ABSTRACT
Education has become a global endeavour with ‘more people than ever before choosing to undertake an international education’ (Arkoudis, 2006, p. 5). This global drive towards the internationalisation of higher education represents a ‘new frontier’ that is changing the demographic of classrooms, campuses and local communities within which universities operate. Workplaces have also become highly globalised and multicultural. Countries like Australia have seen changes in demographic structure, labour shortages and the deployment of immigration as a key source of skilled labour. Accordingly, the need for greater intercultural competence of employees is increasingly crucial to business success. Higher education institutions represent a particular organisational context for the development of intercultural competence, and are ‘especially relevant because they provide students with the opportunity to pre-empt these issues prior to entering the workforce’ (Freeman et al., 2009, p. 9). The sheer number and presence of students from diverse cultural backgrounds within today’s higher education classrooms, along with the necessity of intercultural competence within professions and the workforce generally, ‘creates a pressing need for academics to consider the (associated) learning and teaching implications’ (Arkoudis, 2006, p. 5).
