Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Based on 17 qualitative interviews with faculty and international students conducted at Danish higher education institutions in the fall of 2020, this paper asks how the international classroom was shaped and explores the nature of the international student experience during the pandemic. Faced with the insecurity and restrictions on mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Danish higher education made a rapid shift to online and/or blended learning. This meant that learning and socializing spaces on campus that were previously taken for granted were suddenly moved to online spaces involving a particular combination of proximity and distance, with students being in two places at once. For many international students, the aspect of relating to new people and places is a key purpose of studying abroad. The students voiced their frustration and distress with the new situation. Some had disrupted their stay in Denmark and returned to their home country, while others were frustrated by the canceled activities on and beyond campus. While the interviewees, in particular the students, talk about change, we argue that the pandemic was also a period of continuity and that some of the online practices will continue in the future through internationalization at a distance. By listening to both the students’ and faculty’s experiences of internationalization during the pandemic, we are offered a comprehensive perspective that provides empirical findings, with an attempt to understand how new forms of internationalization at a distance may affect the wider outcomes of internationalization in the future.
Institutions: Presses Universitaires de France, Aarhus University
Language: French
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7140755347