From teaching practices to theory-building: Synthesising unviersity lecturers' experiences with international education

Since the Bologna Agreement 1999 we have witnessed a dramatic transformation in the European internal market for higher education and research. This is a regional variant of a global ‘internationalisation’, characterised by a dramatic increase in student mobility, the rapid expansion of English-medium education, and new regional or national policies catering for the provision of ‘internationalised’ university programmes. The change process has inspired a wealth of publications on internationalisation and policy-making, curricular innovation, and (new) pedagogic practices (e.g. Killick 2017, Leask 2015, Hudzik 2014, Hellsten/Reid 2008). This may prompt the critical reader to ask: What more is there to add?

Departing from the position of a practice researcher, the current author retorts that now is the time when one can truly begin to grasp how, in a more practical sense, macro-level processes of ‘internationalisation’ have transformed actors’ performance of teaching and learning in university classrooms around the world. Building on a comprehensive literature review and empirical material collected between 2007 and 2018 the book Teaching practices in a global learning environment (Tange, forthcoming) documents how internationalisation is manifest in the structural factors conditioning academics’ teaching practice, the actual ‘doings’ and ‘sayings’ that lecturers engage in when performing international education, and the reflections on practice that motivate some actors to modify their pedagoges in response to a diverse student cohort. The theoretical framework builds on the practice theories of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1988), Theodore Schatzki (2002) and John Dewey (1997, 2011), which enables a consideration of field structures conditioning teachers’ action, concrete teaching and learning practices, as well as the possibility of change through ‘Learning by Doing’.

The paper provides an overview of the key contents in Global teaching practices, including the four structural factors of policy, mobility, language and discipline, and the five teaching practices of education design, curricular context, classroom roles and routines, multicultural teamwork and exam performances. This motivates a reflection on how practices change, suggesting that the key word of ‘teaching practices’ be read both with reference to the concrete forms of action and interaction undertaken by international educators, and the change process involved when teachers attempt to accommodate learners in transition from diverse linguistic, educational, disciplinary and socio-cultural backgrounds. The author works from a position inspired by the principles of Grounded Theory. This means that any thematic perspective introduced in the book has been established based on experiences conveyed by 68 Danish and British university lecturers involved in the practice of international education. Subsequently, interview respondents’ experiences have been compared to the findings in previous empirical research, theories on internationalisation, language and education as well as document analyses of a variety of material, including institutional policies, course syllabi and staff biographies. Hence, any theory-building emerge from actors’ practical understandings and grounding in particular institutional, disciplinary and socio-cultural contexts.