Reflections on an Alternative Approach to Continuing Professional Learning for Internationalization of the Curriculum Across Disciplines

Abstract

Academics at the coalface of teaching and learning often feel undersupported, underprepared, and underconfident in “internationalizing the curriculum” (IoC). The formal, structured programs designed by institutions to meet the needs of academics for continuing professional learning (CPL) in our rapidly changing sector fail to engage many academics. As centrally situated higher education/student learning academics, the authors present one alternative approach to CPL, developed in the context of an Australian Learning and Teaching Fellowship: “Internationalization of the Curriculum in Action.” First, the authors reflect on the engagement of disciplinary academics throughout the project; this underscores the value of critical, reflective conversations within and across disciplines. Second, the authors reflect on their own role in creating this critical (inter)disciplinary space; this underscores the value of introducing a theoretical framework for reviewing and developing IoC, providing a structure for the process, igniting the imagination of participants, and questioning and collectively acting on institutionalized enablers and blockers to IoC.

Keywords

internationalization of the curriculum communities of practice positioning theory continuing professional learning academic development reflective practice

Introduction

I know the university does have an articulated commitment to internationalization, but I'm not sure how it applies at my level. As with a lot of strategic goals that the university has, this doesn’t translate well down to the coalface. . . . It gets discussed a lot—that internationalization is a good thing and we should do it—but I don’t think there’s any discussion about why, and what impact it has and so on. . . . I’ve got no idea how to do it.

These words, uttered by an academic at the beginning of his involvement in a national “internationalization of the curriculum” (IoC) project, echo what many have said for some time: Those at the coalface of teaching and learning often feel underinformed, undersupported, underprepared, and underconfident when it comes to IoC (e.g., Leask & Beelen, 2009). Although many universities have embraced internationalization at the policy level, there exists a commonly observed gap between rhetoric and practice at the faculty level (Childres, 2009). Little attention has been given to what IoC means, particularly in practice, and how it can be conceived, implemented, and assessed within specific disciplines (Clifford, 2009) and specific levels within programs (Edwards, Crosling, Petrovic-Lazarovic, & O’Neill, 2003).

Addressing the need for professional development in this area is challenging. Centralized professional development units and the academic developers (also called educational or faculty developers) working in them are positioned to meet the ongoing professional learning needs of teaching and research academics. Yet the formal, structured workshops facilitated by these units largely fail to engage academics or meet their professional needs (Webster-Wright, 2009). In 2011, an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Fellowship, “Internationalization of the curriculum in action,” headed by Betty Leask (2011) aimed to address this issue. The project involved 13 Australian universities and a wide range of disciplines, including nursing, journalism, public relations, management, accounting, applied science, and medicine.

With Leask’s project as our focal point, this article is reflexive in the “strong sense of the word” (Rowland, 2006, p. 75). First, we provide a reflective description of academics’ engagement in the project, particularly in relation to the critical conversations that developed within and across disciplines; second, we reflect on our own role in creating this critical (inter)disciplinary space (Rowland, 2006). From our vantage point as disciplinary outsiders, we are interested in disciplinary academics’ utilization of a key outcome of Leask’s project, a questionnaire on the internationalization of the curriculum (referred to hereafter as “QIC’) as a process rather than the project outcomes per se. (Other papers in this special issue are devoted to an exploration of outcomes within the various disciplinary and institutional contexts engaged in this project). We therefore draw on data collected over the life of the project to ask: How did academics learn to do IoC throughout this project? How did they make meaning of it within the context of their own teaching? What impact did we have on this process? In posing this last question, we’re mindful of a number of critical attempts to reframe or reposition the role of academic developers in the higher education context (also called educational or faculty developers). So, the article is also self-reflexive. Our two-step analysis—where we reflect on academics’ engagement in the project, then on our own role—is informed by our reading of the relevant literature on the concept of IoC itself, the place of disciplinary knowledge in its development, and the domain of academic development. Our theoretical orientation shapes the sense we make of the data we collected from academics throughout the life of this project. In particular, we draw on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) understanding of situated learning in communities of practice, Harré and van Langenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, and Rowland’s (2006) concept of “critical interdisciplinary spaces.”

What Is Meant by “Internationalization of the Curriculum”?

