‘yes! that means get out of your seat’: Interactive learning strategies for internationalising the curriculum in postgraduate business education in an australian university

Abstract

Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC) must start somewhere. A significant body of literature has discussed the need for top-down and bottom-up approaches to IoC, and the change management literature provides further confirmation that it is necessary to approach change from a number of directions simultaneously (e.g. Kotter, 2007). There has been a growing agreement that it is at the nexus of topdown and bottom-up drivers where IoC is best realised: More effective outcomes are achieved by working at the program level (Green & Whitsed, 2013; Leask, 2011). The importance of ‘champions’ of change has been identified in the literature (Dawson, Mighty, & Britnell, 2010; Kotter, 2007). Champions model the way to influence others, in this case for curriculum innovation including the embedding of intercultural skills into the curriculum (Mak & Kennedy, 2012). This chapter outlines the approach to IoC, which I applied in an introductory core unit1 in a postgraduate business course in an Australian university.