Internationalization and Diversity in Higher Education

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, a rapidly expanding and transforming global higher education sector is adding significantly to the engagement of increasingly diverse students in increasingly diverse contexts. At the same time, other processes of globalization are bringing together diverse peoples and cultures in unprecedented ways, requiring that our university learning experiences prepare our students to make their ways within a multicultural milieu locally and globally. There are other complex, contested, and in-progress interrelationships between diverse higher education and the movements within globalization (Dodds, 2008; Lindsay & Blanchett, 2011). But it is the two, related, changes – increasingly diverse higher education students in increasingly diverse higher education contexts, and the increasingly diverse world in which those students will engage as graduates, which have prompted this book.

This chapter reviews emerging local and international contexts of twenty-firstcentury higher education, and suggests links between internationalization of the student learning experience and multicultural/diversity education agendas to equalize those experiences for domestic students. To develop a current perspective, this opening chapter draws upon economic and demographic data, and also illustrates something of how diversity perspectives and priorities can be differently framed in different contexts. Indeed, these differences are a significant part of the backstory to this volume. There is an impressive amount of such data available, but also significant gaps, some contradictions, and substantial questions concerning its validity. Furthermore, the arena is, like much within globalizing education, advancing rapidly, and details of numbers and players will soon be outdated. However, the trends will not, and we need to develop practice from an informed vantage point, even when the image which reaches us is blurred, represents only part of the game, and may not always be one we welcome. A recurrent theme, illustrated in this chapter, is that the shifting drivers and environments in which we enable learning demand dynamic and mutable approaches.

Globalization is interpreted here as a complex of processes shaped and driven by human agents; ‘their value systems and the means they employ to achieve their goals’ are the ‘primary creators’ of the world (Group of Lisbon, 1995, p. 14, cited in Strijbos, 2002, p. 230). Among these people are our students and graduates. How the world impacts upon them and how they go on to impact upon the world are related matters. How they experience their university will influence both – for good or for ill. Living with, working with, shaping futures with diverse others locally and globally is fundamental to the well-being of our students and to the well-being of the global and local communities to which they will contribute. Enabling our students to participate positively is the key driver for the internationalization and equalization of the student learning experience. This chapter explores how daily encounters with increasingly complex human diversity are framing the multicultural and globalizing world for our students and our graduates. Enabling students to respond positively to this is not a small matter. It requires more than skills acquisition. It is about shifting their identities: developing a ‘new paradigm’ (Fantini, 2003, p. 15) for how they view themselves in the world, and moving beyond established ethnic or national identifications of self and others.

The three sections of this chapter explore two major themes: academic identity and transnational working, and knowledge underpinnings for learning and teaching practices with diverse students in diverse contexts, specifically with regard to theories of culture and of learning and teaching. In the reshaping of global higher education, part of which is the emergence of the post-national university and the associated expansion in learner diversity, new academic spaces, practices, and relationships are being formed and dissolved. As with other impacts of globalization, inequalities and contestations emerge for the academic community, raising in particular questions concerning who has access to these new spaces, on whose terms, with regard to whose worldviews, embedded in whose academic cultures, and performed in whose language. As has long been experienced by faculty identified as members of minority groups, there is significant danger, and some evidence, that majority voices are loudest and ears least open.

Unlike the ethnoscapes arising within the connecting processes of globalization explored in Chapter Two, education is a planned and deliberate intervention intended and designed to provide experiences to enable learning in particular ways. This is the space of the formal curriculum. University learning is also enacted in spaces where unplanned, non-deliberate, unintended experience unfolds – experience framed by the unspoken, implied, tacit norms and rituals permeating those spaces. These are the spaces of the hidden curriculum. Those spaces are populated by students, and each individual student and her students-as-peers have a significant impact upon the ways she and they experience their learning. As the composition of faculty and students become increasingly diverse, so do the responsibilities of all to all within the learning spaces they occupy. Clearly, being diverse and doing diversity are hugely different (Ahmed, 2006, cited in ECU, 2015, p. 4), and ‘[h]istory teaches us that left alone, diversity may exist, but inclusion may not’ (Winkle-Wagner & Locks, 2014, p. 4). Whatever the nature of a learning activity, the people within the learning space significantly influence how everybody is enabled or disabled from participation and learning.

Different perspectives explored in previous chapters have built towards a pedagogical approach for the emerging post-national university which seeks to be Intercultural learning activities in which diverse perspectives are presented and critiqued have been proposed as the ideal spaces for such inclusive and appropriately developmental pedagogies. Where groups or cohorts are somewhat homogeneous, the challenge when planning learning activities is to find ways in which diverse issues and perspectives can be ‘made live’ to students, and their own perspectives can be recognized as challengeable and, indeed, challenged by others. The era of globalization is providing enabling technologies through which this might be achieved.