Internationalization is now recognized as a core activity within the higher education sector; however, it has become an increasingly contentious concept through its association with globalization. The slippage between the terms plays out in the differing, even contradictory, rationales for internationalization. How these rationales are embodied in practice differs between regions, nations, and institutions. In Australia, for example, international education has been largely viewed, somewhat skeptically, as being dominated by an economic, neoliberal rationale (Marginson & Sawir, 2011) vital to the ongoing sustainability of higher education in Australia. Although increasing numbers across the sector (nationally and internationally) have begun to see internationalization within a broader framework of Graduate Attributes (GAs) and intercultural capabilities for all students (Leask, 2008), “internationalization of the curriculum” continues to resonate negatively at the teaching and learning interface due to a tendency for it to be equated with uniformity (Schapper & Mayson, 2004). In other words, a “one size fits all” curriculum, where “Western” content and teaching styles are assumed to be “universally relevant” and “universally welcome” (Patrick in Caruana, 2004, p. 4).

In the past decade several different terms for the internationalization of student experience have emerged; for example, in addition to IoC, there’s “comprehensive internationalization” (Hudzik, 2011), and “internationalization at home” (Leask & Beelen, 2009). Typically initiatives associated with any of these involve local and international content, face-to-face intercultural activities at the local level, international connections online, and fostering a lively interconnected cosmopolitan campus. Arguably IoC is the most difficult to define because it couples two fuzzy, ideologically laden terms: “internationalization” and “curriculum” (Leask & Beelen, 2009). To elaborate, in a globalizing world, “Decisions about curriculum innovation for internationalization are not neutral” (Leask, 2008, p. 13). They are ideological in nature, shaped by beliefs, not only about internationalization/globalization but also about the curriculum itself. Barnett (1997), and others (e.g., Barnett, Parry & Coate 2001; Barnett & Coate, 2005) suggest notions of curriculum in higher education are changing, albeit unevenly, across disciplines and universities. Whereas traditional curricula emphasized knowledge attainment, emerging understandings of curriculum encompass three domains: knowing, doing, and being. With Barnett (p. 1), we argue that today’s students, who face a future in many ways unknown, need a curriculum with an ontological focus, one that engages students as whole persons and develops “critical being.” Although an increasing emphasis on performativity is reshaping curriculum in many disciplines, the ontological domain generally remains “an embryonic component” (Barnett, Parry, & Coate, 2001, p. 445).

In higher education, curriculum design is rarely a reflective practice (Barnett & Coate, 2005, p. 2). Those wanting to change this confront a second, more fundamental challenge, namely, “the invisibility of the curricula” itself in higher education; “Curriculum . . . has a will-o-the-wisp quality. It is a bit like gravity or a set of sub-atomic particles” (Barnett & Coate, 2005, p. 152). As Leask and Beelen (2009) observe, this has profound impliciatons for IoC. Given the slipperiness of IoC’s component terms, it is perhaps not surprising it is a concept “poorly understood” and developed in practice (Shiel, 2008) across disciplines.

‘IoC” and the Disciplines

Not only will the debates about internationalization/globalization and the curriculum as concepts have different implications for different disciplinary contexts, but varied understandings of knowledge, ways of teaching, learning, assessing, and researching within disciplines (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Neumann, Parry, & Becher, 2002) highlight the importance of considering the situatedness of academic practice in the context of IoC. Faculties, as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), enable or constrain innovation (Warhurst, 2008, p. 456). As Lave and Wenger observe, learning at work “involves the construction of identities . . . identity, knowing and social membership entail one another” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 53). This insight has been taken to develop critical understandings of dialectical relationships between the individual and extra-individual within faculties and disciplinary units and how this affects on teaching practice. The “practice architectures” (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) and teaching and learning regimes (Trowler & Cooper, 2002) in them “prefigure practices, enabling and constraining particular kinds of sayings, doings, and relatings among people within them, and in relation to others outside of them” (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008, p. 59). Nevertheless, the potential for intradisciplinary diversity, even discord and interdisciplinary resonance, suggests there is value in providing opportunities for continuing professional learning (CPL) across and within disciplines, and hence a role for academic developers in centralized units to create a third “critical interdisciplinary space” (Rowland, 2006) as demonstrated in this project.

