About

Bringing the learning home seeks to enhance Australian students’ international exchange and study abroad experience.

With colleagues from the University of Wollongong and Macquarie Universities, Project Leader Dr Jan Gothard (History, Murdoch University) has been awarded a grant of $200,000 by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC ) to develop teaching resources designed to enhance the acquisition of intercultural competence amongst students undertaking study abroad/exchange. The grant is managed from Murdoch University.

Bringing the Learning Home seeks to bolster international exchange learning by concentrating on skill acquisition, reflective learning and re-entry programming; and to enhance the outcomes of international education both for individual students and for their home campuses by better integrating student exchange into the campus curriculum.

The project will address all three phases of the study abroad experience, pre-departure, in-country and return, but it acknowledges the re-entry phase as a critical opportunity for enhancing global competence and cross–cultural awareness, and thus re-entry will a major focus. An additional aspect of the project will be campus internationalisation.

Investigators plan to facilitate the incorporation of international experience into continuing university education by working with individual students and their teachers, to promote staff awareness of and competence in integrating students’ international experience after return from study abroad into home classrooms. This aspect of the project will also be incorporated into the re-entry phase of the teaching module.