Transformative internationalisation at home

The final event took place today with a workshop led by researchers Eveke de Louw, Marloes Ambagts and Claudia Bulnes entitled: Transformative Internationalization at Home: Building Global Skills for Employability and Innovation.

All three work at the Centre of Expertise Global and Inclusive Learning. Their work primarily focuses on research into the internationalisation of the curriculum and the provision of professional development activities for lecturers.

A transformative learning experience

Eveke: “We mainly wanted our participants to experience what happens when you bring together people from different backgrounds. These may be people from different countries or institutions, but also people who teach in different disciplines. How do you combine these different perspectives and develop education in which these elements come together? And how do you create a rich, transformative learning experience for all students?”

Through their research, they have noticed that lecturers involved in the internationalisation of education often focus primarily on the activities themselves. “The emphasis is usually placed on the activities, but during this workshop we tried to turn that around,” Marloes explains. “What are we actually trying to achieve? What impact do we want to make? And how do we plan for that? Rather than immediately putting forward our own favourite projects or tools, we worked backwards from the impact we want to create.”

Impact at the centre

The participants were given a design challenge, which was fairly intensive due to time constraints. Claudia: “We wanted them to draw on their international perspectives, diverse backgrounds and the different subject-specific perspectives they brought with them. By combining all these different contexts and viewpoints, they had to design an educational activity in which the intended impact remained central throughout.”

Bringing perspectives together

Even during the workshop, it became clear that they had chosen the right approach. “One participant mentioned that they collaborate with a company in Austria and that there might be opportunities to build something around that, while another lecturer worked with people in a more theoretical environment,” Marloes says. “Everyone brought in their own experiences and contacts, and that led to some great solutions.”