Rethinking internationalisation in an age of polycrisis

We are living in an age of global polycrisis, uncertainty and high anxiety. Cost-of-living crises, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, geo-economic confrontation, erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation, cybercrime and insecurity, and mass involuntary migration are global risks and realities identified in the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2023. All of these are compounded by the uneven distribution of global wealth and access to opportunity.

This hyper-complex scenario, and the frustrations and concerns associated with it, affect the mental health and well-being of millions, including large numbers of university students in the Global South and North, limiting their opportunities for a brighter tomorrow.

Against these realities, it is difficult to be hopeful and-or optimistic. Each crisis constitutes a wicked problem intertwined with significant, often conflicting, moral, political and professional challenges. Alternative approaches to problem-solving are needed.

Proponents of socially responsible international education maintain that, for the betterment of society, universities need to reorientate their missions to align with and promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Higher education internationalisation needs to be reconceived as a response to these polycrisis challenges and an avenue to working together to overcome them by preparing graduates to not only live and thrive in – but also to be change agents for – a better, brighter future.

This goal will not be realised if we do not think differently about the role of universities, internationalisation and how we understand and enact the university curriculum.

The October 2023 Peru-Australia webinar series, ‘Internationalising Teaching and Learning’, was developed with this sense of responsibility in mind, bringing together educational leaders from Peru and Australia to share their vision for how higher education internationalisation needs to be rethought.

Curriculum change

Wicked problems demand alternative approaches to problem-solving, a transversal thinking in order to ‘un-wicked’ problems like the global polycrisis and turn them into tame problems that can be solved step by step.

Curriculum change itself is a wicked problem because of its rhizomatic characteristics and the multiple perspectives from which it can be approached. As a wicked problem, curriculum change challenges internationalisation in several ways.

First, it compels us to reconsider assumptions and preconceived ideas about internationalisation, its role, its purpose and place in and for community and society.

Second, it invites us to re-evaluate how we understand ‘internationalisation’ as a practice, ideal and purveyor of opportunities from perspectives other than our own.

Third, it encourages us to lift our gaze and promotes hyperopia, long (rather than short myopic) sightedness to look beyond the present into the future to reconsider how to internationalise learning and teaching in a complex global environment.

Polymath education

Speaking from Peru, Professor José Garcia-Contto from the Universidad de Lima stressed that higher education internationalisation in the Latin American context needs to provide all students with opportunities for intercultural experiences beyond those associated with physical mobility.

For him, the challenge is making internationalisation “transversal” to all stakeholders across all disciplines. Internationalising learning and teaching in Latin America means more than simply appropriating the practices and modalities of the Global North.

Moving away from an emphasis on trade, business and the globalisation of intercultural, social and political processes, internationalisation must prioritise local problems.

Internationalisation for Latin American universities, he argued, cannot be premised on the same drivers and goals of the Global North. If it is to be meaningful and not focused on economic outcomes, the internationalisation of learning and teaching must be approached differently.

This means acknowledging the consistency of change, embracing flexibility, leaving behind rigidity, utilising diverse teaching approaches and being orientated towards community problems. This can be achieved by promoting polymath education and the internationalisation that supports this.

This also means, Garcia-Contto argued, reconceptualising who we are as educators and how we conceptualise learning outcomes and skills development, assessment techniques, teaching approaches, methods and the organisation of learning in physical and virtual learning spaces.

In an era of polycrisis, we do not need a narrow curriculum defined by professional competencies and specialisations, he argued. We need to produce polymath graduates with knowledge in diverse fields and disciplines who can “see through” disciplines and use knowledge to solve these multidimensional wicked problems.

Internationalising the curriculum for polymath learning requires “internationalising” teaching, learning from a multitude of different perspectives, and supporting educators to embrace transformational practices in the classroom.

Responsible internationalisation

Speaking from La Trobe University in Australia, Associate Dean International Dr Raul Sanchez Urribarri emphasised the need to question and transcend institutional approaches, discourses and practices in international higher education that fail to take into account the most urgent social problems of our day.

He argued that we need an internationalisation project that is ethical, responsible, equitable, and with a conscious impact on society. This requires an effort that is sustainable and connected to the needs of our communities at different levels, whilst engaging with polycrisis at a global scale.

To these ends, Urribarri stressed that it is important to consider changes in the geopolitical context across the world in recent times, including trends that are inimical to inclusion and social justice. International teaching and learning offer an important avenue to help everyone involved in higher education to debate and question these trends and to develop spaces for mutual recognition and understanding.

Promoting responsible internationalisation also involves, Urribarri explained, embracing a teaching and learning ethos that is accessible to the largest possible number of students, that is transformative and that engages with the needs, views and aspirations of our students in this changing world. This means going beyond individual achievement and truly helping to build community, now that we need it the most.

While some of these premises are hard to define and operationalise in the abstract, they can inspire and influence the conception, creation and implementation of new international education discourses, strategies, policies and practices.

Moving on: A design approach to the curriculum

Quoting Steven King’s The Gunslinger, Craig Whitsed from Curtin University in Australia observed: “The world has moved on. But it is moving on faster now.”

However, according to Whitsed, conceptualisations of internationalisation and concepts like internationalisation of the curriculum have not kept pace or moved on.

Conceptualising the curriculum as a design problem, he explained, affords hitherto unseen possibilities to emerge. Reconceptualising internationalisation in relational rather than transactional terms opens space for alternative possibilities.

Rather than focusing on the incorporation of international and intercultural dimensions into learning and teaching, it is vital that we engage more fully with the curriculum as a complex conversation with our past, present and future selves.

An internationalised curriculum needs to address what it means to be in and of a community and in and of this world. It must support students in being and doing things “differently” in and for the future.

Design thinking is human-centric and it encourages empathy, problem-defining, collaborative ideation and experimentation.

As much as students need to develop meta-cognitive capacities to learn, equally they need to develop the capacity to unlearn, empathise, think laterally and focus on human values. A design approach to curriculum internationalisation can support the development of these attributes.

Doing the same things repeatedly and expecting different results is, as Einstein is attributed as saying, insanity. A socially responsible internationalisation for all demands a different reorientation in thinking about curriculum design and development and approaches to learning and teaching. Design-inspired approaches to the internationalisation of higher education will result in different results, Whitsed argues.

Multiple pathways

Curriculum internationalisation encompasses more than incorporating international and intercultural perspectives into learning and teaching, mobility and exchange. It is vital to provide educational spaces that encourage all students and staff to “feel and live” the other, their realities and uniqueness and embrace rather than recoil from difference.

With so much crisis in the world, a significant responsibility for universities is to graduate hopeful, optimistic, polymath students with vision to “see through” the complex array of entangled wicked problems. How we do this is another wicked problem as there are no easy solutions. No easy answers. There are, however, many different paths, directions, ways to move on and explore.

Craig Whitsed is associate professor in the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia; Professor José Garcia-Contto is based at the Universidad de Lima, Peru; and Dr Raul Sanchez Urribarri is in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Australia.