutions of higher education graduate globally competent students. Without

global competence our students will be ill-prepared for global citizenship,

lacking the skills required to address our global security needs, and unable to

compete successfully in the global marketplace.

(Brustein, 2007: 3)

I am not seeking to argue against the importance of graduate employability,

but to suggest that it is only part of the picture.

The thrust into skills has paralleled the marketisation of HE, with students

cast as consumers and businesses as our clients. Universities compete

(locally and internationally) for market share, and increasingly sell

themselves through the broad ephemera of location, facilities, celebrity and


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brand. This mono-dimensional engagement with globalisation is leaving the

university itself, and all members of its community, with a crisis of identity

(Lapworth, 2008: 163; see also other contributions to the same volume), the

descriptions of which entirely echo those in much of the literature on the

postmodern condition more generally.

Yet we all know that the challenges of globalisation extend well beyond global

markets and there are certainly more fundamental issues to be addressed if

we truly aspire to graduate globally competent students. These challenges

require a quite radical review of the student experience, especially, though not

exclusively, that offered through our undergraduate curricula (though beware

too of the skills knocking at the postgraduate door). The fragmenting forces

of a globalising world challenge how we shape our identities, how we relate to

the growing diversity in those others with whom interaction is inevitable, and

how we then envision our responsibilities in relation to those global others.

Herein lie fundamental considerations for higher education, situated as we

are at sites of personal development and learning where values are adopted,

ethics explored and identity formation is in process if not completion (Baxter

Magolda, 2009). This is the context for the rationale for internationalisation

elaborated below.

To begin with I set out six propositions leading into what I refer to as a

developed view of internationalisation (Killick, 2007).

Propositions underpinning a developed view of internationalisation

1. A university should seek to provide an education for all its students that

is fit for purpose.

2. An education offering fitness for purpose today is one which will

enable our students to make their wayin the world of today and the worlds of

tomorrow.

3. The world we inhabit is undergoing rapid changes in many dimensions,

through processes broadly grouped under the term globalisation.


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4. These changes involve technological, economic, material, cultural,

social, environmental and personalconnectivity, spanning globally

differentiated life-worlds.

5. To make our waywithin this globalising world, we must constantly

engage in extending the horizons of our life-world. To facilitate that process,

graduates need both a global identity and attributes which take them beyond

the knowledge and skills traditionally delivered within a narrowlydiscipline-

focused curriculum.

6. Internationalisation in this context is about delivering a student

experience (principally but not exclusively through the formal and informal

curriculum) that will enable our graduates to develop such a global identity

along with attributes to enable engagement (agency).

Being beyond the traditional subject discipline and across the university

may be seen to pose a difficulty in the context of UK three-year degrees,

which are typically tightly structured and focused, with little room for

additional knowledge or skills. However, this also offers an advantage over

contexts (for example, the USA) where longer programmes with less rigid

credit requirements have tended to allow the international or intercultural to be

dealt with as a peripheral subject area rather than being situated in the

subject itself. In relation to diversity, Kreber (2009b: 6) makes the point that it

stands to reason for all those engaging with students to respond positively to

different dimensions of diversity and employ inclusive practices. While

incontestable in itself, surely such behaviour must also extend to interrogating

how the discipline itself responds to diversity. This has been most prominently

explored through feminist critiques, but there are other voices to be heard,

geographically, culturally, racially and temporally distributed. For this and

other reasons, I propose that curriculum internationalisation must be taken on

as the responsibility of each discipline area, rather than left as a matter to be

dealt with centrally. Nonetheless, to guide the process of internationalising the

curricula within the disciplines, it may be helpful to outline some of the core

attributes which all our students might find beneficial as they move on to make

their way in the supercomplex world of continual challenge and insecurity

(Barnett, 2000: 167). The nature of those attributes is in part determined by


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the world we anticipate our graduates inhabiting, and in part by the nature of

the role they might play within that world. This second implies a consideration

of the part which universities can or should play in enabling students to take

action (agency) based upon ethical or values-based positions.

