Abstract:
In an increasingly globalized world, there is no doubt that universities should educate students to operate successfully in a diverse range of contexts. Despite most higher education institutions adopting clear mission statements promising globally-ready graduates, it is less clear as to the best way to achieve this goal within the current changed higher education climate. This presentation reports findings from a purpose-built internationalisation-at-home program piloted at a regional Australian university. A mixed group of domestic and international students participated in program founded on facilitated dialogic forums designed to promote deep discussion on topics related to cultural and personal identity, different communication styles and understanding intercultural perspectives. To fully explore the influence the dialogic forums had on student participants, I adopted Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and Deardorff’s intercultural competence model to thematically analyse a range of data sources: interviews, forum video recordings, written reflections and stimulated recall sessions. Interactional analysis was applied to selected dialogic moments to gain further insight around how students interacted during the forums. Participants were found to employ a range of rhetorical and discursive devices as they established connections and shared understandings. Students also commented on becoming more reflective in terms of how they saw themselves as students in the local context, and expressed developing awareness around how this might relate to communicating with diverse others in future global contexts. This study contributes a fine-grained focus on student interaction at the dialogic level, highlighting the importance of student voice, and promotes using a dialogic approach as an effective way to stimulate intercultural competence development on university campuses.