IoC, “Academic Development,” and Continuing Professional Learning in the Disciplines

As a developing discipline, academic development is in a process of defining itself. In their survey of the field, Amundsen and Wilson (2012) find it divided along three axes: institutional location (centralized or decentralized), intellectual location (content- or process-focused), and contextual location (teaching as an individual or sociocultural practice). Theoretically, these divisions mirror the broader literature on workplace learning, which contrasts “traditional PD” first defined by Houle (1980) as professional development didactically delivered by an expert, in a transient, one-off event, divorced from practice with an emergent “participatory” approach. This shift is paradigmatic; traditional PD concerns “acquisition” (of knowledge as a product transferred, or delivered from one to another), in contrast to the newer “participatory” approach, which construes learning as agentic, “expansive,” and broadly sociocultural in orientation (Warhurst, 2008, p. 455). Thus conceived within the participatory paradigm, academic development has the potential to offer academic staff the intellectual space to exchange, debate, and “coproduce” (Gordon & Lee, 1998) ideas about teaching and learning, in ways that honor differing disciplinary values and insights. Put another way, academic development can contribute to the creation of “critical interdisciplinary spaces,” as “site[s] of contestation between different perspectives,” with the aim of “com[ing] to new understandings” (Rowland, 2006, p. 93).

Because academic development “is entwined in the micro politics of the “institution,” caught up in the “tension between compliance and contestation,” questions relating to institutional power are more pressing than those of its theoretical foundations (Rowland, 2006, p. 73). Often positioned ambiguously within universities, academic developers are a “fragmented community” (Land, 2004, p. 4). Although involvement in change processes tends to be a common attribute of this group, there are many orientations toward academic development practice, which are “inscribed within different discourses, drawing on different metaphors” (p. 12). In proposing their model of “coproduction” Gordon and Lee (1998, p. 7) acknowledged that its possibilities are stymied by an institutionalized power–knowledge nexus: the traditional “alpha–beta relationship” between faculty and “support” staff. More recent scholarship has substantially complicated this understanding of power. Mills and Taylor Huber (2005) draw on anthropological research on trading between island communities to ask why inhabitants of “academic archipelagos” so rarely trade with each other. They conclude that in the former case, exchanges occur between relatively equal parties but that relationships in universities are more complex. Manathunga (2006) problematizes interdisciplinary relationships between academic developers and their “disciplinary Others,” to reveal how simultaneously powerful and powerless both sides are. In her analysis, academic developers have never been in a position to colonize disciplinary-based academics through “development,” yet their contradictory positioning in centralized units, as handmaidens of, and critical advisors to, university management makes their insider–outsider status difficult to negotiate. Nevertheless, she suggests, academic developers and their “Others” can be profoundly changed through engaging with each other in the “contact zone.”

Positioning theory provides a way to understand the possibilities and limitations of academic development and create more “critical interdisciplinary spaces.” According to Harré and Moghaddam (2003, p. 5), there exists in any unfolding social interaction an assumed framework of rights, duties, and obligations to perform certain actions; these bound the repertoire of socially possible acts available at any given moment and any given context. Certain acts are afforded while others are constrained relative to the position(s), assumed or prescribed, during any interaction. Storylines regarding internationalization, curriculum, academic development, CPL, and one’s own discipline are accepted, or contested, (re)created and lived within disciplinary units and universities. The positioning of the academic developer, academics, and programs/courses of study within the university and its IoC storyline is significant because it blocks or enables “doings, sayings, and relatings” (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) in relation to IoC. For example, if academic developers are positioned as insiders/outsiders—as trainers, or purveyors of generic educational theory (Rowland, 2006) imposing on a discipline IoC—the repertoire they then have access to is potentially constrained within the storyline imposition. If, however, they are positioned (or able to position themselves) as something other, as facilitator for example, then the range of possible rights, duties, and obligations may be extended (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999, p. 17).

The positioning of academic development is pertinent in our case. Though neither of us (authors to this article) formally holds the title of “academic developer” (one being a lecturer in higher education, the other in student learning) our disciplines and location in centralized units position us similarly as insiders-outsiders. Therefore, in the following descriptive reflection on “IoC in Action” (Leask, 2011), we refer to ourselves as academic developers.

The Project

During 2011, we participated in an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded National Teaching Fellowship project focussed on “IoC in Action.” Where possible, the Fellow (Leask) worked with higher education/student learning lecturers/academic developers situated within centralized units to engage academic staff in different disciplinary teams with internationalization of the formal and informal curriculum in practice. Each team was asked to address the question: How can we internationalize the curriculum in this discipline area, in this particular institutional context, and ensure that, as a result, we improve the learning outcomes of all students?

