Internationalizing Canadian Universities: Critical Perspectives

• In Event: Comparative and International Education Society of Canada (CIESC): Canadian Initiatives in Comparative and International Education: What Can We Learn From the Study of Canadian Educational Systems?

Abstract

Higher education faces new challenges in a world more globally connected than before and yet more fractured and unequal. The intensification of the global movement of people, things and ideas is reflected in the proliferation of educational ‘goods and services’ internationally, illustrating how internationalization of higher education is a response to, and even a product of globalization. The strong connections made in the literature between economic globalization and internationalization of higher education and the resulting orientation of higher education to market influences, appear to contradict the prevailing rhetoric on the academic benefits attributed to internationalization. Analyses of its processes are rarely incorporated in educational theory and practice (Dale & Robertson, 2003) and much less in the Canadian internationalization research (Beck, 2008).
In this conceptual paper I will first summarize some of the key gaps in Canadian research on internationalization, namely, the lack of understanding of the perspectives, practices and experiences of the participants engaged in internationalization, the implications of this on how internationalization is conceptualized, little attention to curriculum and almost none related to pedagogy and overall, the need to investigate the complexity of internationalization if knowledge about internationalization is to be advanced. I will then review the contributions of key scholarship and scholars on internationalization of higher education in Canada (eg. AUCC, 2007; Bond, 2011; Desai Trilokekar, Jones and Schubert, 2009; Jones, 2011; Knight, 2004; Knight, 2008; Qiang, 2011) followed by the author’s own contributions to the field.
Using recent and ongoing research on internationalization emerging from Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Research on International Education, I will demonstrate the benefits of theoretical frameworks using globalization theory, postcolonial thought and ecological frameworks. From globalization theory the scholarship of Appadurai (1996), who theorizes that globalization is more than a model of centre-periphery relationships and is characterized by fluidity, irregularity and complex global/local interactions, is used to theorize similar flows in internationalization. While there are many approaches to analysing social relations at higher education sites, postcolonial theory is effective in understanding these relations from the perspective of power and how it operates in the multiple social and professional realms. Bhabha’s (1990, 1994) notions of cultural creation and cultural containment, and cultural translation, and Pratt’s (1992) notion of the ‘contact zone’ and transculturation will be discussed. A third framework to be highlighted in this paper is one that employs sustainability as an organizing principle, emerging from unsustainable or problematic practices that issue from what can be called “a blind impetus” on the part of higher education institutions to internationalize. I will demonstrate how the scholarship of Wals and Jickling (2002), Stier (2004), and Kramsch (2002) and van Lier (2004) are useful in articulating a sustainability framework for internationalization.
The main contribution of these conceptual frameworks is the divergence from the standard use in major Canadian studies, to date, of institutional models and frameworks of internationalization (e.g. Knight, 2000) to employing sociological, globalization, postcolonial and ecological theories.

Author

• Kumari Beck, Simon Fraser University