ABSTRACT
The community which surrounds the student, whether they are an international or a ‘home’ student studying in an international or an intercultural context, can provide a valuable resource for developing an understanding of aspects of the culture(s) of the host environment. The community can also provide a rich resource to help universities welcome and integrate their international students. If engagement is well thought through and carefully set up, there will be some reciprocal benefit in both resources and insights for the local community. Where community engagement is linked to an ethos of citizenship or ‘service’, benefits to the community will be more central to the project. Where an institution is seeking to ‘internationalise’ its entire student body, opportunities for intercultural interactions within the local community can provide a context for the development of personal awareness among the majority of non-mobile home students, and an important intervention within a strategy for ‘internationalisation at home’ (IaH) (Crowther et al., 2000; Nilsson, 2003). Incorporating community engagement into outbound student mobility programmes can add significant opportunities for gaining a deeper understanding of the host culture. The integration of active learning and reflection in such programmes can be related to a range of learning theories, and argued to promote a number of generic ‘transferable’ skills (see Case studies 1 and 4),1 enhanced notions of citizenship, and more transformational processes arising from raising to consciousness personal value systems, or establishing ‘new resources of knowledge and authority’ (Case study 2).
