Intercultural relationship development and higher education internationalisation: a qualitative investigation based on a
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Intercultural relationship development and higher education internationalisation: a qualitative investigation based on a three-stage ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework Kazuhiro Kudo 1,2
& Simone Volet
2
& Craig Whitsed
3
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
This qualitative study scrutinised the experiences of intercultural relationship development between international and domestic students at two Japanese private universities, which have contrastive degrees of commitment to internationalisation in regard to stated vision, curriculum, international student enrolment and languages of instruction. Kudo et al.’s (Higher Education, 77(3), 473–489, 2019) three-stage ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework was adopted to gain insight into the roles of institutional internationalisation and personal agency in intercultural relationship development. A thematic analysis of interview data from 32 students (14 domestics, 18 internationals) revealed that institutional internationalisation may play a relatively small role in promoting intercultural relationship development compared to students’ agency. A detailed examination of the associations between three forms of agency (i.e. situated, cosmopolitan and creative) and three relational stages (i.e. interactivity, reciprocity and unity) led to the identification of cosmopolitan agency as a meaningful hallmark of intercultural relationship development. These findings call for future research aimed at identifying the environmental and individual conditions that are most conducive to the cultivation of cosmopolitan agency in both international and domestic students. Keywords Internationalisation . Intercultural interaction . Intercultural relationship development . Agency . Cosmopolitan . Ecological framework
* Kazuhiro Kudo [email protected] Simone Volet [email protected] Craig Whitsed [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Higher Education
Introduction With the exponential increase in global student mobility and growing importance placed on educating globally minded future leaders, the proponents of higher education internationalisation emphasise the need to equip all students with intercultural competence, global citizenship and cosmopolitanism (Richardson 2016). Intercultural interactions between international and domestic students are considered an essential ingredient in the cultivation of these attributes (Leask 2015). Yet, despite the considerable allocation of institutional resources (fiscal and human), educationally orientated programmes and extra-curricular activities to engender these attributes and increase meaningful interactions between international and domestic students, there is limited evidence of this occurring (cf. Zou and Yu 2019). It is widely recognised that the mere presence of students with diverse cultural backgrounds in the same institution is insufficient to harness the rich potential of student diversity as an educational resource (Marginson and
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