International Strategy for Higher Education Institutions
International Strategy for Higher Education Institutions
Changing strategies for global engagement Posted on by Vicky Lewis
I’m just about to head off on a family holiday for a couple of weeks. And I know that, once I get back, the EAIE conference in Toulouse (17-20 September) will be just around the corner.
This conference is always a highlight of my year and I’m looking forward to travelling down through France to La Ville Rose by train.
I’m pleased to be chairing and speaking at a session there. It’s called University strategies for global engagement: What’s changed since the pandemic?
(Session 4.05 at 15:30 on 18 September – details in the Leadership, strategy and policy topic list).
It’s been fun preparing for it with co-presenters Ramon Ellenbroek from the Netherlands and Dr Douglas Proctor from Australia.
We came up with the session because we’d been wondering whether, in the years since the pandemic, there have been any noticeable changes in priorities within university strategies for global engagement. And, if so, whether such changes are linked to what happened during the pandemic, or whether they have other causes. And how national contexts and policy developments impact on institutional strategies.
Lots of questions – so we’ve opted for a roundtable session where we hope to explore some of them with participants.
Our session explores how higher education institutions have evolved their strategic priorities for global engagement in the years since the pandemic – and considers how they might evolve further.
It takes as its starting point the study I conducted in the UK in 2021, which reviewed the global engagement dimension in 134 university strategies and explored with senior sector stakeholders what post-pandemic strategies might focus on.
At the time, there was a shared view that universities needed to step back and re-think their strategies to align better with institutional purpose and values, and to respond better to global challenges including the climate crisis, forced migration, populism and racial injustice.
The findings from this study are used to trigger a discussion about the characteristics of internationalisation and global engagement strategies developed by institutions in three different countries (UK, Australia and the Netherlands) since the pandemic.
How different are the strategies really from what went before? Have institutions managed to ‘build back better’? We will comment on the changing national context in our respective countries, and sector-wide themes, as well as drawing on individual case studies.
Participants will get to explore any recalibration of strategies that has taken place in their own institutions, leading into a discussion of context-specific priorities, universal themes and what the next phase in the evolution of universities’ strategies for global engagement might look like.
In all three of our countries – the Netherlands, Australia and the UK – there have been major national policy developments since we submitted our original conference session proposal. We’re looking forward to teasing out the impact of these on institutional strategies and priorities – and to hearing from those operating in very different national contexts.
If you’re planning to attend the 2024 EAIE conference and like the sound of our session, it would be great to see you there.
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