Student and staff perspectives on Internationalisation at Home: a local investigation

This chapter reports on a small-scale study, which was carried out at a large HEI in Italy, within the frame of the European project ATIAH (Approaches and Tools for Internationalisation at Home, https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/atiah/). The aim was to investigate how the local university community (students, academic and non-academic staff, policy makers) conceptualised Internationalisation at Home (IaH) in terms of existing practices, desiderata and possible future scenarios. The chapter addresses the themes of the volume by focussing on those internationalisation policies and strategies, which, according to Beelen and Jones’s definition of IaH, aim at “the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments” (2015: 69). Since contemporary European universities are international by their own nature, the challenge is investing on local diversities in order for the entire HEI population - not only mobile minorities – to be given opportunities for intercultural learning on campus (Teekens, 2007). However, intercultural development is not an automatic outcome of diverse people being together (Leask, 2004), just as much as it is not a result of living abroad (IEREST, 2015); precise and contextualised strategic interventions are needed. The study presented addresses IaH from the point of view of the university community. Data were collected through nine interviews and two focus groups (respectively with staff and students), and were analysed thematically. Results show that most interviewees, regardless of their role, perceived IaH as synonymous of promoting interculturality and multilingualism, as well as an opportunity for the university to renew curricula and teacher training in an intercultural perspective.