Language and Intercultural Communication | 2019
Editorial
Abstract
People travel; people travel abroad for education. And they do this for all sorts of reasons and at all sorts of levels: to learn another culture, to learn another language, to increase their cultural capital, to increase their job prospects, as well as simply to have a good time. They might pursue short courses, primary or secondary schooling, undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. Following on with our series of ‘themed’ open issues for 2019, in this fourth collection I have been able to pull together a number of papers which feature language learners who have who have either travelled abroad to study, or who have just returned from studying abroad. Dippold, Bridges, Eccles and Mullen explore the accounts of young people who have travelled from other countries around the world to study their undergraduate degrees in the UK; Yu Kyoung Shin and Eun Sung Park consider four students at different stages of their educational careers who have left the social and economic constraints of North Korea to pursue their education in the South, and in some cases gone on to the USA. Mohammad Naseh Nasrollahi Shahri explores the stories of one language learner who has returned to study in an in Iranian university after periods of time spent abroad studying English; and finally, Curtis, Robertson and Mahony report on a small group of Australian teachers who travel to Lombok to learn something of the Indonesian language and culture. Universities worldwide are keenly aware of the value – intellectual, cultural, and monetary – of attracting international students to their institutions: not only to enhance the diversity of their own student body, but also to boost their income. Increasingly this movement is not just from East to West, but also – with the continuing rise in investment in national education systems in Asia and their relative inexpensiveness compared with some of the well-established ‘destination universities’ in Europe and North America – from West to East. However, as of yet this reversal has perhaps been rather slower from the Global North to the Global South. Yet over the past few years increasingly critical voices have emerged from these pages in relation to the internationalisation of higher education. For this has more often than not gone hand in hand with the increased marketisation of courses, which reflects the commodification of education within the ethos of our current neoliberal phase of capitalism. Previously Castro, Woodin, Lundgren, and Byram (2016) have reported on the way in which student mobility is constituted with the discourses of internationalisation, and Collins (2018) criticised the appropriation of the term ‘intercultural’ by the dominant discourses of the neoliberal university system; various manifestations of ‘Neoliberalism in Higher Education’ from around the world were also presented in Gray, O’Regan and Wallace’s recent eponymous special issue (2018). These papers for the most part addressed internationalisation from the standpoint of policy critique. The actual intercultural experience of voices of those at the sharp end of internationalisation – staff and students – have perhaps been reported less regularly in these pages, although Ladegaard and Cheng (2014) have investigated the ways in which overseas exchange students constructed each ‘other’ in international classes in a Hong Kong University. As a corrective to this trend, the first paper in this issue lets us hear the students’ angle on internationalisation. Dippold, Bridges, Eccles and Mullen investigate the extent to which aspects of university mission statements are actually reflected in students’ lived experience in the seminar and lecture hall. In order to accomplish this, they draw on the metaphors of ‘block’ and ‘thread’ (after Amadasi & Holliday, 2017, 2018; Holliday, 2016) to analyse the narrative accounts of first year international undergraduates as they describe their experience of studying across a range of different disciplines in four UK universities. Despite the widespread critique of policy, Dippold and colleagues conclude there is scope of for optimism, in as much as many examples appear not least to oscillate between ‘block’ narratives that ‘reinforce the notion of uncrossable cultural boundaries’, and ‘thread’