Two disciplinary units in each author’s university participated in the project. For (Author 1) working at a research-intensive university these were journalism/ communication and nursing/midwifery; for (Author 2) working at one of the “Innovative Research Universities” these were public relations (PR) and information technology (IT). Each disciplinary team, made up of interested course/unit coordinators and program leaders, was given the QIC (Leask, 2011) to complete individually. The QIC canvassed a range of questions that addressed their understandings of how their institutions, faculties, and disciplines understood internationalization, communicated this, and enacted it within the discipline at the program/course level. This then facilitated discussions, which enabled each team to clarify what IoC meant for them and how this was expressed across their degree structures and at the course/unit level in terms of subject matter, teaching and learning activities, readings, resources, and assessment. These meetings also provided an opportunity for teams to reflect on strengths and weakness of their courses, articulate a vision and action plan for change, and identify blockers and enablers for further action. Often this involved seeking input from students, other colleagues, and/or professional bodies/employer groups. Toward the end of the year, teams were invited to present and discuss their work-in-progress at a national Symposium organized be Leask (2011), and within their universities. In (Author 1’s) university, team representatives cowrote an article for the university’s teaching and learning e-zine and they’ve continued to discuss their progress with her. In (Author 2’s) university team leaders gave presentations to the Internationalization Steering Committee to highlight the value of this approach for curriculum renewal. Thus, the process could loosely be described as action research, in that it was cyclical, participatory, reflective, and ongoing (Kemmis, 2007).

Because none of the project’s participants in our universities had previously engaged in academic development focused on IoC, we were keen to understand what they felt was different about this project. We collected data with two purposes in mind: to capture and facilitate reflexive practice, in ways that would make what is implicit in our own and our disciplinary colleagues practice visible for interrogation and analysis. With reflection integral to action research, it seemed particularly apt that our own participation in the project was designed to be reflexive.

Data collected included recordings and transcriptions of a disciplinary team meeting, an interview with a team leader, an open-ended survey of participating teams at our universities, a survey of participants attending the project’s national Symposium, and notes on our observations and reflections. Our analysis was inductive and iterative; we moved back and forth across the literature, our findings, and our questions. Knowing that reflective practice has become “routinized,” even regulatory practice in education (Pollard, 2002), we were keen to maintain a critical edge to our reflections, and to this end, the periodic discussions between ourselves, Leask, colleagues, and participants in the project were invaluable.

Reflecting on Intra- and Inter-Disciplinary Engagement With IoC

Feedback from participants in disciplinary teams was invariably positive. For example,

It was very rewarding, and extremely informative. My understanding of IoC has been heightened considerably. Whereas previously this may have been on my “radar,” it is not part of the conscious thought and planning of our curriculum. I enjoyed it, and benefitted from the opportunities . . . which I also see as professional development. (Participant 1)¹

In the following reflection, we focus on factors that seemed to function as “enablers” (Leask, 2011) of each team’s engagement with IoC within the context of the project.

Empowerment and Creation of Critical Intradisciplinary Spaces

The beginning of this project was marked by a pervasive sense of disempowerment among potential participants. A few raised questions about the “responsibility for development,” suggesting with Mathias (2005, p. 97) that “placing [it] in the hands of education specialists undermined their [sense of] ownership and commitment.” More widespread and longer lasting, however, was the resentment toward “managerialism,” and (perceived) institutional rationales for internationalization. Cynicism and alienation from management surfaced frequently in comments like “Apparently we do global responsibility” (Participant 6). These sentiments shifted markedly throughout the project. Through self-reflexive conversations with colleagues, some challenged their own acquiescence to (what they perceived to be) dominant institutional and other discourses, unsettling simple binary notions of power/powerlessness in the process. For example,

Engaging in this project led us to question how much we acquiesce . . . in designing our curriculum. . . . [Through the project] we have challenged normative theoretical frameworks [and] renewed our focus on process in curriculum—students need to be able to come back to a set of questions . . . this is the most empowering thing we can do. (Participant 4)

Arguably, this empowerment is only possible when academics are free to act on their responsibilities for curriculum development in ways that honor disciplinary ways of “knowing, doing, and being.” One of the clearest messages from all participants at the national symposium was that volunteering for the project was crucial to their engagement. The universally held view was that completion of the QIC, or adoption of any specific resource from the project, should not be mandated or imposed but seen as potential stimuli for discussion within the regular curriculum review process.

