Education without Boundaries

Respecting cultures, and identities, creating Third Spaces for dialogue, and forging collaborations between local and global communities, this subtheme will explore how universities use local as well as (virtual) cross-border learning spaces to enable transformative engagement between students, faculty, and communities as part of inter/cross/transdisciplinary educational practices for comprehensive internationalisation. 

The use of the concept ‘border’ not only refers to geo-political borders, but also (territorial) borders linked to disciplinary, research and pedagogical knowledge. 

Areas of focus include:

• Macro level: What are we learning about contextualised and comprehensive internationalisation at the interface of decolonization and cross-border thinking in education practices, embedded in the broader context of curriculum transformation?
• Meso level: What are we learning about building equitable partnerships with institutions in the Global South; including advocating for a politically and culturally ethical approach to be adopted in developing North-South, South-South and North-South-South teaching and research collaborations?
• Micro level: What are we learning about community engaged scholarship, research and research capacity building including professional development opportunities through hybrid virtual exchange (Collaborative Online International Learning - COIL) learning spaces?
  • Access Mark Dawson, postgraduate researcher's, co-authored book 'Success in Groupwork', which uses examples of real students' successful group projects, to offer a succinct and supportive guide, helping students tackle group assignments with confidence.

Oriented towards justice, solidarity, and human rights, this subtheme will focus on enhancing universities’ responsiveness to local and global societies and the development of new approaches for challenge-led, transdisciplinary education for sustainable development (ESD).

Areas of focus include:

• Macro level: How can higher education institutions maximize the potential of inclusive cross-border learning spaces to enable transformative engagement involving students, faculty, and communities, especially at grassroots level, towards enhanced responsiveness to local and global societies and the development of new approaches for achieving ESD?
• Meso level: What pedagogical and research approaches are being used / developed for integrating transdisciplinary perspectives in HE?
• Micro level: How might collaborative enquiry be used as emancipatory education/transformative teaching and learning practices in HE?

Examining new social imaginaries that shape alternative education policy making processes and possible higher education futures in different contexts (e.g., Ron Barnett’s discussion of “Feasible Utopias”), this subtheme/research cluster will focus on awareness-raising of alternative conditions for knowledge co-creation and critique of competing and complex structures and issues driving contemporary HE practices.

Areas of focus include:

• Macro level: Examining multi-level policy making[1] in transnational higher education, such as regional cooperation frameworks in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, global policy travel/ policy mobility, supranational/ regional, national, and institutional actors, their interactions and influences (soft power, knowledge diplomacy) on shaping HE policies and practices in the global North and South; Examining the relationship between the knowledge economy and HE practices including the critique of regulatory and competitive frameworks, such as TEF, REF, KEF; The EU definition of research as opposed to what the African union would consider research; How universities prioritise funding schemes and funders, e.g. EU Horizon, UK RI vs another funder?
• Meso level: Exploring alternative ways of conceptualising academic practices at the institutional level; how HEIs navigate different contexts and negotiate different priorities to construct international partnerships that are simultaneously cultural, political and economic projects. For example, the process of establishing collaborative doctoral programmes and pushing the boundaries of national doctorate regulations and institutional practices, and ways of (re)orientating research themes towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• Micro level: New imaginaries and alternative practices at individual level, for example in building international supervisory capacity, doctoral learning ecologies and pedagogies; mutual learning and access to sharing facilities, resources and perspectives. New imaginaries are pluriversal, emergent, and processual in nature and aim to make envisaging futures possible.