Teaching practices can mean two things: 1) the pedagogic strategies that lecturers use to disseminate scientific knowledge; and 2) a ‘teaching of practices’, which is best described as a socialisation process that enables students to internalise the skills they need to succeed in a new academic, institutional and disciplinary culture. Hanne Tange’s book Teaching Practices in a Global Learning Environment, which is the focus of this CGHE Book Symposium, works with both understandings, using the concrete practices of programme design, academic literacy, course syllabi and multicultural teams to explore how academic staff experience and shape the transformation that is ‘international higher education’.
The analysis of global higher education in this book is grounded in the actual experiences narrated by 68 international educators. The voices of the teaching staff is placed at the centre of the argument, which yields a picture of heterogeneous practices rather than a standardised ‘how to do’ global higher education. Qualitative data from Danish higher education is compared to observations made in literature originating in other countries and regions, which leads to the suggestion that authors from dominant geographies such as United Kingdom, United States and Australia may have overlooked the impact of factors such as the global status of English and UK-US domination of scientific knowledge production. Following the example of Bourdieu, the micro-level practices that teachers perform in the classroom are understood as action influenced by developments at the macro-level. Hence, ‘internationalisation’ is read as a change in the way academics imagine education and research, which is demonstrated empirically with reference to four structural conditions: organisational culture, disciplinary orientation, academic mobility and English-medium publishing/teaching. In conclusion, the book brings together practices and structures in a global ‘practice-scape’, underlining connections between pedagogic action undertaken by individual teachers and conditions in other educational sites/policy levels.
The three respondents to the book, Meeri Hellsten, Miguel Lim and Susan Wright, will focus on those contributions made by the book that seem to them especially significant, before passing the discussion to the participant audience.