However much those within academia and many of those looking in may

think otherwise, universities do not stand outside the world and cannot hide

behind flags of academic neutrality; we are more than a spectator of society

(Green and Barblan, 2004: 15). As already alluded to, in the wake of market

forces, universities have in recent decades been driven to play their social

role out through a shift to key skills and employability (dumbing down by

skilling up). Barnett and Di Napoli (2008c) offer a host of perspectives to

suggest that this process has stripped the academy of its identity. However, it

is a mistake to attribute this loss solely to our local difficulties. Universities,

disciplines, staff and students are also located in the global flows and

associated uncertainties of postmodernity. Shifting our focus from skills to

values, from performing to being, might be an appropriate way to help us re-

establish some common core. It must be acknowledged that assigning to HE

a role of encouraging or developing values seems anathema to some (see, for

example, Shephard, 2008). Yet a view of knowledge and education which

believes it can be value-free is naive; the question is not whether, but which

values ought to be promoted (Case, 1993: 320). In defending the inclusion of

the values of a global perspective in the curriculum, Collins invites academics

to explore the sometimes hidden values and exclusiveness that underpin

their practice, refuting the notion that any academic activity is value free

(Collins, 2005: 224). As obvious examples, consider the value positions taken

by the academy in respect of scholarship, intellectual property, academic

freedom or research ethics; more broadly, we actively oppose racism and

sexism, and espouse tolerance and the validity of human rights. Barnett goes

so far as to assert that a university cannot, with dignity, retain the title of

university unless it upholds the collective virtues of tolerance and respect for

persons (Barnett, 2000: 27).


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Mayo (2003: 42) cites Richard Shaulls foreword to FrieresPedagogy of the

oppressed,asserting there are only two stances for education:

Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the

integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and

bring about conformity to it, orit becomes the practice of freedom, the means

by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and

discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

(Freire, 1970: 1314)

It may not be clear whether he was advocating most stongly for education for

conformity or for freedom, but Dearing proposed that good HE in the UK can

imparttolerance, openness, and the capacity to inject positive forms of social

interaction (Dearing, 1997b: 23) (my italics). Dewey (1916/1966), the founder

of much educational thinking, saw education as the basis for healthy

democracy. At the other extreme, Mao Tse Tung ousted the academy for its

anti-revolutionary conservatism. Education and values cannot be dissociated,

and so it is important to recognise universities as not simply sharing values

with the rest of society but also helping to shape society (Robinson and

Katulushi, 2005: 256). This line is, of course, replete with well-rehearsed

difficulties who decides (and on what authority) what shape we want? How

do we mediate between those whose preferred shapes are opposed? And so

forth. Opening the debate is a can of worms which cannot be avoided once

we embark on the process of curriculum internationalisation. At a time of such

global change (and local threat), it is a debate we should welcome.

Taking this view of value-driven rather than value-free HE, enabling students

to make their way implies engaging responsibly with the world. Enabling

graduates to take a responsible stance is a value position which underpins

this paper and the model of curriculum internationalisation advocated within it.

In the next section I briefly explore particular features of the world our

graduates may inhabit and how these relate to issues of identity and the

graduate attributes which may be relevant to HE students regardless of their


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disciplinary home. In this, I recognise the danger of positioning myself among

the wrongheaded by perhaps offering unrealistic and totalitarian responses

(Barnett, 2000: 45), but I hope it will be possible to see that, in arguing for a

location of the self which offers greater personal security as a co-citizen in a

globalising world andsome of the attributes which will enable dialogues and

less ethnocentric critical engagement with alterity, I am attempting a model to

open up rather than close down ontological and epistemological horizons.

