In the last twenty years, there has been a noticeable trend of changing the internationalization of higher education both in conceptual terms and in its implementation. Among other things, the changes refer to the emergence of such forms of internationalization, which refer not only to the mobile but also to the majority non-mobile population of students, among whom we are supposed to systematically develop intercultural competence mainly by implementing concepts internationalization at home and internationalization of the curriculum. The latter refers to the purposeful integration of the international and intercultural dimension in study programmes or the teaching-learning process. The successful implementation of the mentioned concepts depends on a strategic and comprehensive approach to the internationalization of higher education, which includes the planned personal and professional development of students and academic, primarily pedagogical, staff.
Internationalization at home and internationalization of the curriculum are overlapping concepts that have evolved in different higher education settings (the first one in Europe, especially the UK, and the second in Australia) and they differ from each other in their implementation (Beelen and Jones 2015b). They both emphasize the teaching and learning activities in connection with internationalization, and they appeared as a response to the instrumental approach towards internationalization in higher education. In other words, internationalization has become excessively focused mainly on the quantitative elements of internationalization, as pointed out by various authors (Brandenburg in De Wit 2011; Jones 2008; Beelen 2016b, etc.).
In light of this, in the dissertation I first give an insight into the conceptual aspects of internationalization of higher education, its development, and other overlapping concepts, and present the reasons and motives for the internationalization of higher education, thus giving a theoretical and conceptual basis for understanding the central topic of the dissertation. I further focus on the conceptual aspects of the internationalization of the higher education pedagogical process, with a detailed definition of the concepts of internationalization at home and internationalization of the curriculum. In the dissertation, I underline the purposeful crafting and achievement of (internationalized) learning outcomes of study programmes and modules with an international dimension, which are discussed by various authors (Deardorff 2015; Green and Mertova 2009; Egron-Polak and Hudson 2014; Aerden 2014; Leask 2015; Beelen and Aškerc 2019, and in our country mainly Cvetek 2013, 2015, 2019 and also Aškerc Veniger 2017). I follow the student-centred teaching approach, particularly Biggs' constructive alignment in course design (Biggs 1999a, 2014; Biggs and Tang 2007), which interconnects the constructivist aspect of learning activities and 'alignment' in curriculum design, in which students construct meaning through relevant learning activities that are aligned with teaching methods and the assessment tasks. The latter is also the central focus of the internationalized curriculum, which is why, in the dissertation, I introduce and justify the term constructive alignment of the internationalized curriculum.
Since the internationalization at home and of the curriculum in practice are often carried out inconsistently concerning their theoretical definition and purpose, analyzing their occurrence in practice represents one of the key research problems of the dissertation. In addition to the conceptual definitions of the mentioned concepts, I also present their transnational or international appearance in the period before and during the Bologna process, as well as focusing on European Union (EU) policies in relation to internationalization at home and the internationalization of the curriculum. At the same time, I take into account the current socio-contextual situation in connection with the Covid-19 virus epidemic. An important starting point for the analysis is the fact that in 2013, internationalization at home was addressed as a political element in the European Commission Communication (COM (2013) 499), making this concept important for all European universities.
In this context, I analyze the situation in the field of internationalization at home and of the curriculum using the example of two selected higher education systems, i.e. Slovenian and Dutch, noting that in selected strategic national documents of the Dutch higher education system, as well as in strategic institutional documents of selected higher education institutions in the Netherlands and the competence profile of selected study programmes offered by universities in the Netherlands, there are more elements of international and intercultural dimension than in comparable documents of the Slovenian higher education system or higher education institutions. I supplement the latter with the findings obtained from semi-structured interviews, and with the results of the online questionnaire, which also gives an insight into the so called 'micro' level of the research problem, i.e. in the emergence of international and intercultural elements in the teaching-learning process at the level of individual subjects or modules. Based on the analyses, the conclusion is that academic staff from the so called 'soft' disciplines include the international and intercultural dimension in all steps of the internationalized curriculum to a greater extent according to staff from so called 'hard' disciplines. Besides, the emergence of international and intercultural elements is partly related to the academic staff's participation in various training courses on the integration of international and intercultural dimension in the study process, wherein staff perceiving the effects of such training on their own pedagogical work include such elements in the curriculum to a greater extent. I also present some other interesting findings and correlations between dependent and independent variables in the implementation of the internationalized curriculum in the higher education learning process.
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