Journal of Studies in International Education

This article is a case study of how one university is internationalizing all its courses so that all graduates will demonstrate an international perspective as professionals and citizens. This focus on courses and their teaching, learning, and assessment promotes international education, multiculturalism, and the recognition of intercultural issues relevant to professional practice. The first section deals with structural options and pathways for course design when internationalizing curricula and the defining characteristics of such options. The second and final section of the article outlines ways in which an internationalized curriculum broadens the scope of the subject to include international content and/or contact and sets up teaching and learning to assist in the development of cross-cultural communication skills. Internationalizing university curricula is a powerful and practical way of bridging the gap between rhetoric and practice to including and valuing the contribution of international students.

How do educators enhance their global competencies and intercultural communication skills so they can better educate students in our increasingly diverse society? In Spring 2000, the authors conducted a survey of 52 New Jersey City University faculty and staff to assess the relationships between their international experience, global competencies, and levels of intercultural sensitivity. The survey drew on Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity and definitions of global competency from Wilson, Stohl, Singer, and Hanvey. The authors of this article found that both second-language proficiency and substantive experience abroad independently increase the likelihood that an educator will be more advanced on the Bennett Intercultural Sensitivity Scale. This survey provides directional information about the relationship between second-language acquisition, experience abroad, and ethnorelativism. The findings suggest that we need global, intercultural, and professional development for faculty and staff that is ongoing, substantial, and inclusive of work in another language and culture.

This article asserts a need for educators to consider the mission and value of study abroad programs and their relation to the processes of globalization and internationalization. As educational systems increase their emphasis on the need for international education, it will be necessary to consider what types of study abroad opportunities are relevant to current world trends. This article attempts to provide a framework for understanding the distinction between the terms globalization and internationalization and their relevance to the future of international education and study abroad programs.

A total of 114 African educators came to Northern Arizona University (NAU), in Flagstaff, from 1988 to 1992 to attend a 45-day Summer Institute sponsored by the United States Information Agency. Two former participants in the program, who came back to NAU as graduate students, interviewed campus personnel and students and members of the surrounding community to examine the impact of the 5-year experience. The program’s year-by-year evaluations were analyzed in light of interview responses. It was shown that the program helped the academic and surrounding communities discover other facets of African education and life that media often misrepresent in the mainstream subconscious. Participating African educators were very appreciative of the innovative curriculum and instructional methods they learned and were mesmerized by minority inclusion policies on campus. However, interviewees and the African educators deplored the United States’s lack of awareness and interest in cooperation with Africa.

Research-based literature on new phenomena is scarce, so is the literature on the relatively new, but strongly growing, trend in internationalization, which concerns the provision of education across borders: A trend that sometimes has been identified as “moving education, not learners,” Two studies have recently been published that reveal a lot of information on this so far quite-unexplored, but much discussed, issue. It is not surprising that both studies come from two countries that are leading in this area: the United Kingdom and Australia.