Teaching Practices in a Global Learning Environment

Hanne Tange is Associate Professor of English and Global Studies in the Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University, Denmark

"In a provocative blend of Bourdieu’s sociology and the practice turn in contemporary theory, Hanne Tange reframes the debate over international education. Explicitly taking practices as a category of analysis in the field of international education, Tange writes with insight of the "hidden curriculum" whereby international teaching involves the transfer of practical knowledge from academic staff to students. Her emphasis on tacit as well as formalised types of knowledge is a welcome corrective to the often sterile debate concerning "intercultural competence" which too often occludes critical analysis of the concrete course activities and the socialisation processes involved in the field of international education. Read this book and profit!" Professor Anthony Elliott, Dean of External Engagement and Executive Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia"At last, a book that treats university lecturers as key thinkers and shapers of the internationalisation of higher education! Nested in a scholarly analysis of the linguistic, disciplinary, institutional and policy features of a global learning environment, this book uses rich empirical data from three major studies to give voice to the teachers engaged in curriculum and module design, classroom activities, multicultural teamwork, and assessment – the practices that have transformed international education in the last decades. An added advantage is that the study’s semi-peripheral location in Europe offers a refreshingly critical perspective on the traditional US/UK nexus of ‘globalisation’."Susan Wright, Professor of Educational Anthropology, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark"This book provides a substantial tool for understanding internationalisation in higher education in a larger context: its development, incentives, political and institutional backgrounds, essentially by insisting on the role of academic staff as central agents. The author’s historical, social and didactic overview together with a clear methodological approach provides a transdisciplinary analysis of concepts too often left undefined, despite their high strategic value. The author questions the role of macro-level trends such as a global market for higher education, cheap technology and travel, Englishisation, and benchmarking schemes rewarding institutions for international education and research. Based on a thorough understanding of teaching and education, this book places individual actors’ enactment of teaching at the heart of international education.University managers implement a policy of strategic internationalisation in order to raise their institution’s stakes in the global competition, suggesting a rather passive role for academic staff. However, the movement could be the opposite, recognising the role of academic staff as agents driving the globalisation of higher education and research. Internationalisation at two extremes: as a strategic goal, recruiting students for financial reasons and with an understanding of own superiority, fuelling deficit discourses and exam failure; or as a learning process for all, taking inclusion for granted and treating dissonances as learning situations. New pedagogies, variation, collaboration with international office staff and learning consultants: Give back the responsibility to academics for internationalisation.The originality of the book is to provide a more profound understanding of the interaction between policy level, organisational culture, and academic staff and students as agents and co-creators of knowledge." Professor Hanne Leth Andersen, Vice-Chancellor for Roskilde University, Denmark

• Part 1 1. Introduction 2. Researching Teaching Practices 3. Theories and Practices Part 2: Structures in a Global Learning Environment Introduction 4. A Global Field of Higher Education 5. Internationalising The Disciplines 6. Global and Local Teacher 7. The Languages of Internationalisation Part 3: Teaching Practices in International Education Introduction 8. Designing International Education 9. Roles, Rules and Routines 10. Curricular Contexts and Concerns 11. Multicultural Teamwork 12. Exam Successes and Failure Part 4 13. Constructing a Global Practice Scape