1. Academic perspectives on
internationalisation
Professor Rebecca Hughes
Pro-Vice-Chancellor (International)

2. Overview
• Internationalisation touches the working
lives of academics at several levels
• What is their ‘lived experience’ of this
process
• What can it tell policy makers?
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3. Participant nationalities
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4. Disciplines of participants
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5. Countries experienced by participants
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6. | |
Locations of 53 societies on global cultural
| Re f l e c t i o ns Changing Mass Priorities
map in 2005-2007 Figure 1
Locations of 53 societies on global cultural map in 2005-2007
Figure 4 Source: Data from World Values Survey. The oval at the lower right shows the mean size of the standard deviation on each of the
two dimensions within the 53 societies (the shape is oval because the S.D. on the horizontal axis is larger than on the vertical axis).
01/10/12 © The Universityworld will look like that. But empirical reality today
the of Sheffield icans do not overlap much with their European peers;

7. Patterns of cultural experience
• Pattern 1: Outlier – ‘homebody’
• Pattern 2: Low cultural WVS distance
• Pattern 3: High cultural WVS distance
• Pattern 4: Outlier – ‘Globetrotter’
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8. Asia-Europe Bridge required?
• If replicated across larger samples these data
suggest that Asian academics are being
required to travel greater cultural and linguistic
distances than others
• A topic for further investigation is whether this is
an invisible barrier to transformative and
equitable knowledge sharing, collaborative
problem solving and innovation
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9. Motivations to be mobile
• ‘If I went there my scientific career would be dead’
• ‘They sent me over here’
• ‘I’ve always chosen the least paid, but I have been able
to follow my interests’
• ‘A nice location … I like skiing so it was a fantastic
environment’
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10. Possible affective categories
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11. Academic life in a second
language: challenges
• ‘I asked them, do you understand what I’m saying? And I just
got a blank stare.’
• ‘I would try to control the accent a bit more if I was just in
front of UK people.’
• ‘At one point, after the second lecture, I was asked if I couldn’t
speak English with a German accent because that would be easier
for them to understand.’
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12. Academic life in a second
language: pleasures
• ‘Immediately I saw that it was a very mixed cohort … it made me feel … more
confident. … It went well, it went well and yes there was a good relation with
the students.’
• ‘I held a meeting yesterday … we had 14 people, so out of these, two are from
Belgium, five from Italy, one of my students from Turkey, one Indian student,
my RA’s an Indian girl, me, there was one English guy, my other RA … so it
was very, very relaxed. … the lunchtime break, the coffee was fantastic fun.
We’ve been working together so we know each other.’
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13. Anxiety triggers?
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14. Experiencing being ‘foreign’
• ‘I think England is an interesting country in that you can tell it’s an island. …
You can tell that it’s very much this kind of island mentality of feeling like
you’re closed off and people are quite xenophobic, I find.’
• ‘…the main problem that I often even up to this point encounter is that, usually,
labourers are non-English speaking, common ones being Polish people or even
Scottish people, Scottish and Irish and they have-, they find it really hard to
understand English.’
• ‘I don’t have any [problems], I love the country, I love the language, if I could
speak better than I can I would be very, very happy.’
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15. Experiencing being ‘foreign’
• ‘I have a colleague and she’s English. I notice that sometimes she speaks to me
very like child. Can… you … I say “Yes, thank you.” [Interviewer: How does
that make you feel then?]
• Good and bad. I mean good because at least I really understand. Bad because
sometimes I say “Okay, I’m foreign, not stupid.” I understand.’
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16. Summary
• Motivations to be mobile are diverse and centre on human factors:
contractual stability, relationships, and intellectual stimulation rather
than institutional profile. No one mentioned rankings!
• Language is clearly a powerful factor in terms of both basic and
accurate communication, identity as a teacher, and sense of
inclusion/exclusion more generally.
• Densely international communities may be less problematic than
those where there is a single dominant language/culture to which a
small number of ‘foreigners’ try to accommodate.
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17. Policy points
• Consider the profile of staff in the departmental community – highly
multicultural or danger of isolation?
• Does everyone have the communication skills for safe delivery of
experimental work in a laboratory setting?
• Are students able to understand the lecturer easily in terms of
language delivery?
• Are inexperienced lecturers being put into ‘high anxiety’ settings?
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18. Conclusions
• The research community will find their path to communication
against the odds and even enjoy this process.
• The novice academic or student may well be pushed into a career-
changing path by encountering a sense of alienation or exclusion in
a mismanaged intercultural encounter.
• More research on the working lives of academics and potential
barriers to internationalization of Higher Education is needed to
understand these dynamics better.
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19. To
Discover
And
Understand.