Exploring the Impact of International Student Mobility on Cross-Cultural Learning Adaptation

Abstract

The context for this paper is an increased internationalisation of learning and teaching in Higher Education (HE) worldwide (Knight 2006; Caruana & Spurling, 2007) and specifically the ambition to internationalise student experience (Hyland et al., 2008). The specific interest is 'internationalisation' from the students' perspective as it focuses on 'academic learning that blends the concepts of self, strange, foreign and otherness' (Teekens, 2006, p. 17). This view of internationalisation is also congruent with the perspectives of Appadurai (2001), Haigh (2009) and Sanderson (2011) who foreground the value of personal awareness in intercultural encounters in HE. The interest for the chapter, within this context, is to examine the complexities underpinning the concept of culture of learning in student mobility through a non-essentialist lens. Exploring the rich, individual student perspectives, the objectives are to explore how students can benefit from cultural diversity through mobility, and how this can raise their awareness of their own and other cultures of learning, a key contributor to the development of an intercultural capacity which is a key graduate attribute.