How international is international?

As higher education internationalisation (HEI) continues to be embedded into the core agenda of Western universities, there is a growing focus on internationalisation of teaching and learning, often termed as internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC). While most IoC studies emphasise the internationalisation of content, students, and learning support, few have investigated staff internationalisation. Pedagogy and teachers’ practices are often inscribed into the paradigm of Western dominance, while their culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds and experiences, which could otherwise be an asset to the diversity of curriculum, receive far less consideration.

This webinar will discuss the role of staff internationalisation as a part of internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC). This discussion will draw on two recent studies conducted in a large Arts faculty at a leading university in Australia. The first study was a mixed-method study to identify internationalisation elements in the faculty profile and the curriculum till 2021. The second study was a collaborative autoethnography by the teaching team of a large compulsory Arts subject in 2022.

These two studies showed the importance of staff’s CALD experience and background in IoC from two different levels. In the first study, while the quantitative analysis of staff profile presented a large number of countries and languages where staff received higher education and engaged in collaborative research and teaching activities, the majority of these countries were English speaking, or other European, i.e. “Western”. It thus raised the question of how international is considered international.

The findings of the second study centred on the teachers’ CALD backgrounds as a valuable part of the local and contextual realities of IoC, and hence we call for explicit inclusion of teaching staff’s CALD backgrounds and experience in the curriculum.