Section 2

Global identity and graduate attributes in a globalising world

Baxter Magolda correctly proposes that our students require a transformation

from dependency to self-authorship, or the capacity to internally define ones

beliefs, identity and social relations (Baxter Magolda, 2009: 143). However,

we also need to recognise that the challenges of identity formation have

dimensions beyond a relinquishing of dependency. The discourses of

globalisation present a complex and confusing montage of causes and

consequences; this is hardly surprising given the multiple sites in which it is

enacted. Indeed, this complexity and its surrounding uncertainties are

themselves the prominent feature of the globalisation process as much as

they are of its critiques. Liquid modernity (Bauman, 1991, 1998) is a context

which bounds the life-worlds of our students, and should therefore inform the

interpretations of our disciplines. One significant dimension to this is

constructed by the shifting ethnoscapes(Appadurai, 1997, 2006/1966) which

increasingly add complexity to our lived experience: the landscapes of

persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists,

immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and

individuals (Appadurai, 2006/1966: 182). Hall proposes that in the

postmodern world, far from seeking to achieve fixed identity or identities, our

problem is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open (Hall,

1966: 18). Ray goes so far as to propose that in the globalising world we can

(or must) accept eclecticism in our choice of identities (Ray, 2007). Whetheror not we accept that we canmake our way in the world under such a fluid


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state of identity, it is clear that living with alterity challenges our self-identity

(constituted at least in part through essentialised constructs of the other) and

can lead us to close down the horizons of our life-world in defence of the

socialised ethnocentrism which helps secure the self. The notion of

ethnocentrism is a prominent one in discussions of self within the literature on

intercultural identity, sensitivity and adaptation (Bennett, 1997, 2008; Bennett,

1986, 1993a, 1993b; Matsumoto, 2001; Matsumoto and Juang, 2004;

Matsumoto et al, 2001, 2004; Matsumoto and Yoo, 2005). Kim asserts that it

is our culture which allows us to define who we are and what is meaningful

(Kim, 2001: 58). Experience which leads us to question our cultural norms

and values, and thereby to shift our sense of self-identity, is seen to be

psychologically disturbing, requiring:

a disappointment of the narcissistic assumption of the superiority of us

over them. It challenges us to be willing to become involved with otherness,

to take up others perspectives by reconstructing their perspectives for

ourselves, and understanding them from within.

(Alred et al, 2006: 2)

Education, as one of the most powerful forces of socialisation, can be seen to

have a role to play in helping us swim rather than sink among this liquid tide of

local and global others. If we are to help students cope with their disappointed

narcissism and readjust their inner compass away from the concentration

on the polarity of the own and the foreign to an attentiveness for what might

be common and connective whenever [they] encounter things foreign

(Welsch, 1999: 201), this will require active attention to identity formation,

including deliberate focus within the mainstream curriculum.

As multiple others nudge the borders of our life-world whenever we enact our

daily lives, images of the differentiation in their lived experiences also flash

into consciousness and force upon us a recognition of the impacts we have

on the lives of geographically and socially distant others. These others have

always been with us; some of us have always been in the position of living at


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the expense of those others, but the global financescapes of postmodernity

have positioned so many more of us in the role of the consumer/exploiter,

while the ethnoscapes and global mediascapes continuously assert these

global others into our consciousness. In such a context, I suggest, it becomes

increasingly difficult to consider ourselves ethicallyas anything other than co-

citizens of a single planet. Yet Bauman argues that postmodern life

strategies are fragmentary forces, leaving human connection distant and

vague, and leading us to cast the Other primarily as the object of aesthetic,

not moral, evaluation; as a matter of taste, not responsibility (Bauman, 1996:

33). This is inadequate, not only as a response to the challenges to self-

identity indicated above, but also as a response to the global ethical issues

posed by the juxtaposed other (Dower, 2003; Dower and Williams, 2002).

