Internationalisation as a lens on the marketisation of higher education

1. Anna Robinson-Pant, University of East Anglia Presentation for SRHE seminar, April 29th. 2015 A.Robinson-Pant@uea.ac.uk Internationalisation as a lens on the marketisation of higher education

2. Towards a transformative approach • ‘Transformative internationalization is as much about values of international reciprocity within the institutional ethical and belief system as it is about skilful teaching and learning practices, requiring individuals to move from an ethnocentric to an ethnorelative position.’ (Turner & Robson 2008:126) • ‘Despite paying lip service to various aspects of internationalisation, institutions are failing to make the most of the opportunity to engage in a radical reassessment of HE purposes, priorities and processes that student diversity and multicultural interaction provide.’ (De Vita and Case 2003: 238) • ‘As with most educational transformations, internationalisation has been largely atheoretical and driven through practice.’ (Maringe, Foskett and Woodfield, 2013: 10)

3. Internationalisation: the economic rationale • ‘Internationalisation has grown alongside the marketisation of education’ (Maringe, Foskett and Woodfield 2013: 18) • Models of internationalisation: commercial-value driven, cultural-value driven, curriculum-value driven (ibid) • Internationalisation of the curriculum: ‘the incorporation of an international and intercultural dimension into the content of curriculum as well as the teaching and learning arrangements and support services of a program of study’ (Leaske 2009: 209)

4. Internationalisation: the research perspective • ‘The dominant discourse appears to centre on what universities do to fit international students into their existing cultures…’ (Turner & Robson 2008: 70) • ‘While globalisation tends to focus on the creation of universal models in various spheres of life, which promote greater integration and interdependence between nations, internationalisation seeks to promote the greater exploitation of knowledge through multi-perspectives and multi-models created through exchange and increased communication between nations and different cultures’ (Meringe et al, 2013: 13) • ‘The interplay of intercultural communication on the ground of contemporary western institutions is also a dynamic source of change and differentiation in the languaging practices of higher education’ (Turner 2011: 11)

5. Recruitment agents and internationalisation • International recruitment agents: what thoughts do you have about them? Any questions/issues about agents that arise from your experiences in HE? Choose the colour of post-it note that fits most closely with your role in relation to higher education: Pink = teacher Green = administrative/policy Yellow = student

6. Beyond a marketing perspective on recruitment agents • Consumer behaviour and student decision making (Pimpa 2003) • Agency theory: Typology of HEI approaches towards agencies as strategic investor, market trader, flexible friends, mutual enterprise and tough banker (Huang, Raimo and Humfrey, 2014:13) • Migration/mobility studies: agents can ‘be viewed as the connection between increasingly formalised regulatory systems, market dynamics of migration and the social lives of international migrants’ (Collins 2012: 137) • ‘a clash of two different economies, one guiding the production of the documents and the other guiding their uptake’ (Research on Burundese asylum seeker documents in Belgium, Blommaert 2004: 660)

7. Agents as educators too? ‘The norm now is that agents apply on behalf of the student – the student just gives the agent all the information and they also receive the emails and forward them to the students – mostly they are very good at this and translate the university’s messages to the student because the messages can confuse the student, especially if they are international’ (Interview with HEI international officer). ‘The kids these days are too much dependent on us. Sometimes they don’t even read the emails from the university and expect the agent to do everything. I tell them “you are going to study abroad, you need to read all the information yourself”. It is totally different from my time. I had to do things for myself, the counsellor did not help that much.’ (Agent in Thailand) ‘Now applicants are faced with too much information and they need to study it carefully.’ (Agent in Japan) ‘Many clients tend to shop agencies and submit more than 15 applications. I hope that I could educate my clients a healthy concept about pursuing international higher education.’ (Agent in Taiwan)

8. International students in the UK university ‘Some lecturers say at the beginning that they do not want to hear any noise. But many students do not care about it or maybe they are discussing about the lecture. Most of them have just finished undergraduate courses in China. It is very strict there and they don’t want to do that sort of course again, but they bring that behaviour here. Because you can talk in lectures here, they think that they can discuss in lectures all the time. They think it is OK because everyone comes from China. I find this very disturbing but I don’t know how to say anything to the lecturer about the talking. Sometimes I want to get up and say something but I don’t want to fuel prejudice about Chinese students.’ [from interview with Chinese student] ‘We choose our own group. I am not so happy with mine. All the group is Chinese apart from me and they speak to each other in Chinese. In my group only one person speaks English to me then translates into Chinese for the others. It is not just that I don’t understand them, but that when I speak to them in English there is a lot of communication breakdown, my meaning gets lost. I see this because when they write it down, it is not what I meant... I try to get them to speak English but they seem timid in the group and don’t look at me. Maybe the seminar teacher would help with this situation if I emailed them but I did not think was important enough to do that.’

9. Beyond cultural dualisms: research with international students Extract from DVD ‘International students: reflections on PhD supervision’, section on ‘Researching and communicating across cultures, disciplines and methodologies’ (Magyar and Robinson-Pant, 2010) • Whose knowledge? Whose authority? • Whose literature? Whose language? • What is ‘good’ academic writing - and reading?

10. Internationalisation as a lens on the marketised university: possibilities and challenges • Exploring how cultures and identities are constructed through our interactions and changing practices in higher educational institutions • Moving from dualisms, identification of ‘differences’ to focus on how students and teachers negotiate differing perspectives in learning and teaching situations • University managers/administrators and academics responsible for teaching and learning have different and sometimes conflicting priorities, concerns, values and knowledges. How can we begin to bridge this widening gap?

11. References Bartell, M. (2003) Internationalization of universities: a university culture-based framework, Higher Education 45, 43-70 Blommaert, J. (2004) Writing as a problem: African grassroots writing, economies of literacy, and globalization, Language in Society 33, 643-671 Brooks, R. and J. Waters (2011) Student Mobilities, Migration and the Internationalization of Higher Education, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Collins, F. (2012) Organizing student mobility: education agents and student migration to New Zealand, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp 135 - 158 De Vita, G. & P. Case (2003) Rethinking the Internationalisation Agenda in UK Higher Education, Journal of Further & Higher Education, Vol. 27/4, pp 383-398 Huang, I., Raimo, V. and C. Humfrey (2014) Power and Control: managing agents for international student recruitment in higher education, Studies in Higher Education Hulme, M., Thomson, A., Hulme, R. and Doughty, G. (2013) Trading Places: The role of agents in international student recruitment from Africa. Journal of Further and Higher Education. Knight, J. (2014) Three generations of crossborder Higher Education, in Streitwieser, B. (ed) Internationalisation of Higher Education and Global Mobility, Oxford: Symposium Books Leask, B. (2009) Using formal and informal curricula to improve interactions between home and international students, Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(2) 205-221 Magyar, A. and Robinson-Pant, A. (2010) International research students: reflections on PhD supervision. DVD and manual produced for UEA Centre for Staff Educational Development Maringe, F., Foskett, N. and S. Woodfield (2013) Emerging internationalisation models in an uneven global terrain: findings from a global survey, Compare, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp 9-36 Pimpa, B. (2003) The influence of peers and student recruitment agencies on Thai students’ choices of international education, Journal of Studies in International Education Vol 7 (2) pp 178-192 Robinson-Pant, A. (2005) Cross-cultural Perspectives on Education, Buckingham: The Open University Press The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (2014) The Agent Question: Insights from students, universities and agents, Sept. 2014 Turner, J. (2011) Language in the Academy: cultural reflexivity and intercultural dynamics, Bristol: Multilingual Matters Turner, Y. and S. Robson (2008) Internationalizing the University, London: Continuum