Monthly Features & Archive

Spring 2021 Features

Practice Brief

Community Colleges and Global Equivalents: Increasing Visibility by Dr. Rosalind Latiner Raby – California State University, Northridge

Read the full practice brief here.

Scholarship Brief

Whiteness as Futurity

by Dr. Riyad A. Shahjahan and Dr. Kirsten T. Edwards

In their forthcoming conceptual essay Shahjahan and Edwards (2021) argue that Whiteness as futurity colonizes (or orients) global subjects’ (nation-states’, policy makers’, institutions’, and individuals’) imaginaries and reinforces the asymmetrical movements, networks, and untethered economies underpinning global HE. We highlight how Whiteness governs the future through three distinct pathways: a) influencing future aspirations, b) creating conditions that make it economically and culturally harmful to not invest or continue the investment in Whiteness, and c) remaining malleable enough to disguise or superimpose itself by appearing flexible to local conditions. The three characteristics detailed below do not emerge procedurally, but instead symbiotically, able to exist independently while also catalyzing the potency of one another.

You can read a full brief of their paper here.

Socioculturally Attuned Understanding of and Engagement With Chinese International Undergraduates

by Dr. Tang T. Heng
This research brief documents sociocultural reasons for Chinese international students’ challenges and opportunities in U.S. colleges and discusses how to generate more socioculturally attuned understanding of and engagement with (Chinese) international students. You can read a full brief of Dr. Heng’s paper here.

Operationalizing ‘internationalization’ in the community college sector: Textual analysis of institutional internationalization plans

by Dr. Lisa Unangst and Nicole Barone
In their 2019 paper, “Operationalizing ‘internationalization’ in the community college sector: Textual analysis of institutional internationalization plans,” Unangst and Barone used the textual analysis tool Voyant to dissect three US community college internationalization plans to explore how the foci of those plans differed.

Read the full scholarship brief here.

Critical Voices

Balancing International Education and its Carbon Footprint

by Dr. Pii-Tuulia Nikula and Adinda van Gaalen
The authors pose some interesting reflection questions on the environmental impact of education abroad and alternatives to physical mobility. Are these new modes of internationalization are equivalent? Can we expect current and future students to be satisfied with these alternatives? Aren’t they entitled to the experiences previous generations had? Are there other caveats to consider? You can read their full essay here.

From “Foreign Languages” to “World Languages” within U.S. Institutions: Abandoning Misleading Terminologies

by Dr. Roger Anderson – Central State University

“Foreign language” learning is a crucial component of an internationalizing education, yet the term itself is highly problematic, particularly for people living in a multilingual country like the United States. A general meaning of “foreign” is that something is not of that place; it somehow does not belong there, not wholly, or legitimately. Those that choose to continue using the terminology of “foreign languages” will continue to ignore complex linguistic realities and become complicit in the promulgation of inaccurate and damaging perspectives. In this essay, Anderson suggests the adoption of a more inclusive term like “world language.”
Read the full text here.

Internationalization and Hegemonic Practices

by Dr. Shazia Nawaz Awan – Dalhousie University

Internationalization in higher education is generally understood in terms of student and faculty mobility in ways that when students and faculty move to the Northern hemisphere, it is to acquire knowledge, and when they move to the Southern hemisphere of the world, it is to disseminate knowledge. These understandings have created an intellectual imbalance where there are binary divisions between the ones who give and the ones who receive.
Read the full text here.