Practices to improve collaboration by reconfiguring boundaries in transnational education

This paper investigates quality assurance as boundary-making practices that establish and re-establish boundaries of a transnational education (TNE) partnership between an Australian and a Malaysian higher education institution. Drawing on practice theory we offer a conception of boundaries as enacted, shifting and performed by the multiple actors involved in the partnership. We employ a relational, practice-based approach and a participatory action research methodology to investigate how quality assurance could be re-configured to enhance relationships and collaboration, and support on-going dialogue, co-developed curriculum and context–sensitive quality measures. This paper re-casts boundaries and borders as collective performances, offering an expanded conception of boundaries from the dualistic home-host, pre-given conceptions common in the TNE literature. Our case study demonstrates how participatory action learning (PAL) is useful for expanding and re-shaping the boundaries in TNE in ways that support the creation of transnational teaching teams and intercultural communities of practice. We show how stretching the boundaries from a dyadic relationship between quality assuror and subject coordinator to include sessional academics and enacting PAL projects using communal media generates the conditions of possibility for developing teaching teams that are transnational in practice as well as in name. The move towards joint responsibility for the development of curriculum, teaching and learning contributes to more equitable partnership approaches and creates possibilities for intercultural engagement between academics and students in different geographical and cultural contexts

Teaching and learning practice development with transnational teaching teams

Significant changes have occurred in international education in the last 20 years. Some of these changes have been driven by the need for developing countries to access higher education in excess of their capacity to provide opportunities to study. A common response to this situation has been student mobility in which international students travel to other countries for their higher education. More recently the trend has been \u27programme mobility\u27 (Knight 2012), in which it is the higher education programmes that move as they are delivered locally in the developing country via partnership arrangements with overseas institutions. A rapid growth in transnational programmes has resulted in many opportunities for nations seeking to build their capacity, for institutions and for staff and student learning. However, a number of challenges for transnational academics and their students, often related to differing cultural expectations, inequalities in power relations and ensuring quality standards across partner institutions have also been identified (Hicks and Jarrett 2008; McBurnie and Ziguras 2007; Pyvis 2011)