International Education Week (IEW), November 15-19, 2021, is to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide.
Pitt’s legacy in international education comes from collaborations with institutions and persons around responsible educational leadership, through three intertwined groupings: management and policy; curriculum and pedagogy; and assessment and evaluation. General indicators of internationalization include student and faculty exchanges, participation in international events, joint projects, publication co-authorships, and publication in international journals. Internationalization contributes to institutional prestige, increased access to funding for research and projects, accreditation, and student enrollment.
At IISE, within the last few years, the mission has been expanded from an almost exclusive external focus on international higher education, to include service to the School of Education’s global perspective as a whole, for students, faculty, and colleagues in and outside Pitt. There have been strong shifts from transactional leadership toward responsible leadership across multiple contexts. Comparative perspectives are also needed to manage the highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous conditions that frame many of the decisions made by practitioners and policy makers.
Dr. Maureen McClure, IISE Director, highlighted this in the latest IISE Annual Report. "Universities discover and share basic knowledge. They help solve practical problems. They also have responsibilities to the very real young people in their classrooms. And these young people are living their lives communicating through increasingly internationalized devices. All of us need to learn how to better balance both our international and domestic (glocal) views. This requires comparative perspectives, so younger people can craft the tools they need to learn responsible ways of understanding different points of view."
One of the opportunities that IISE prizes is our ability to mentor the young leaders who come from all over the world. We lead with integrity, modeling effective stewardship of resources and treating every person with dignity. By cultivating these apprentice relationships, we practice what we teach. This also means making feminist approaches to leadership and balancing career and family, especially during a global health crisis, visible to the young scholars with whom we work. Modeling striving for well-being concurrently with targeted action for greater social justice has been a lifelong commitment.
IISE has nurtured relationships with partners in diverse organizations worldwide. Relationships have developed through journal peer reviewing, event hosting, conference speaking, and student/faculty exchange. In addition to its academic interests, IISE also participates in initiatives that support potential and current international students. It is open to interested faculty members, staff and students to join when they do work with international content, e.g., for faculty members when they serve as counterparts for visiting scholars (link).
Read more details here for IISE’s legacy in international education.
By: AS
Date: Nov 12, 2021
Source: 2020-2021 IISE Annual Report