Suchergebnisse

Capacity building within higher educational institutions in so-called developing countries is gaining momentum and likewise the research field 'international education and development'. In this paper we address the question: How can we make capacity building of higher education in developing countries without imposing a neo-imperialist agenda? We provide a first attempt to answer this by discussing our experiences of being part of the Danish Building Stronger University (BSU) capacity building project. Here we realized that we had participated in a mainstreaming of academia despite our intention to do the opposite. Hence, we want to address how to make quality assurance can be made without imposing Western epistemologies. We call for an appreciation of different knowledges instead of mainstreaming in the name of internationalisation and globalisation. Capacity building of higher education in developing countries should ensure a broader perspective of educational quality in order not to lose knowledge diversity and wisdom.

This work in progress explores how internationalisation policies and instruments affect perceptions of quality, relevance, and learning in higher education (HE) and how these perceptions travel with internationally mobile students and academics. Inherent in the word inter-national is a focus on geography; this begs the question how geography can improve the quality of HE: how can the integration of a 'non-national' dimension or the mobility between countries enhance the relevance and quality of education? We propose that drawing on spatial theories help us tease out implicit understandings of geographies of internationalisation; i.e. what come to be seen as 'the right knowledge' when teaching in English, who becomes the 'good student' in a classroom with students from all over the world, and how perceptions of pedagogy is negotiated by international staff. After discussing arguments for a spatial approach to HE internationalisation, we present the ongoing empirical study and its first results.