INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION AT HOME: THE CASE OF ALBANIAN UNIVERSITIES
INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION AT HOME: THE CASE OF ALBANIAN UNIVERSITIES

Summary/Abstract: The White paper on Intercultural Dialogue, launched in 2008 by the Council of Europe, emphasizes, among other things, the role universities can play in fostering intercultural dialogue by integrating it into the course content and teaching activities becoming thus actors in putting it into practice. In the growing internationalized context of universities worldwide, there is a need to sustain intercultural dialogue not merely through good policies but above all through good practices that would work primarily towards developing competences, most importantly intercultural competence, for the internationalization of curricula, thus making internationalization a tangible reality for mobile and non-mobile students. In this regard, adopting an intercultural dialogue approach oriented towards internationalization at home (IaH) would benefit universities by equipping their students with competences for building a more interconnected and diverse society. In this paper, I will make an overview of the internationalization process that has swept Albanian higher education drawing more particularly on how universities address the IaH perspective and how, if so, they highlight the importance of intercultural dialogue. For this discussion, I will draw on the content analysis of strategic documents adopted by some Albanian universities, public and private, as well as on the results obtained from a survey on internationalization conducted between December 2018 and January 2019 with students, academic and non-academic staff from these universities. In the end, some suggestions will be attempted as regards the integration of intercultural dialogue in policy documents about internationalization, its role in IaH activities and practices and how these can be implemented.

• Details
• Contents