Additionally, the complexities of the globally interconnected world can lead to

a sense of impotence; agency is threatened by the lack of security, fixity,

knowledge and procedural schema, which may enable us to make our wayin

the world. My suggestion here, then, is that universities have a legitimate role

to play in helping students engage with the processes of identity formation (or

life-world becoming) (Barnett, 2000:14). Specific dimensions to this are:

a. in the context of personal development amidst the turbulence of alterity

locating their sense of self among the complexities of living with and

between global others

b. to challenge the ethnocentrism of socio-cultural socialisation processes

as a basic underpinning for a global ethic understanding their role as

co-inhabitants of the planet with those global others

c. as underpinning to a sense of personal agency enabling them to act

effectively and responsibly in their personal lives and through the

professional practice arising from their discipline.

Such aspirations form the rationale for the interpretation of internationalisation

presented here. I believe that they are at least suggestive of a positive

response to the limiting visions which frame the marketisation agenda on the

one hand and much of the discourse on postmodernism on the other; perhaps

enabling a global identity in which the other and the self are both defined less


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through the kaleidoscopic lenses of what they are not. Holding a value, being

responsible, is a matter of identity (I am) and the underpinning to wantingor

being inclinedto act. Self-identification as a global citizen, then, is a pre-

requisite, but on its own does not enable me to enact my values (I can).

Below, I propose two clusters of abilities, or attributes, which might be

integrated into any discipline.

A starting point for constructing the I can dimension in an internationalised

curriculum, and for making our objectives transparent to ourselves, our

students and other legitimate stakeholders in HE, is through developing and

publishing university statements of graduate attributes. While there may

appear to be little distinction to be drawn between attributes and skills, and

certainly within a marketised HE discourse there is a danger of attribute

statements being limited and limiting, I believe the two can be fundamentally

distinct when attributes are crafted with attention to making our way

responsibly in a globally interdependent world. Suggestions for outcomes

relating to global perspectives can be found in the literature on sustainability

and development education (Case, 1993; McKenzieet al, 2003; Shiel, 2006;

Shiel and Takeda, 2008), and relevant objectives are comprehensively

elaborated in the World Declaration on Higher Education (UNESCO, 1998).

Australia has a national requirement for universities to articulate graduate

attributes, (Barrie, 2004, 2007). As an example, Leask (1999) has reported on

the University of South Australias comprehensive set of graduate attributes.

The seventh set of attributes is reproduced below.

A graduate who demonstrates international perspectives as a

professional and a citizen will:

7.1 display an ability to think globally and consider issues from a variety of

perspectives

7.2 demonstrate an awareness of their own culture and its perspectives

and other cultures and their perspectives

7.3 appreciate the relation between their field of study locally and

professional traditions elsewhere


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7.4 recognise intercultural issues relevant to their professional practice

7.5 appreciate the importance of multicultural diversity to professional

practice and citizenship

7.6 appreciate the complex and interacting factors that contribute to

notions of culture and cultural relationships

7.7 value diversity of language and culture

7.8 appreciate and demonstrate the capacity to apply international

standards and practices within the discipline or professional area

7.9 demonstrate awareness of the implications of local decisions and

actions for international communities, and of international decisions and

actions for local communities.

Looking at each of these, I think it is clear how it is possible to propose

notions of graduateness through attributes which transcend skills and signal

aspirations far beyond employability.

Leeds Metropolitan Universitys guidelines for curriculum review document

(Killick, 2006a) proposes three attributes around the notion of graduate as

global citizen:

the awareness, knowledge and skills to operate in multicultural

contexts and across cultural boundaries

the awareness, knowledge and skills to operate in a global context

values commensurate with those of responsible global citizenship.

This document has informed a university-wide curriculum review project at

Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Met), and is based upon the twinned

concepts of cross-cultural capability and global perspectives (see Jones and

Killick, 2007 for a full case study). Cross-cultural capability, originally

conceived in the context of the capability movement in HE (Stephenson,

1998), and informed by Sens conceptualisation of the substantive freedoms

the capabilities to choose a life one has reason to value (Sen,1999: 74),

is essentially concerned with the attributes which may help us make our way


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as co-citizens of a globalising world; some of these will be generic, others

subject-specific. A global perspective offers a worldview to extend the

normally ethnocentric horizons which can bound the life-world, and provides

the basis for a global ethic which sees individual responsibility as extending

beyond the frontiers of my country, my ethnicity, or my culture.