Disciplinary Communities of Practice

The bewilderment expressed by one participant (Participant 2) quoted at the beginning of this article was heard within most teams at the beginning of the project. Working through the QIC together fostered the development of mini communities of practice, that is, as having a shared interest (in IoC), a focus on practice, and a concern for nurturing relationships between members because they were seen to support their learning. As Participant 3 said, “I think it was much easier when we sat and did it together, kind of went through it and talked about it—I found it very difficult on my own, and you definitely need a bit of a club.” Over the course of the project, team members developed a “shared repertoire” of practices by discussing problems and exchanging resources. The process fostered the “legitimate peripheral participation” of relatively new academics to absorb and be absorbed in the “talk” of the “old-timers” about their practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). As “newcomer” Participant 2 explained: “I know that there are particular learning outcomes [of IoC, but] to my knowledge there were no courses or units that could teach those things, but now after looking at V’s idea, I think that there probably are.”

The valuing of difference within teams was a particularly noteworthy outcome of the project. The disciplines that were attracted to this project tended to be the newer, applied ones, which are typically made up of scholars from several other disciplines. With Becher and Trowler’s (2001), we found that differences within these disciplines may be very pronounced. As Participant 4 explained, “There are differences, tensions between old and new hands, between theorists and practitioners. This process helped us think about what each of these can bring. It has given us an appreciation of what’s already there in the School.” The process also enabled teams to find common ground, for example, by developing “a shared narrative” that disrupted the powerful “storylines” of both disciplinary knowledge and “internationalization.” Participant 4 went on to say:

This is where joining the project has been helpful. We come from different disciplines—law, sociology, cultural studies, media studies. . . . So we don’t hear what each other are saying. . . . We risk not communicating clearly with our students and each other. This has given us a way of unpacking the assumptions that we bring to curriculum design. The project has given us the opportunity to develop a shared language . . . a narrative: de-westernization. Developing a stronger critique is the starting point for de-westernization.

According to positioning theory, storylines, positions, and social acts are mutually determinate. As the “de-westernization” storyline is claimed adjacent positions and social acts are then afforded (while others are constrained); within reflexive positioning the repertoire of socially possible actions are recast. Within the new discourse, these academics reject the established storylines that have traditionally positioned them in a “colonial discourse” (Participant 4).

Disciplinary Understandings of Internationalization and/of the Curriculum

Findings in this project echo earlier studies (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Neumann et al., 2002) that reveal the centrality of disciplinary ways of knowing, teaching, learning, and assessing to curriculum development. In particular, our findings reiterate Barnett et al.’s (2001, p. 435) conclusion, that although curricula across disciplines are founded on the same three domains—knowledge, action, and self—“the weightings and levels of integration of these components vary between different disciplines.” There were distinctive differences between participating teams across these domains. For example, journalism/communications—the discipline most closely matching Becher’s “pure soft” category—focused on developing a critique of the theoretical foundations of “international” knowledge in the discipline. As Participant 4 put it,

We had a lot of discomfort with the term “internationalization” . . . because everything we do is international, but dominated by the US, the UK. These perspectives dominate the research paradigm of the School. Our books are from the US or the UK. There’s no unique Australian theory or contribution to research. This is problematic because most of our students are from the East and the South—predominantly the South. And we have a unique situation—our distance from the North. We need to be more critical of theory . . . often what passes for knowledge are simply routinized practices. (Participant 4)

In contrast, both IT and nursing/midwifery, as “hard and soft applied” (Becher, 1989) disciplines focused on performativity, the “doing” domain of the curricula—but like journalism/communications they brought a critical edge to their inquiry. The nursing/ midwifery began by identifying the goal of IoC in their discipline as enabling students to provide “culturally competent care” and faculty members to be “culturally competent teachers” (Participant 1), then asked what that actually means within the discipline, and how it could be better taught within the context of problem-based learning—the dominant pedagogy in health disciplines. The IT team too emphasized “skill development” but came to question what they saw as a dominant myth in the discipline: that “technical skills are culturally neutral and that’s the value of them” (Participant 5).

Debate between team members was critical to the process of developing shared disciplinary understandings of IoC. The following recorded discussion illustrates just how divergent thinking could be:

Participant 5: It’s a technical course. Technical skills are international and that’s the value of them I think.

Participant 6: They like to pretend its cultural neutral so we don’t need to do anything.

Participant 5: No, really technical stuff is the same everywhere.

Participant 6: [I disagree. For example] I have a slide on the way that prepositions don’t map across English to Korean. . . . And then you make the point that SQL is based entirely on understanding those metaphors.

