Globalization of higher education : an evaluation of Sweden's National Agency of Higher Education's investment in an international teachers' exchange programme

• round the world today there is a movement towards increased globalization. Above all, this means a development from centralization towards increased decentralization. The market has also come to play an important role in the development. Higher education's reaction to these trends is, among other things, a strong movement towards internationalization. Sweden's National Agency of Higher Education implemented a liberal exchange programme where approx. 300 university lecturers and an equal number of foreign lecturers worked, for a number of weeks, at each others universities. Their experiences have shown a number of positive results when it comes to their professional development including an increase of language knowledge, new insight pertaining to teaching, exchange of ideas within research and in some cases an establishment of an extended teacher and student exchange programme between the countries. A negative effect that might arise in a situation like this is that there may be a sense of there being a divide among university lecturers into an A and a B group, where those lecturers that have had the possibility of progression through exchange programmes of this nature also possess a ticket to the train of globalization that rushes through the world, whilst others are left behind in their local situation without this opportunity of further progression.In many contexts, internationalization and globalization show that these A and B groups are often equivalent to groups of men and women who, as a group, have different opportunities of participating in this development. This imbalance, being disadvantageous to women, does not apply when it comes to the National Agency of Higher Education's investment in international exchange. This exchange has instead had a large number of women participants from university sectors that are predominantly female. It is therefore especially interesting, from a democratic point of view, to evaluate these observations. The long-term effects of the teacher exchange programme are presently being analysed in a follow-up evaluation project and will be presented at the conference.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Pedagogik

Education

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)