Sessions

Intercultural competence in domestic students

The rapid development of international education has occurred alongside a growing need for higher education institutions to educate global citizens. Yet, traditional approaches to internationalisation, such as a mobility, have proven to be restricted to a small percentage of students, and Japanese undergraduates often cite financial, safety, and job-hunting concerns as obstacles to studying abroad. Internationalisation-at-home has emerged as a viable alternative to experiences abroad in the quest for global human resources. This session is aimed at presenting cases of two Top Global universities leading internationalisation in Japan and their institutional efforts to foster interculturally competent domestic students through contact with international students on campus. I will discuss results from a longitudinal survey, carried out over one-year, of 164 Japanese students engaged in a range of curricular and extracurricular programmes with both international and domestic students and an intercultural focus, including teacher-led lectures and programmes, a residential programme aimed at first-year students, and regular university circles. Results from 10 follow-up student interviews shed further light on the factors promoting and hindering the development of globally competent graduates on domestic campuses, thus generating a discussion platform from which internationalisation-at-home strategies can be implemented more effectively.