Promoting intercultural learning in a multicultural university: ideals and realities

Abstract

This paper evaluates a module designed to facilitate intercultural learning within an international, multicultural student group. Intercultural learning is a desired outcome of an internationalised curriculum, but achieving it is difficult. Key reasons are persistence of deficit models used to frame both international student assimilation and widening participation, and a failure to recognise how home students’ increasingly diverse nature results in interconnectedness of home and international students’ multiple identities, positionings and needs when translating educational policy into practice. Drawing on these students’ and their teachers’ perceptions, I explore how they operate in this international learning environment, and whether they value curricular adjustments designed to draw mutual value from their diversity. Potential barriers and practical suggestions for engendering intercultural learning are presented. Participants’ narratives indicate that, although intercultural awareness-raising and reflective practice encourages intercultural learning, obstacles include linguistic inequalities and unchallenged conceptions of privileged knowledge.