This article, emerging from a wider study on internationalization in the Republic of Ireland, explores internationalization through the everyday lived experience of faculty and its impact on their professional contexts. It highlights issues that faculty members face in a national context, where internationalization is viewed as an economic goal rather than an academic goal. This aspect, which has been under-researched in higher education literature, addresses the complexities and contradictions that internationalization can create for faculty. A social realist approach using Archer’s morphogenetic framework was employed to facilitate an exploration of the variegated responses that internationalization produced. The performative response to internationalization was captured, which revealed different agential responses: from an acceptance of the instrumentalist discourse to feeling demoralized by the lack of recognition for professional commitment, the impact of non-engagement by colleagues and engagement with the process to advance other career objectives.
This article presents the results of a study conducted in order to determine how Chinese university students in Mainland China gain their cultural knowledge about Western culture and society, and the resources they would prefer to use to learn more. The study involved administration of both a questionnaire and semistructured interviews. Responses were obtained from 470 undergraduate students from 15 universities based in Beijing. The results showed that the students believed they learned more from foreign media and, in particular, films and TV series from the United States than from any other source, and that they also preferred to learn in this way. The results also showed that they learned little about Western culture and society through conversations with native English speakers, although they wanted more opportunities to learn in this way. These results have implications for those involved in developing and delivering pre-sessional and orientation programmes for Chinese university students in the Western higher education contexts.
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