The internationalization of the curriculum is a pervasive but contested concept within higher education (HE) that poses both challenges and opportunities for universities. Education leaders have called for strategies for internationalization which have traditionally focused on the recruitment of international students and staff as well as on introducing English-medium-instruction (EMI) across degree programs (Altbach & Knight, 2007). However, these strategies EMI do not warrant the development of intercultural skills and global competence among students.
This study discusses the impact of a teaching innovation project that aims to foster intercultural and global competence within an EMI course at a university. Following Jones and Killick (2013), our intended learning outcomes were internationalized by shifting the focus towards adopting a global outlook as a graduate attribute avoiding large chunks of additional course content. We examine the teachers' and students' perceptions of how our intervention has prepared them to deal with cultural and linguistic diversity in the at-home context for a period of four months. We include semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, a questionnaire, and classroom observations.
The results point in three directions. First, the activities implemented have succeeded in opening the participants' minds towards naturalizing the use of EMI vis-à-vis other languages. They also emphasized that reflecting upon global issues made them become more tolerant. Second, the students and the teachers enjoyed interacting in pretend international communicative situations where English appeared together with other languages. Finally, despite the participants' reported positive experience, a skeptical attitude remained in relation to whether the course contents and English would be useful to work in Catalonia.
The students' embracement of our implementation highlights a view of universities as "world spaces" (Roberson, 1995: 39) where "the world-as-a-whole is potentially inserted". This is crucial for internationalization at home and our intervention seems to have succeeded in that respect. However, activities that confront the students with international cases occurring in domestic scenarios should also be present in such an initiative. Intended international learning outcomes should ensure that students graduate with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to make positive, ethical contributions as citizens and professionals to their global, national, and local communities (Least, 2015). In line with de Wit and Altbach (2021), our study highlights that internationalization in HE (and IoC) is entering a phase in which linking the global to the local and integrating global, regional, national, and local dimensions is imperative.
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