To explore these further, I return to one of the propositions which I suggest

underpin a developed view of internationalisation:

These changes involve technological, economic, material, cultural,

social, environmental, and personalconnectivity spanning globally

differentiated life-worlds.

The personal is highlighted because, as indicated in earlier discussions, this is

the frontline of that global connectivity: the site where flowing ethnoscapes

eddy through the life-world of every individual, regardless of location or

occupation. It is a prerequisite for engagement with civil society, political

processes, our colleagues and our masters, our neighbours, and all those at a

distance with whom we enact our everyday business of living, establish the

planetary systems and processes which shape our environment and our

capacities to feed ourselves, seek to resolve conflict by jaw not war and

engage in every other dimension of the evolving complex global-social world.

Negotiating the boundaries which inhibit successful communication in this

highly interconnected world requires complex and not always natural

attributes: precisely the theatre of a supercomplex higher education.

Cross-cultural capability concerns beingwith cultural others. In addition to

identification, it encompasses the abilities to communicate effectively across

cultures, and to locate and recognise the legitimacy of other cultural practices

in ones discipline and subsequent personal and professional lives. In a

globalising world, these are forms of freedom. Global perspectives is

suggestive of a global ethic and notions of global social justice. These offer a

life one has reason to value. Each of these has applicability wherever we

encounter alterity and wherever we are responsible for inequity. And so, in the


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communities of multicultural nation states, it has local as well as global

relevance.

Embedding such overarching objectives within the curriculum, however,

requires complex shifts in content, delivery and assessment. A piecemeal

approach, or one which relegates internationalisation to the silos of key skills

or PDP, is an inadequate response. A major contention of this paper is that

each of us with responsibilities for student learning needs to interrogate the

programmes we offer to see how we can better facilitate the identity formation

discussed earlier, along with cross-cultural capability attributes and an

appreciation for how each of our personal and professional choices impacts

upon the highly differentiated life-worlds of those others with whom we share

the planet (a global perspective).

Internationalisation of the curriculum along the lines proposed here supposes

a level of intercultural sophistication on the part of the faculty (Yershova et al,

2000: 67), along with a personal identification with its underpinning rationales.

Not unreasonably, Gunn raises the question of the ability of academic staff to

influence the broader personal capabilities of our students (Gunn, 2009: 172).

This highlights the issue of enabling academic staff to transform themselves

and their practice, something which requires significant attention and support

(Leask, 2008: 64). The process of curriculum review at Leeds Met has been

accompanied by an impressive number of initiatives to raise the profile and

understanding of internationalisation activity (see, for example, Jones, 2007;

Killick, 2008a), and by targeted staff development opportunities. The topic

areas of staff development workshops and seminars reflect the kind of focus

which might be included in an internationalised curriculum: intercultural

communication, culture in professional practice, stereotypes and

misattribution, inclusivity, working in intercultural groups, schemas and world-

views, etc. Embedding each of these, incidentally, helps develop generally

more inclusive practice which can support diverse students (home and

international) in their successful integration into university life.

Internationalisation at Leeds Met has also had high-level support, and is

strongly evidenced in related university policies and strategies. However, it


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cannot be argued that internationalisation work is completed. Indeed, in many

areas of the university, it has barely begun, and progress is only made when

academic colleagues identify with the values, support the objects and are fully

supported in their efforts to achieve them. As noted in the opening section of

this paper, internationalisation is a long-term process.

