Internationalisation in practice – local experiences and cultural learning

Abstract

Ten experienced teachers at LTH were interviewed about their experiences of teaching in English, as an example of internationalisation. All ten had previously been rewarded with (ETP) for scholarly teaching and they were all self-selected. The interviews focused on personal experiences in the form of narratives, both made by the interviewee personally, but also as narratives originating from other teachers, and then communicated to the interviewee. Results show that internationalisation is materialised in many forms within LTH, often as local practices within sub-cultures, developed by one teacher alone or by groups of teachers. Further, experiences in the form of narratives do generally not travel within the LTH across sub-cultural boundaries. The conclusion is that internationalisation happens as variations of local practices within sub-cultures and that personal experiences made by individual teachers at LTH only to a limited extent contribute to organisational learning. Various limitations of the study are listed.