The relevance of an internationalised home curriculum for all students is generally acknowledged. Other than study abroad, the home curriculum gives programs of study full control over the way students learn international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives. However, misconceptions, lack of strategies, lack of skills of academics, and lack of connection between stakeholders present major obstacles to internationalising teaching and learning “at home”. The practical trajectory outlined in this chapter presents programs of study with the opportunity to focus on employability skills instead of on a semantic discussion on internationalisation. By linking this orientation on employability skills with the articulation of intended learning outcomes (ILOs), a pathway for developing employability skills in all students will be created. Within this pathway, international, intercultural, interdisciplinary, and future-focused dimensions serve to enhance students’ acquiring employability skills. The trajectory presented here evolved out of action research on internationalisation with academics. During the action research, taking employability skills as a starting point emerged as an enabler for the internationalisation process. It helped to overcome lengthy and semantic discussions on the meaning of internationalisation. After that, international and intercultural dimensions are included in these employability skills. These skills are then translated into ILOs. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Internationalization and employability in higher education on 19/25/06, available online: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351254885.
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Careers work is a very political business. Since the early 1990s, successive governments in England and the Netherlands have persistently challenged those working in the careers sector to demonstrate the educational, social and economic value and impact of their work. In this context, the marketisation of career guidance policies and practices has expanded, with a growing assumption that market-based goods and services ensure greater responsiveness to consumer choice and offer better and/or more innovative services for lower prices. In this article, we do not intend to give a comparison of trends in England and the Netherlands. We only examine the impact of market principles applied to career guidance provision in both countries. Findings indicate such provision for young people is on a steady decline. Lessons learned from these two nations indicate that a market for quality career services does not exist in schools and colleges. As a result, marketisation and privatisation of career services have led to an impoverished and fragmented supply of services. Greater attention by governments in career guidance policies for young people (and adults) is necessary to reduce the widening gap between ‘the haves and have nots’ in society. Failure to reduce labour market mismatch through new forms of careers dialogue is not only damaging and costly for individuals, families and employers, but for the taxpayer too.
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This article provides a description of the emergence of the Spanish ‘Occupy’ movement, Democracia real ya. The aim is to analyse the innovative discursive features of this movement and to connect this analysis to what we consider the innovative potential of the critical sciences. The movement is the result of a spontaneous uprising that appeared on the main squares of Madrid and Barcelona on 15 May 2011 and then spread to other Spanish cities. This date gave it its name: 15M. While the struggle for democracy in Spain is certainly not new, the 15M group shows a series of innovative features. These include the emphasis on peaceful struggle and the imaginary of a new democracy or worldview, transmitted through innovative placards and slogans designed by Spanish citizens. We consider these innovative not only due to their creativity, but also because of their use as a form of civil action. Our argument is that these placards both functioned as a sign of protest and, in combination with the demonstrations and the general dynamics of 15M, helped to reframe the population’s understanding of the crisis and rearticulate the identity of the citizens from victims to agents. In order to analyse the multimodal character of this struggle, we developed an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines socio-cognitive approaches that consider ideological proposals as socio-cognitive constructs (i.e. the notion of narrative or cognitive frame), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the analysis of discourses related to processes of social imagination and transformation. The socio-constructivist perspective is used to consider these discourses in relation to their actors, particular contexts and actions. The use of CDA, which included a careful rhetoric analysis, helped to analyse the process of deconstruction, transformation and reconstruction that 15M uses to maintain its struggle. The narrative analysis and the discursive theoretical concept of articulation helped to methodologically show aspects of the process of change alluded to above. This change was both in terms of cognition and in the modification of identity that turned a large part of the Spanish population from victims to indignados and to the neologism indignadanos, which is a composition of indignado and ciudadano (citizen).
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