Academic Mobility And International Academics

Throughout this timely collection, chapter authors offer insight into overall academic employment experiences, including their motivations and challenges in steering their academic career. They offer guidance on how international academics can harness their career aspirations and how internationality in academic careers is evolving.

This book offers a contemporary perspective on the mobility of academics across the globe. With contributions from authors based across 4 continents focusing on the experience of academic mobility in Africa, Australia, Europe, the Gulf and the United States, the volume is both comprehensive and relevant.

Students in a range of academic disciplines can take part in a growing number of international placements available to them. Given the sharp increase in the number of exchange programs in recent years, the benefit derived by students from their added mobility merits greater investigation. Academic Mobility Programs and Engagement: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential scholarly publication that examines international and study abroad programs and their effect on students and student preparation. Featuring a range of topics such as healthcare, cultural responsiveness, and teacher education, this book is ideal for higher education institutions, faculty, cross-cultural trainers, government officials, counselors, student services administrators, policymakers, program developers, administrators, academicians, educators, researchers, and students.

Academic mobility in higher education is an old phenomenon, but it has become a high profile issue as the numbers of students and staff engaged, and the number of countries involved, has increased hugely in the last few decades. For this reason and many others – political, cultural and educational – this book reports research on the many facets of the experience and people involved, both now and in the past. The emphasis in research has so far tended to focus on contemporary student mobility but this collection deliberately includes articles on mobile staff, because the question of mobility is a matter for universities and higher education in its entirety and not just a matter of bringing new students into existing and unchanging lectures, laboratories and seminars. Despite the fact that universities are and have been international institutions in their composition from the beginning, universities became in the 19th and 20th century de facto national institutions. This has changed and continues to change in the 21st century, for many reasons, but often financial, as universities seek to enhance their budgets in a globalised economy, and students seek to enhance their employment chances by acquiring qualifications with a difference. However, even if the starting point is financial, nonetheless the chapters in this book demonstrate that the effects of mobility are much more far-reaching. The effects are on host universities, on the university community of staff and students, on the ways in which staff and students understand the nature of university study, on the ways students may or may not integrate with a local community. By experiencing something different—for institutions, an influx of students with different ideas about academic study, for students an interaction with ‘locals’ and with other ‘internationals’, for staff a challenge to their assumptions about teaching and learning—all see themselves in a new light and are often forced to change. This book charts the changes which are happening now and will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future. It therefore offers all involved a reflection on their own experience and practice and the means of improving them.

In a male-dominated higher education sector characterised by overt and subtle adversities for women, the path for women in academia is rarely a simple and easy one. This book sets out to empower women in academia to unite in sharing their stories, inspiring and encouraging one another.

This book examines the way Chinese academics returning from the US re-establish their academic identities and professional practices at China’s research universities in the context of higher education internationalization in China. It goes beyond economic accounts of academic mobility based on the notions of brain drain, brain gain, and brain circulation. Instead, it uses a cultural approach to explore the everyday experiences of the returning scholars concerning the issues of their sense of identity, as well as their ways of connecting and bringing about changes in their work communities. It will appeal anyone interested in 1) globalization and academic mobility; 2) China’s talent policies and strategies; and 3) the internationalization of Chinese universities.

This volume provides a nuanced empirical assessment of the extent to which the academic profession is internationalized at the beginning of the 21st century. It indicates which are the most internationalized academic activities, and focuses on specific topics such as physical mobility for study or professional purposes, teaching abroad or in another language, research collaboration with foreign colleagues, and publication and dissemination outside one’s native country or in another language. It places the main theme in the wider context of the history of higher education’s internationalization. It provides explanations on what drives and deters academics from international activity, and documents some of the consequences that internationalization has on academic work and productivity. This study is based on a survey of 25,000 academics working at higher education institutions in 18 countries and Hong Kong on five continents. Comparing data from the 1992 Carnegie International study to the 2007 CAP survey, relying on respondents’ perceptions of change, and comparing different academic generations, it offers valuable insights on changes in the internationalization of the academy.

Understanding Student Mobility in Europe interprets student mobility in European higher education through an active dialogue between disciplines, voices and variables of interest. Providing the conceptual, methodological, pedagogical and empirical foundations of an interdisciplinary approach, this book advances readers’ understanding of the student exchange experience, whilst outlining guidelines and resources for approaching student mobility and considering how students can gain from cross-border education. Intersecting voices from different disciplines and sojourners, including exchange students, international students and highly skilled immigrants, the book outlines practical guidelines for intercultural curriculum development and assessment, and provides insights, practical ideas, useful terminology and resources to maximise the learning gains of this student population. Split into three distinct parts, the book initially lays the foundational substructure in which an interdisciplinary approach is based. It then addresses questions of practical application by considering the experiences of 50 sojourners in Portugal and the UK through an interdisciplinary lens, and summarises the implications of interdisciplinarity with regards to student mobility in European tertiary-level education. This book is essential reading for academics and postgraduate students interested in student mobility, education abroad practitioners, and policy-makers at institutional, national and international levels.