Publication details
Developing a long-term internationalization strategy: A case study from the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The Faculty of Education is one of the ten faculties at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, with 4800 students and over 400 academic staff. The university heads and the faculties representatives are currently completing a strategic plan for years 2021-2028. The Faculty of Education decided to use their involvement in drafting the strategic plan on the university level as an opportunity to revise the faculty’s approach to internationalization and move away from focus on inputs and outputs (e.g. number of study abroad programs and their participants) to outcomes, that is improvements in all students and teachers’ intercultural and global competences through internationalizing curriculum, teaching, training, and research. Rather than taking an add-on approach, the strategic plan of the Faculty of Education newly integrates internationalization into all aspects of higher education, i.e. teaching, research, services and the social role of the faculty. Further, the process of drafting the new internationalization strategy reflects the idiosyncrasy of the 23 academic departments at the faculty and is informed by research (on-line questionnaires and semi-structured interviews) in the academic staff as well as students’ expectations and needs in internationalization. The study presents the most significant outcomes of the process of creating and implementing the internationalization strategy at the Faculty of Education and conveys the principles that guided the process: mission-connected dialogue with the academics, building a strategic support culture for internationalization at the academic departments, establishing a mindset for shared collaboration across the departments, and communicating examples of the envisioned future of an internationalized faculty. We hope the study will provide stakeholders and decision makers in internationalization with an inspiring example of how internationalization is made operational in an individual institution |