Abstract
This article asks whether student peer advisors can contribute to curriculum ‘internationalisation’ through their role in promoting and supporting student mobility. We conducted a single case study of Erasmus student mobility at Loughborough University between 2010–2012, and our experiment offers a perspective on the possible futures of European Studies, where the decline of foreign language learning may find compensation in the internationalisation of the curriculum via the opportunity for study mobility abroad.
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Notes
These partners were, at the time of the study, exclusively European, but the scheme has since expanded to include a partner in Taiwan.
Brooks and Waters (2009) deal with this type of ‘whole diploma’ mobility, as do Findlay and King in their 2010 report for the Department for Business Innovation and Skills on the ‘Motivations and Experiences of UK Students Studying Abroad’ (BiS, 2010).
For example, in 2009–2010, the United Kingdom received almost twice as many incoming Erasmus students (study and work placements combined) as it sent out: 22,650–11,723 (British Council, 2012).
We use ‘placement’ to denote ‘internship’, the more familiar term in US English.
We also extended the scheme to include finalist students who had been on work placements in the United Kingdom, but in this article we restrict our comments to study mobility abroad only.
We only have space here to give extracts from students’ responses, and we have selected the most evocative and vivid of these.
We acknowledge that there may well be factors beyond the influence of the PAs that contributed to students’ decision to take the plunge and study abroad. Our second cohort of mobile students indicate, for example, that ‘employability’ is a significant consideration, namely, bolstering the CV with a view to improving graduate employment prospects. Such elements, however, lie beyond the scope of this study, and could usefully be included in any follow-up research.
Indeed, students automatically used Facebook for all their inter-group communications, and this seemed to function very well.
I thank my Loughborough colleague Alex Christoyannopoulos for our discussions on this new scheme.
It is clear but not explicit in Coleman's (2006) article that his concern and disapproval of the impact of English-medium teaching in European HEs on UK study abroad students is targeted at students studying degree-level foreign languages; this does legitimise his stance. However, he misses an opportunity to reflect on how what he calls the ‘Englishization’ of European HE may bring to non-foreign language learners opportunities for quite the opposite of the ‘impoverished learning experience’ that he bemoans, and this is certainly the case for our small cohort under study here.
References
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the students at Loughborough who completed the questionnaires so fully and helpfully.
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Correction
The author names in the reference Findlay and King et al (2010) were incorrect in the version of this article originally published 7 June 2013. The reference has been corrected in this final version.
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drake, h. Learning from Peers: The Role of the Student Advisor in Internationalising the European Studies Curriculum. Eur Polit Sci 13, 12–22 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2013.32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2013.32