International Student Engagement

This book responds to the growing calls among international educators, activists, and students themselves to pay closer attention to the qualitative dimensions of international students’ experiences at U.S. colleges and universities. This book outlines deep approaches to the academic and social integration of international students at U.S. colleges and universities. It describes concrete examples of strategies to enhance the international student experience across a wide range of institutional types, and explores actions that have enabled colleges and universities to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for international students. It fleshes out the effects of these actions through the first person narratives of international students themselves. It focuses on reinforcing an institution’s existing strengths and capacities to help academic leaders at these institutions to develop comprehensive strategies that will enable the creation of inclusive campus climates for international students.The book combines evidence derived from the national Global Perspective Inventory dataset, the experiences of institutions at the forefront in developing effective strategies, as well as first-person narrative experiences of international students to illustrate the real-life consequences of institutional policies, practice, and programs.One of the aims of this book is to take readers on a journey, from community colleges to liberal arts institutions to large public flagship research universities, from rural parts of the U.S.to highly-populated urban areas in order to raise questions about the impact of the surge of international students in these environments and about the corresponding challenges that confront senior administrators seeking to strengthen and deepen connections for the students. The book explores some of the actions that universities and colleges across the U.S. have taken to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for their international students, placing particular emphasis on the importance of tapping and reinforcing each institution’s existing strengths and capacities in the development of strategies that will enable it to create more inclusive campus climates for current and incoming international students, and engaging in active collaboration with all departments and offices across the campus, with the larger community, and most important, with the international student community itself.

Drawing together major global studies from leading researchers, this book presents novel results, ideas, and developments from the world’s largest collaborative study of student engagement in higher education. It builds insight into contemporary higher education practice, policy, and research. The chapters are written by experts who lead student engagement research in nine diverse countries in Asia Pacific, North and South America, Europe and Africa. The book presents analysis, results, benchmark data, and case studies. It deep-dives into research programs, analytical capabilities, empirical situations, and development trajectories. The book updates earlier publications and charts emerging perspectives and development opportunities. The research contributions are for students of higher education, as well as for policymakers, advisors, and university administrators. Higher education practitioners and leaders around the world will enjoy this book.

Exploring the impact of the digital environment on international students, carefully selected global contributors examine how digital experiences have been used to internationalize higher education. Using fascinating case studies and current research, this book considers the digital experiences of students as a result of their engagement with international education providers and stakeholders from a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective. Looking specifically at the digital transitions and networks that international students experience during their time studying overseas, this book examines the ways in which the curriculum and higher education institutions’ engagement strategies have been shaped by the digital environment. Split into three sections, this book: looks at the broad experiences of international students, covering the digital transitions and networks that students experience during their time studying overseas explores the ways in which the curriculum has been shaped by the digital environment considers the ways in which higher education institutions and other service providers implement digital engagement strategies to communicate more effectively with international students. Digital Experiences of International Students is essential reading for practitioners, academics, researchers, administrators, policy-makers, and anyone with an interest in learning and teaching in a digital age.

In the updated edition of this important volume, the editors and chapter contributors explore how diverse populations of students experience college differently and encounter group-specific barriers to success. Informed by relevant theories, each chapter focuses on engaging a different student population, including low-income students, Students of Color, international students, students with disabilities, religious minority students, student-athletes, part-time students, adult learners, military-connected students, graduate students, and others. New in this third edition is the inclusion of chapters on Indigenous students, student activists, transracial Asian American adoptee students, justice-involved students, student-parents, first-generation students, and undocumented students. The forward-thinking, practical, anti-deficit-oriented strategies offered throughout the book are based on research and the collected professional wisdom of experienced educators and scholars at a range of postsecondary institutions. Current and future faculty members, higher education administrators, and student affairs educators will undoubtedly find this book complete with fresh ideas to reverse troubling engagement trends among various college student populations.

Hand-in-hand with the continuing drive to recruit international students to Western universities goes an interest in student engagement. However, it is often unclear exactly what is meant by engagement. This book goes beyond the policy rhetoric to provide a practice-based explication of international student engagement and its enabling institutional conditions. By utilising a social practice conceptual model, the book explains the multiple dimensions of engagement that are often conflated in policy: the antecedents to engagement, the actions of engaging, and the achievements and outcomes of engagement. As a result, the book is able to address issues such as how English comes to matter in international student academic practice; the teaching and assessment approaches that promote international student engagement; and the metacognitive, cognitive and affective strategies that international students use to achieve academic and personal transformation.

Using a range of international examples to compare the reality, purpose and effect of student engagement in universities across the globe, Student Engagement and Quality Assurance in Higher Education argues that teachers and students need to collaborate to improve the quality of university education and student learning. The growing trend of assessing and assuring quality in higher education is incredibly complex, as there are so many variables affecting both experiences and measures. With case studies from ten countries, covering a variety of cultural and environmental settings, this book focusses on ways of working with students to produce applicable, implementable strategies for universities the world over. Internationally applicable, this book presents ideas from a range of cultures, which can be adapted to be implemented in a variety of cultures. The reader is provided with a range of approaches where both the advantages and disadvantages are clearly presented. The ten case studies consider the macro, meso and micro levels of each approach, allowing for an exploration of the growing area of research and practice that is student–staff partnerships, showcasing ways of working with students to enhance engagement and quality, which are vital for a long-term approach. Focussing on one of the main reform topics for universities, Student Engagement and Quality Assurance in Higher Education is essential reading for educational researchers, institutional leaders and all concerned with the implementation and progression of student engagement and quality assurance in higher education.

This book examines significant issues in geography teaching and learning from the perspectives of an international network of academic geographers and postgraduate students. Drawing on classroom experiences and research in a wide variety of educational settings, the authors describe conceptually interesting and practical applications for enhancing student learning through inquiry, problem-based learning, field study, online collaboration, and other highly engaging forms of pedagogy. Other articles focus on approaches for improving the experiences of distance learners, strategies for enhancing the employability of geography students, and preparing students to engage ethical issues in the discipline. An international audience of educators will find much of value through the use of comparative examples, literature reviews encompassing research in multiple national contexts, and an underlying awareness of the diversity of practices in higher education internationally. This book is a collection of articles previously published in two special issues of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education.

This book focuses on the interrelationship between international student connectedness and identity from transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives. It addresses the core issues surrounding international students’ physical and virtual connectedness to people, places and communities as well as the conditions that shape their transnational connectedness and identity formation. Further, it analyses the nature, diversity and complexity of international student connectedness and identity development across different national, social and cultural boundaries.