The concept and practices of Internationalisation in Higher Education for Society will be thoroughly tested in the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project

The concept and practices of Internationalisation in Higher Education for Society (IHES) will be thoroughly tested in the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project also entitled IHES, led by Palacký University, Czech Republic. The Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Spain, is a partner in this project and responsible for implementing two regional IHES laboratories, one in Catalonia (Spain) and another in the Olomouc region (Czech Republic).

The origins in short

In the last decades higher education has been progressively making itself available to the wider community and the society that it serves. In most higher education institutions (HEIs), this pledge to social commitment has taken the form of incorporating new objectives linked to the UN’s SDGs for 2030 into their university policies and strategic plans. At the same time, HEIs have realised that they possess a wealth of experience in terms of internationalisation and that the international values they promote can greatly contribute to a more open and fair society if taken outside the university walls.  

Thus, a new objective has emerged: “Internationalisation in Higher Education for Society (IHES)”, a concept defined and encapsulated by Uwe Brandenburg, Hans de Wit, Elspeth Jones and Betty Leask in 2019, which explicitly aims to benefit the wider community, at home and abroad, through education, research, service and international or intercultural engagement. The concept and practices of IHES will be thoroughly tested in the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project also entitled IHES, led by Palacký University, Czech Republic.

The Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Spain, is a partner in this project and responsible for implementing two regional IHES laboratories, one in Catalonia (Spain) and another in the Olomouc region (Czech Republic).  

These two laboratories have been created to develop and implement a set of university activities aimed at society incorporating a strong internationalisation component. These IHES activities will be evaluated from the perspective of promoters, actors and beneficiaries, and may serve as examples for others to follow suit. In this article, we will focus on the IHES Catalonia Lab as case study.  

Training as a first step towards change

In order to create the IHES Lab, the first step was to raise awareness on the importance of this ‘new’ concept within our institutions. To do so, and given URV’s experience on training as an internationalisation at home practice with projects such as SUCTI and SUCTIA, a training course for all the promoters and actors of the would-be IHES activities was organised.  

The three-day training course had the following main components:  

• Internationalisation of higher education: what it is, its objectives and global trends.
• Intercultural communication: basic concepts and ready-to-use tools.  
• IHES: what it means, key components, objectives, benefits and challenges.  

Participants were immersed in this highly interactive peer-learning experience, which allowed them to re-think and re-define the social engagement activities that they were already conducting through an internationalisation lens. At the end of the training, they all presented their projects, and received feedback from their colleagues, while finding new collaboration synergies.  

A focus on activities

The IHES Catalonia Lab was then ready to start in the academic year 2021-2022 with the following eight activities: 

1. “I confess: I have been on an Erasmus experience (and I would do it again!)”: Bringing the Erasmus experience to secondary schools via their own alumni (now URV students who have been on Erasmus).
2. International Service Learning: social market and international service-learning placements.
3. SustainComp Project: Second life for computers to be sent to those in need.
4. Sports: Canoeing and hiking, open experiences with international flavours.
5. Climate change witnesses: videos and poster presentations of climate change realities from around the world.
6. International activities at the 15 locations of the Extensive Campus Project (network of municipalities in the Tarragona region).
7. Senior Citizens International Lectures.
8. The SMiLE Programme: international incoming students on English language oral teaching practice in schools of the region.

With their international component, the Lab’s activities have an impact on the local community by interacting with different systems and networks, such as the regional primary and secondary education system, public administrations, NGO’s, SMEs, volunteers, town councils, associations, emeritus teachers, active members of the university community and society at large.  

IHES Lab: Great challenges, great opportunities

Alongside the great opportunity that the IHES project has brought about for the URV and its region come great challenges. One of these is stakeholder engagement. In order to reach society, the university community needs to be part of the process and engaged in its vision, but it can only do so if it understands what IHES is about (comprehension), knows how to engage (competence) and has opportunities to contribute (connection)*. That is why the training course was considered key to make a start on the first two C’s: comprehension and competence.  

Nevertheless, this engagement needs to be maintained in the implementation phase, through adding the third C: connection. This can be done via follow-up meetings, appointing a coordinator for the Lab or IHES activities who is there to assist and accompany the different actors in the field, and implementing a proper system of evaluation, a crucial tool to prove the worth of IHES to all those in doubt. The survey system set up within the IHES project will produce results in due course and a full evaluation report will be published in 2023. Nonetheless, what this experience has highlighted so far is the importance of the ‘intangible’, which is so present in the internationalisation of higher education world, so difficult to ‘sell’ to scientific minds, and yet so meaningful for human experience.  

Another point that has emerged with regards to connection is that in order to strengthen the IHES commitment, HE leaders must find ways to recognise its protagonists. Our experience thus far tells us that a key asset and undisputed leader of IHES is the student, both the international student and the local student with an international experience, because they have the potential to naturally transmit to younger generations the importance of social commitment in today’s world. Consequently, recognising the engagement and commitment of all those who play a role in IHES is key in ensuring that the institutional change is enduring and profound.  

At the IHES Catalonia Lab we have learned to be adaptable and open to the unpredictable. The fact is that some activities that seemed easy to implement became utterly challenging or even impossible to put into practice, while other activities that initially seemed more complex showed unsuspected potential or even became a success. Some have even had such an impact that society itself is demanding new such initiatives. Interacting with society undoubtedly leads to new and surprising results, if only we are willing to get out of our institution’s walls and learn with and from society.  

To conclude, we believe that the IHES concept is here to stay in deeper ways than we can now envision.

It could very well become a future indicator for assessing the quality of teaching, research, innovation and of any other higher education activity.

And HEIs should, as it has long been suggested, get out of their ivory towers and place their resources and wisdom at the service of society. But are universities truly ready to address or lead the way in tackling the growing and ever more complex and urgent societal needs? IHES could be a possible first step in the right direction.

*The three C’s of engagement is a Hudzik and McCarthy (2012) model for stakeholder engagement, also developed in the EAIE blog post Stakeholders in internationalisation: dealing with (dis)engagement (December 2021).

Reference: Brandenburg, U., de Wit, H., Jones, E., & Leask, B. (2019). Internationalisation in higher education for society. Retrieved  from: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190414195843914