The process of first completing the QIC individually and then discussing responses often meant team members confronted and debated differences that were deeply rooted in theoretical perspectives and practices. The aim was not to mend, or cover over, these “fractures” but to see them as a means to open up accepted beliefs to question (Rowland, 2006). In the process participants learnt much from their disciplinary colleagues and developed a shared narrative about their disciplinary pedagogy. For example, in the debate quoted above, the gap between these polarized views—knowledge as universal/value free versus knowledge as sociocultural construction—was not, to our knowledge, closed. But as a disciplinary group, they came to agree that “the skills that we teach aren’t meant to be applicable in any context and what we do [is encourage] students to engage with multiple perspectives and points of view . . . that’s bang on” (Participant 3).

Whole-of-Program Approach to the Curriculum

All participants identified the value of collectively reviewing IoC across whole programs of study (degrees) rather than individual units. One team, whose discipline had taken a heavily modular approach to curriculum “design” (irony intended), particularly valued the process for revealing “the disconnect between the units of study” (Participant 5). In fact, the trend toward greater flexibility and fewer prerequisites in program structures makes the development of coherent learning pathways challenging (James, Lefoe, & Hadi, 2004, p. 176). This team, realizing that their modularized program acted as a “blocker” (Leask, 2011) to sharing understandings and practices within their discipline and providing students with a coherent pathways through programs, engaged informally in “mapping” IoC-relevant learning objectives, subject matter, and assessment across units they taught.

Creation of Critical Interdisciplinary Spaces

Although it was the opportunity to work in the “fault lines” (Rowland, 2006) within their disciplines that participants found particularly valuable, they also found the periodic interdisciplinary conversations illuminating. Participating in the national symposium was particularly motivating. Some acknowledged that the thought of “performing” (Participant 9) their IoC work in front of Leask, other renowned IoC scholars, and other disciplinary teams both motivated them to engage more deeply and provided welcome recognition and reward for their work. Beyond providing an important catalyst, goal, and recognition however, the national and institutional interdisciplinary symposia created a space where participants could test, reflect on, and sharpen the understandings already developing within their disciplinary IoC communities. Another, less anticipated, outcome of these interdisciplinary conversations was the developing awareness of commonly experienced institutionalized “blockers” (Leask, 2011), which prevent good IoC practice. As academic developers, we were keen to move from critique to action; the part we played in developing an institutional intervention, along with other facets of our role in this project, is discussed below.

Reflecting on Our Engagement in the Process

Recalling the tensions within academic development, we would place the project theoretically within the emerging “participatory” paradigm. That is to say, it was designed to be interactive and long term, involve multiple opportunities for cycles of engagement reflection and collaborative participation, create trusting relationships and “investigative cultures,” and pay particular attention to “proximity to practice” (Penuel, Fishman, Yamaguchi, & Gallagher, 2007, p. 929).

Ideologically, our role in the project is more difficult to define. Metaphors like “coproduction,” “trading,” and “contact zones,” previously used to describe roles and relationships between disciplinary academics and academic developers, did not quite fit. We could say we functioned as facilitators of the participants” reflective practice, but with Rowland, we find this description too limiting, if it is taken to mean enabling participants to validate established practices. Too often “reflection” does not lead to learning but operates rather to legitimize self-referential, uncritical practices (Boud & Walker, 1998; Pollard, 2002). Creating critical (inter)disciplinary spaces on the other hand is artful work, which in our case essentially involved the following; introducing a theoretical framework, guiding the process, creating a place to play, and understanding IoC as a social process.

To elaborate, first we introduced disciplinary teams to a theoretical framework for reviewing and developing IoC, by drawing on the critical understandings of “curriculum,” “internationalization,” and “globalization” outlined earlier; for instance, this meant questioning the propensity within disciplines to focus more or less exclusively on one curricular domain (generally knowing or doing) rather than a more expansive view encompassing three domains including the ontological (Barnett et al., 2001). Second, we provided enough—but not too much—structure for the review and development process (conceptualizing it as disciplinary action research projects, with the QIC to structure the first phase of review and reflection); this meant countering the tendency in each disciplinary group to initially view the QIC as an “audit,” or “a type of scale-marking” exercise as Participant 1 put it, and to open up different, less quantitative, more open-ended, and relational ways of engaging with it. Third, we created a safe space to question the tendency to accept, even reify experience, to play instead with other interpretations of existing practices, igniting the imagination of participants, to consider not what is or must be, but what could be—a key component in Leask’s (2011) process model for IoC. Fourth, our understanding of the design and enactment of the curriculum as a social practice meant questioning, then collectively acting on institutionalized enablers and blockers to IoC. The critical interdisciplinary spaces that fostered discussions about the “conditions of practice” (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) necessary to foster IoC have led to the establishment of working parties in our universities, which will make recommendations to support IoC development within the institutions’ existing degree program (course) review cycles within departments. Both academic developers and disciplinary participants are involved in this process.

