Speakers:

Paola Eiras is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, and she holds a PhD in Sociology of HE. Her thesis explored students’ cultural identity constructions in a transnational university in China. As one of the team members of the Geographies of Internationalisation project, she is currently exploring instruments of internationalisation in Danish universities. Paola has a background in both the biomedical field and Linguistics, and she has been a mobile academic for more than 10 years. Further information https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5987-8892

Lene Møller Madsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Geography and has for the last 15 year worked within the field of science education. The focus of her research is on student’s learning processes and students’ ways of becoming members of disciplinary science educations. Lene is a senior researcher within Geographies of Internationalisation, a research project that aims at exploring how internationalisation affects the perception of quality, relevance and learning in higher education and how these perceptions travel with mobile students and academics. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7149-9142

Thilde Juul-Wiese is a Ph.D.-student at the Department of Educational Anthropology, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Her Ph.D.-project is part of Geographies of Internationalisation (GeoInt (au.dk)) and explores outgoing student mobility at teacher education, including the geographies of this kind of mobility, imaginaries of places of learning and practising, and how educational ideas are mobile and materialize in new contexts. Thilde is a trained teacher and holds a MA in Anthropology of Education and Globalisation. Thilde Juul-Wiese - Research - Aarhus University (au.dk)

Chair: Dr Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Co-Director of CHEF, Aarhus University, Denmark

Time: March 24th, 2022 at 15.00-16.00 Central European Time (CET)

Place: A Zoom-link will be shared with the participants closer to the event

Abstract:

In the context of a global knowledge economy, internationalisation of higher education (HE) has brought about increasingly bold statements about the skills, knowledge and attitudes students should bring to their lives and work in an interconnected society. While internationalisation is regarded as a tool for enhancing the quality of education, research, and service to society, we have no clear knowledge regarding how internationalisation affects ways of thinking about quality, relevance, and learning within Danish HE. Situated in these debates, our project explores six common instruments of internationalisation in Denmark: outgoing student mobility, incoming student mobility, English as a medium of instruction (EMI), international specialisation, international staff, and internationalisation at home. In this joint presentation, we will focus on three of these instruments, namely outbound student mobility, inbound student mobility and EMI. Empirical evidence draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a teacher training college and a faculty of science exploring how ‘knowledges’, ‘students’, and ‘pedagogies’ are perceived and (re)shaped in the contextualised practices of internationalisation of HE. Using a spatial analytical approach and mobility theories, a common thread in our presentation revolves around understandings of how both material and relational spaces are integrated (or not) to produce new understandings of pedagogies, students, and knowledges.