A Workshop on "Mapping Internationalisation of the Curriculum"
Internationalisation of the curriculum might not be a term you use every day in your work at the university. Yet, if the leadership at your university intends to modernise the teaching programme, you as an academic teacher, programme director, education developer and internationalisation manager at higher education institutions, must know it.
To assess at what stage your higher education institution or your programme is in terms of internationalisation of the curriculum, it is useful to perform a mapping exercise.
In this exercise you will lay out all your knowledge and insight related to the issue at hand and will be able to tell what you have, what is missing and what you still need to succeed in moving your agenda forward.
To trully engage in this mapping exercise, you will first need to understand related key concepts. This mini-course introduces the concepts of Internationalisation at Home (IaH) and Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) before moving onto the mapping exercise.
The Mini-Course Summary
- This mini-course introduces you to the definitions of Internationalisation at Home (IaH) and Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) in the context of programme modernisation, relevant for today’s global living and working environment.
- The importance of IaH for the sustainable development of the entire teaching institution is discussed. The material highlights the key strategic decisions and an array of practical aspects of changes related to internationalising the higher education institution and quality of education.
- Importantly, the mini-course takes a look at the students and their generations at a university: X, Y, Z and Alfa.
- Culture and its implications for the interactions at an international higher education institution are highlighted.
- The concepts of multicultural learning space, the glocal classroom, the development of knowledge and student employability might be seen in a different light and may afford you, the course participant, a different view of their own didactic practice.
- You are introduced to the process of diagnosing the issues requiring modernisation in your course or programme (depending on your responsibility at the university). The mini-course suggests pathways to implement the necessary adjustments in your teaching programmes.
- Finally, you receive tools to conduct a mapping exercise. No professional trainer-set is necessary. The instructions are provided and the exercise may be conducted with peers.
The Intended Lessons Learned – persons engaging in this activity can be expected to:
- understand the concept of Internationalisation at Home (IaH) and Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) and their strategic and practical implications when defining a modern teaching programme;
- gain a deeper awareness of the concept of Intercultural Communication (ICC);
- be able to diagnose programme elements which require adjustment, plan this adjustment and implement it;
- be able to use the provided mapping exercise at home institutions to discover the solutions already available but previously not considered significant and prepare to act for change.
Ketso!
To facilitate the discovery of a stage at which institutions are in the process of the internationalisation of the curriculum, we used a method developed in Lesotho in Africa – Ketso. This method allows learning together and developing creative solutions while each voice or concern is heard with respect. When using this approach during the development of this Intellectual Output, we used a set purchased with the funds provided through CLILMED during our LTT in Sweden (see https://clilmed.eu/gallery/).
The workshop participants easily adopted the method and expressed interest in experimenting with the method at home institutions. In result, the Ketso training set was later used at participating partners institutions to discover their own needs related to the various processes of internationalisation and problem-solving in general when preparing to talk to their colleagues about CLILMED and its results.
The User Guide
This material was developed by Justyna Giezynska of Luminar Foundation in November 2019 for a CLILMED workshop and is now available to all interested in a form of a mini-course. This mini-course is free of charge but, for the reasons of users’ safety, registration is required to access the platform. It will be available online until October 31, 2025. Updates will be carried out periodically.