Ethical policies and practices of internationalisation and with international students.

Our research improves ethical practices with international students in higher education. We take a practitioner focus to support universities with developing meaningful intercultural curricula, pedagogies, student support, and policies.

International students represent a significant population of higher education students. These numbers increase almost annually, barring global crises, as do understandings of the importance of globalising curricula and practice in higher education institutions.

Research on international students often takes a ‘deficit lens’, presenting this group as lacking language skills, academic abilities and cultural capacities. This has made it difficult for higher education practitioners to develop effective approaches to internationalisation. Our work demonstrates how these existing practices are unethical, particularly in countries that allow universities to charge high fees to international students.

Our research explores and critiques these deficit lenses, seeking to reframe internationalisation as a generative, creative, and mutual endeavour. We have explored academic staff’s pedagogies of internationalisation, academic and international officer perceptions of internationalisation, barriers of inequality to international student mobility, international students’ experiences of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism, and how academic literature represents international students. 

We work with teaching and research practitioners to collaboratively build an understanding of constructive, reciprocal, ethical practice with international students.

Our work has been funded and supported by organisations such as Advance HE, the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), British Academy / Leverhulme, the German Academic Exchange Network (DAAD), and the Spencer Foundation.

How we’re making a difference

To help practitioners develop their understandings of internationalisation and working with international students, we have developed:

• An Internationalization Practitioner Network with over 300 international members hosting monthly webinars
• A Research with International Students (RIS) Network for over 1000 researchers who include international students as participants in their work
• Reports, podcasts and databases for AdvanceHE on supportive and ethical practices for internationalisation
• An open access dataset about internationalisation indicators in UK higher education
• An international conference ‘Research with International Students’
• A programme of staff training workshops on rethinking work with international students which has been delivered to teaching staff nationally and internationally