Abstract
The five articles in this edition provide a timely reminder that the face of internationalization is ever changing in the 21st century.
The focus of internationalization efforts in different parts of the world has altered over time. In some regions, the recruitment of fee-paying international students has been prominent for many years; in others, it is a more recent phenomenon. The study by Urban and Palmer, “International Students as a Resource for Internationalization of Higher Education,” in which they examine the perceptions of undergraduate and graduate students at a public university in the Midwest of America, highlights the challenges and the opportunities afforded by international students in universities in different national and regional contexts. This research contributes to the body of literature examining how higher education institutions involve international students’ experiences to achieve their strategic internationalization goals and how they might improve their current approaches. In particular, this research points to the importance of interpersonal relationships in the realization of internationalization goals and supports previous studies highlighting the need for institutions to deliberately create environments that facilitate meaningful interaction between domestic and international students.
The contrast and tension between approaches to internationalization focused on trade and economic benefits, compared with approaches focused on academic values is a feature of Patricia Walker’s article “International Student Policies in Higher Education: From Colonialism to the Coalition: Developments and Consequences.” Walker discusses the values underpinning U.K. government approaches to international students and related government policies, and compares these with traditional academic international values. She calls for a re-engagement with “true academic internationalism.” Her article also highlights the ways in which national governments both prompt and respond to changes in the global and national context through policies and how, in turn, these policies have both intentional and unintentional consequences, nationally and globally.
International trade in education continues to grow in volume and complexity. Our concerns regarding the ethics of trade in international education, particularly when that trade is between developed and developing countries, is periodically scrutinized and commented upon. In “Educational Change and International Trade in Teacher Development: Achieving Local Goals Within/Despite a Transnational Context,” Greenwood, Alam, and Kabir examine the degree to which local development goals were met in a teacher development program involving collaboration between Bangladesh and New Zealand. They analyze the findings of their case study using different ideological paradigms. This analysis forms the basis for a working model for developing “Fair Academic Trade.” The model is founded on the building of shared knowledge, the negotiation of learning goals of relevance to students, the formation of collaborative learning communities, and the provision of appropriate study support.
The popularity of study abroad destinations varies over time depending on a range of macro and micro factors, including, for example, policies influencing the outflow of students from home countries (a macro-environmental factor) and the perceptions and preferences of individual students for different destinations (an individual factor). The study by Lee, reported in “An Investigation of Factors Determining the Study Abroad Destination Choice: A Case Study of Taiwan,” explores why and how students travel to Taiwan for study. It is one of very few studies focused on investigating the factors influencing the flow of students into the Asia Pacific Region. It highlights the value of scholarships, multilingual websites, Chinese language training programs, and the customization of recruitment strategies and programs for different target groups for Taiwanese universities wishing to improve the flow of study abroad students into their institutions.
Universities and the international education opportunities they provide have an impact on the campus community as well as on the broader national and global communities with which they interact. In “A Fraught Exchange? US Media on Chinese International Undergraduates in the American University,” Abelmann and Kang analyze U.S. media discourse on Chinese undergraduate students and the way in which it builds on existing contradictory images of China as, on one hand, alluring and, on the other, a threatening “Yellow Peril.” On campus and in the classroom, Chinese students are constructed in discourse in different ways, including as “antipodal other” transformed by their liberal American experience, as exemplary, hard-working diligent students who can act as agents of internationalization and as of dubious quality and character, more likely to plagiarize and cheat in exams than domestic students. The authors highlight the dangers inherent in framing the influx of Chinese students into the United States as a market exchange including the threat this poses to achievement of the ideal of transformational internationalization.
We hope you enjoy reading these articles and the different and varied perspectives they provide on the changing face of internationalization in the 21st century.