ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with a consideration of the changing approaches to internationalisation, highlighting the difference between cross-cultural theorists’ focus on acculturation and contemporary strategies such as internationalisation at home or internationalised curricula. This is followed by a section on designing international education, which suggests that internationalisers should address four concerns: Purpose, form of education, undergraduate/postgraduate, and degree of subject specialisation. A second topic is academic socialisation, which introduces the key notion of transition learners, a group including all students new to a discipline, department, or university. Socialisation involves both academic and social learning processes, which suggests that the act of designing should take into account the informal curriculum as well as the formal. The final section approaches international education through the question of progression, using concepts such as troublesome knowledge and threshold concepts to explain the challenges identified by academic staff teaching a class of students recruited from a variety of disciplinary, institutional, socio-cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Arguably, diversity other than language and nationality has often been overlooked in literature on student transition, which has fuelled the spread of deficit discourses tied to particular groups of learners (e.g. Chinese, Asian).
