The value of international mobility experiences for building future-focused skills: A case of Vietnamese academics

Ms Phuong Quyen Vo¹

¹The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia

As a core component of globalisation of higher education pre-Covid19, international mobility experiences are supported in the literature as an optimal approach for formulating graduates’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Degree mobility schemes have been determined by not only participants’ own journey but also governments’ initiatives to bolster their people’s capacity. However, little is known about the voices of higher education academics who have been engaging in South-North degree mobility experiences as to the benefits, particularly in building future-focused skills ready to work, live, and act on complex problems in future unknown contexts. This calls for a study to explore the perceptions of Vietnamese academics of building future-focused skills from their international mobility experiences. The research uses a reflective framework for knowledge, skills, and dispositions formation based on a combination of John Dewey’s theory of experience, reflective thought and action and Bandura’s model of triadic reciprocal determinism. A multiple case study research is employed with mixed methods explanatory sequential design. As a part of the PhD research project, this presentation reports stratified random sampling applied for the online survey of 70 Vietnamese academics who participated in Master and PhD programs in Australian universities and purposive sampling interviews employed for 10 selected survey respondents. The findings of the research are still emerging, so this work is expected to contribute to post-COVID empowering and life-changing experiences for a comprehensive approach of internationalization in an integrated way of global, regional, national, and local dimensions.

Biography:
Phuong Quyen Vo is currently a second-year PhD candidate in Education, College of Human and Social Futures of the University of Newcastle. Before she became a current Vice-chancellor’s HDR scholar of her Doctoral program, Quyen was a NZDS-Open (New Zealand Development Scholarship) scholar completing Master of Education from Unitec Institute of Technology of New Zealand. She has been experiencing in 19 years’ teaching and research in Vietnamese higher education. Her research interests include international education, internationalisation in higher education, learner-centred approaches, intercultural communication competence, curriculum evaluation and assessment, and professional development.