Abstract:
Since the World Conference on Higher Education which focused on the internationalisation of Higher Education (UNESCO, 1998), Australia has seen a six fold increase of international students The internationalization of education is taking place in many guises, one of which is collaborative articulated programs that offer students the opportunity to complete a degree program in two countries. This paper draws on data from a larger project that focuses on international students in the School of Education at RMIT University and identifies and explores the ways in which they negotiate a global learning identity. The project aims to explore the idea that international students forge new learner identities when they move between different learning cultures and that this new identity may have implications for educational outcomes and the ways in which institutions provide systematic support for this cohort of students. The paper reports on the identification and implementation of strategies employed with students who are studying a collaborative articulated program in China and Australia. These students are enrolled in a Bachelor of Education, Early Childhood Education and had completed the first two years of their degrees in China. They came to Melbourne to complete the last two years of their program. This paper identifies the particular needs of this cohort and reports on a range of strategies that appear to be effective in supporting their transition to studying in a western university. The significance of the study lies in its focus on the 2+2 degree program, which is the first of its kind in an Educational institution in Australia and as such presents a unique opportunity to study the identified needs of this particular cohort.