Section 3

Summary

UK HE is gaining ground in its own social construction of the concept of

internationalisation, fundamentally as a response to the various pressures of

globalisation and one which contests the marketisation agenda. In this

context, I have presented a rationale for internationalisation as a process of

taking forward the university experience to better meet the needs of our

students in the turbulence of a globalising world. These needs are both

developmental in terms of emergent senses of self-identity based on an ethic

of global responsibility, and educational in terms of enabling attributes and of

locating disciplines and professional practice in a global perspective. I have

sought to demonstrate how appropriate graduate attributes can derive from a

university experience which is fit for purpose, and suggested that such

attributes are articulated in the constructs of cross-cultural capability and

global perspectives. I have focused on the internationalised curriculum as the

principal mechanism through which such attributes may be developed, and

suggested that, given this direction, individual disciplines have the

responsibility to interrogate the learning experiences and outcomes they offer

and demand of their students. Although I have not developed the point, I have

also noted that institutions have responsibilities to enable this work through

their own practice and the provision of support and staff development

opportunities. I should note that I have argued for the importance of a whole

institution approach to internationalisation elsewhere (for example, Jones and

Killick, 2007). Such a pervasive approach is essential. However, all the other

dimensions of institutional internationalisation cannot be effective without

curriculum, or where it is sidelined to additional or optional modules, as it is


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the core curriculum which frames learning and thereby opens the horizons of

the life-world to the potential of alterity (Bond, 2003; Kehm and Teichler, 2007;

Killick, 2006b, 2008b; Paige, 2003).

Bourriaud (2005, 2009) proposes a shift from postmodernism as a new era of

altermodernism, which is identified and identifies as global from scratch,

begins to take form. Similarly, in one sense, the project of curriculum

internationalisation, as envisaged here, is an educational response to its

commodification on the one hand and to the somewhat nihilistic visions of

postmodernity on the other, and one through which we might (re)construct

fragmenting identities in the self as global citizen. I am proposing that

internationalised curricula conceived around this notion may better enable our

students to make their way in the world(s) of the future. Perhaps not

coincidentally, the university conceived with this at its core may enable

academic leadership to pull back from its advancing role of translating

between mutually non-comprehending communities (Barnett and Di Napoli,

2008b: 204) and establish a new integrity to underpin the identity of the

academic, regardless of either discipline base or position on the teacher

researcher continuum. In this regard, internationalisation offers institutions the

opportunity to be transparent about their own stance on issues of social

justice, global citizenship and the like for the sake of prospective students,

staff, and society more generally.

Note

The thrust of this paper formed the introduction to a workshop on learning

outcomes at the 2008 Higher Education Academy Annual Conference. The

appendix summarises proposals arising from group work at that workshop.


20/33


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Appendix

Generic learning outcomes devised by participants in the workshop Graduate

attributes for a globalising world at the Higher Education Academy Annual

Conference, Harrogate, 2 July 2008.

Skills

Students will be able to:

demonstrate the ability to think critically in a global context

operate in a diverse and multicultural context

demonstrate critical self-awareness in inter/multicultural global contexts

successfully demonstrate the ability to translate ideas of responsible

global citizenship into action in terms of:

work

society/community

personal development

analyse a problem with a global dimension from at least three different

perspectives

communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds.

Knowledge

Students will be able to:

demonstrate an understanding of the potential of their discipline to

unite and divide cultures and communities

demonstrate knowledge of the relationship between their own culture

and that of another culture

demonstrate a critical understanding of cultural diversity/responsible

global citizenship


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demonstrate an understanding of the value of a range of perspectives

in their disciplinary field

identify intercultural issues relevant to professional practice

demonstrate an understanding of perspectives on globalisation as a

contested concept

demonstrate a knowledge and an understanding of different cultures

compare systems, contexts and environments from different countries

and cultures

identify intercultural issues relevant to professional practice.

Values and attitudes

None were identified as it was generally felt that these would be problematic

to assess.

enhancing learning in the social science vol_2_1_killick[1]

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