Though internationalisation at home is a relatively recent concept, it has already been embraced widely, particularly in northern and western Europe. Internationalisation at home aims to bring internationalisation to all students through the home curriculum. It is therefore primarily about teaching and learning, which implies that lecturers are increasingly becoming prominent players in internationalisation. After all, they are the ones who create learning environments with international and intercultural dimensions. In today’s blog, internationalisation at home expert Jos Beelen looks at where the international officer fits in.
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On 13 June 2018, Susana Menéndez said farewell as member of the Executive Board of The Hague University of Applied Sciences. To mark that occasion, a symposium was held on leadership in the internationalization of higher education, of which Susana has been a champion over the past ten years.
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In November 2019, scholars and practitioners from ten higher education institutions celebrated the launch of the iKudu project. This project, co-funded by Erasmus [1], focuses on capacity development for curriculum transformation through internationalisation and development of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchange. Detailed plans for 2020 were discussed including a series of site visits and face-to-face training. However, the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the plans in ways that could not have been foreseen and new ways of thinking and doing came to the fore. Writing from an insider perspective as project partners, in this paper we draw from appreciative inquiry, using a metaphor of a mosaic as our identity, to first provide the background on the iKudu project before sharing the impact of the pandemic on the project’s adapted approach. We then discuss how alongside the focus of iKudu in the delivery of an internationalised and transformed curriculum using COIL, we have, by our very approach as project partners, adopted the principles of COIL exchange. A positive impact of the pandemic was that COIL offered a consciousness raising activity, which we suggest could be used more broadly in order to help academics think about international research practice partnerships, and, as in our situation, how internationalised and decolonised curriculum practices might be approached. 1. KA2 Erasmus+ Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices (capacity building in the field of Higher Education)
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