Of course, we are at the beginning of a process that needs to be ongoing. Maintaining the momentum among original project participants and fostering it in others across our universities will require more than the development of critical (inter)disciplinary spaces supported by a comprehensive system for reviewing and articulating action (the program review cycles). To recap, other key factors to the success of this project were the active involvement of course coordinators and program leaders within each discipline, the whole of program approach built into the project design, the leadership of Leask and the status associated with her national project, the opportunity to present at the national symposium as a catalyst and goal, and sufficient funding to enable teams to undertake IoC as an action research project. As with any curriculum innovation however, there are four other key conditions that need to be met if IoC is to become core business in our universities: effective multilevel leadership, an institutional “climate of readiness,” availability of resources (including expertise, money, but also time—the most precious resource of all within modern universities), and funding that supports risk taking (Southwell, Gannaway, Orell, Chalmers, & Abraham, 2005). Complicating action on each of these conditions is the fact of increasing casualization of teaching. Although IoC must be driven by disciplinary leaders, it will be vital to find ways to involve the casual staff at the “tenuous periphery” (Kimber, 2003) of universities in every phase of the research cycle.

Conclusion

Here we have described and reflected on an alternative approach to CPL in the context of an ALTC Fellowship project: “Internationalization of the Curriculum in Action” (Leask, 2011). Our contribution as disciplinary outsiders is a reflection on the process, not an investigation of the outcomes of this project, which are presented elsewhere in this issue. Theoretically, the project was informed by an emerging CPL paradigm, which construes learning as agentic, “expansive,” and broadly sociocultural in orientation (Warhurst, 2008, p. 455). Our analysis involved two moves, both from our positioning as centrally located lecturers in higher education/student learning—a reflective inquiry into disciplinary academics” engagement in the project—and a self-reflection on our own role. Beginning our inquiry with the contestable concepts of IoC and “academic development” usefully highlighted the possibilities and pitfalls of the QIC as a process for curriculum review within a disciplinary community of practice and our position within it. Although our practice could have been limited by our institutional positioning in roles comparable to that of the centrally located “academic developer,” we found that the processes developed in this project effectively enabled us to position ourselves otherwise.

As expected, given the action research design of the project, the process of scholarly inquiry into IoC practice is continuing within the teams already engaged in the project. At the same time, some of the project’s disciplinary “old-timers” (Lave & Wenger, 1991), together with academic developers, are mentoring other disciplines that are beginning the same process. And conversations have started within another critical space, between management and representatives of disciplinary perspectives (including higher education/student learning). This last phase is crucial; with Turner and Robson (2007, p. 80) we conclude that the divide between (perceptions of) management’s neoliberal rationale for internationalization and the more cooperative, internationalist ideologies, espoused by academics point to “a lack of long-term sustainability and the disruptive capacity of motivational disunities” at the coalface of teaching and learning. Finally, our participation in this project has highlighted the possibilities for imagining and doing when agency is exercised within and across disciplinary communities of practice working on IoC. If these communities are to be sustained and broadened, the key conditions of effective multilevel leadership, institutional readiness, and appropriate resourcing and funding for all teaching staff will need to be met.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Wendy Green is a lecturer in higher education at the Teaching & Educational Development Institute (TEDI) and the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. She teaches and researches in the area of cross-cultural education. Her current interests include internationalizing the curriculum, continuing professional learning (CPL) for academics, the experiences of international academic staff, and study abroad.

Craig Whitsed is a senior lecturer in the Murdoch University Student Learning Centre. He is the joint chair of the Murdoch University Internationalization Steering Committee, a member of the Murdoch University Academic Council and Learning and Teaching Committee, and leads an ALTC Extension project, Finding Common Ground. His research interests include internationalization of the curriculum, internationalization in the Japanese higher education context, academic staff in the context of curriculum internationalization, and academic integrity at the policy level.

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