The Internationalization Cookbook: Critical ingredients for serving healthy and tasty globalized education
The Internationalization Cookbook: Critical ingredients for serving healthy and tasty globalized education

Summary/Abstract: Internationalization in higher education is a debated topic in society, politics and higher education itself. Often, the debate centers on one aspect or form of internationalization, such as student mobility. However, definitions of internationalization relate to many different elements of higher education, including curriculum content and structure, pedagogical approach, and organizational and societal context and values. In this article, the author uses a cooking metaphor to explore some of these aspects and how they relate to each other and to dominant definitions and debates on internationalization. The steps of the recipe take you through internationalization research and experiences of educational design and management of international programmes. The key purpose of this conceptual article is to invite readers to critically reflect on their own or their institution’s internationalization efforts. A central question that this article asks is: What are critical considerations when selecting, combining and preparing ingredients in order to serve ‘healthy and tasty’ dishes of internationalized or globalized education that meet students’ needs? Rather than presenting a prescriptive approach, the cooking metaphor is used to explore the complexity of internationalization and the limitations of dominant definitions. Taking equity, justice and epistemic plurality in higher education seriously, internationalization and globalization efforts need to involve asking critical and uncomfortable questions, including about how and why these concepts are defined, and creating a diversity of dishes in the process.

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