1. Choosing a Program
Internationalization Strategies for the Global Knowledge Society
UNIVIA-TEMPUS Workshop
UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA
13 June 2016
Peter Szyszlo, PhD candidate
pszyszlo@uOttawa.ca
Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa
2. Choosing a Program
i) Provide a critical overview of globalization, the knowledge society and
internationalization in an effort to contextualize these distinct, but highly
inter-related constructs within a post-Soviet higher education context.
ii) Identify and interpret how the phenomenon of internationalization
translates into the development of strategic partnerships, innovation and
institutional change.
iii) Mapping exercise: Delta cycle for internationalization (Rumbley 2010)
Overview
3. Choosing a Program
• Globalization is an ongoing, complex and dynamic process occurring at
different levels in higher education around the world.
• Globalization is bringing about an ‘academic revolution’ to the mission of
higher education and research (Altbach et al. 2010).
• A ‘new geography of action’ is taking shape whereby higher education
systems are driving and are being driven by the forces of globalization
(Breton 2014).
• Universities often perceive themselves as objects of globalization;
however, they are also its agents (Scott 1998).
Globalization
4. Choosing a Program
• Despite the tendencies for policy convergence brought on by globalization,
universities remain embedded within national higher education systems.
Globalization is a non-linear process.
• The post-Soviet region faces a dual transition which needs to take the
post-socialist and global contexts into account (Kwiek 2001).
• Glonacal Agency Heuristic: Global-National-Local (Marginson & Rhoades
2002).
• The globalization of higher education represents the construction and
redefinition of new spatial action by the very actors themselves (Breton
2003).
Globalization
5. Choosing a Program
• Internationalization: Definitions and pathways
• The movement of scholars gained prominence in Europe over a century
prior to the Renaissance (i.e. re-internationalization for the 21st century).
• Globalization vs Internationalization: Globalization can be thought of as a
catalyst, while internationalization is the response.
• Internationalization can be considered an ‘educational innovation’ and a
‘process of educational change’ (van der Wende 1996).
• Internationalization can also be considered as a means to an end rather
than an end in itself.
Internationalization
6. Choosing a Program
• Internationalization policies in context: Non-static and highly fluid in
nature.
• Internationalization rationales: i) political; ii) economic; iii) social/cultural
iv) academic.
• Concepts go global, but may play out differently in other higher education
systems (i.e. policy mutations and hybridity).
• The Soviet higher education legacy and the pressures of globalization
reveal a dual framework whereby adaptive responses and entrenched
management logics run parallel (and often in conflict) with one another.
Internationalization
8. Choosing a Program
• Mobility of students and academic staff
• Mutual influences of higher education systems on each other
• Internationalization of the substance of teaching, learning, and research
• Institutional strategies of internationalization
• Knowledge/innovation transfer
• Cooperation and competition (Coopetition)
• National and supra-national policies as regarding the international
dimension of higher education (Khem & Teichler 2007)
Internationalization
10. Choosing a Program
Internationalization
• Higher education internationalization efforts in the early 21st
century are shifting from transactional to transformational
approaches.
• Internationalization is a construct and an institutional project.
• Yet, internationalization suffers from conceptual unclarity and few
metrics exist to gauge rationales, prevailing motives and outcomes
of internationalization efforts.
• Nota bene: A university without a proper internationalization
strategy runs the risk of becoming irrelevant!
11. Choosing a Program
• The knowledge society represents an emergent discourse requiring radical
reforms to higher education systems (UNESCO 2005).
• The ‘third industrial revolution’: the creation and timely application of
new knowledge is defining the pace of innovation and national prosperity.
• “If knowledge is the electricity of the new informational-international
economy, then institutions of higher learning are the power sources.”
(Castells 1994)
• Knowledge does not deplete with use, but grows through application and
networking!
Knowledge society
12. Choosing a Program
• Universities are major interlocutors in the global knowledge society;
however, for higher education systems in the former Soviet space, specific
challenges remain.
• Post-socialist states have “become a part of another transformation
process shared with the rest of the European Union – toward knowledge-
based societies” (Silova 2009).
• Bologna Process - Berlin Communiqué & Lisbon Protocol: Promoting
Europe as the most competitive region in the world (i.e. knowledge
policies). Bologna as a stimulus for change.
• The ‘Europe of Knowledge’ (1997) is being built upon existing national
higher education frameworks (policy lending and borrowing).
Knowledge society
13. Choosing a Program
• The Soviet higher education legacy and the drive for Europeanization are at
the nexus of many post-socialist higher education system.
• Internationalization strategies should not be a matter of ‘pitting legacies’
against one another, but rather “a matter of combining them in a manner
that is most expedient in view of national institutional peculiarities”
(Dobbins & Knill 2011, 427).
• Reconciling the (post) Soviet with the global: “Take the best from the West
and leave the rest”.
• Future Challenges: Converting the achievements of the past into the assets
of the future, intellectual symmetry, mutually interesting problems,
resource allocations, program sustainability.
Knowledge Strategies
14. Choosing a Program
• TASK: Map out individual university approaches to internationalization by
applying the Delta cycle of internationalization (Rumbley 2010) to
determine institutional rationales, strategies and outcomes.
• NB: Please be sure to distinguish between ‘strategic aspiration’ versus
‘strategic reality’ (Maringe and Foskett 2010).
Mapping excercise
