ABSTRACT
Many higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world are ambitious to enhance their educational quality by internationalising their curricula and creating internationalised learning opportunities for all their students. In most cases, these terms seem to allude to elements of a more complex network of interrelated and interdependent constructs that are associated with the transversal graduate attributes pertaining to responsible global citizenship and employability. The observed lack of conceptual clarity is exacerbated by a lack of agreement on definitions of intercultural competence (ICC) and a wide variety in its constituent elements. The adjective ‘working’ is used to indicate that this is work in progress in the evolving field of higher education internationalisation. The model also implies that ICC is contextual. A certain level of culture-specific learning and understanding is necessary for successful intercultural engagement.
