A Canadian Lens on Facilitating Factors for North American Partnerships

Abstract

What does it take to develop and maintain effective international education partnerships between institutions in the Canada, Mexico, and United States? This was a driving question for the qualitative study funded by a Fulbright-Enders-Garcia grant examining the relationship between North American partnerships and campus internationalization. Administrators, professors, and students at four institutions in Quebec, Canada and two institutions in Mexico shared institutional documents and their perspectives on North American partnerships and campus internationalization to help eluminate this relationship. This article features a Canadian lens on what factors contribute to effective partnership development with institutions in Mexico and the United States. The qualitative case study approach yields data on the facilitative institutional documents, administrative structures, and supporting mechanisms that exists within a given institution. Through probing interviews with diverse stakeholders, this approach also yields the human dimension—that is the factors that facilitate individual efforts to craft and maintain partnerships. The piece features primarily the internal workings at work on one side of the partnership equation—in this case within the Canadian institutions. Internationalization champions who are initiating new North American partnerships or seeking to maximize the effectiveness of existing international partnerships are the intended audience. It draws illustrations from the case studies to substantiate the argument that through the combination of visionary leadership, facilitative mechanisms, and competent internationalization leaders who are intentionally collaborating successful partner relationships are established and sustained. It is clearly critical in this global era for institutions to develop international partnerships that advance individual research agendas and student global learning. The issue at hand is how might leaders articulate their vision and organize their institutional structures so that these partnerships contribute as well as they might to advancing student global learning. Drawing elements of good practice from each case, this piece offers a structural model for maximizing partnership engagement.