Increasing Faculty Engagement: The Key to Meaningful and Sustainable Higher Education Internationalization

According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (2014), over 80% of Canadian post-secondary institutions have identified internationalization as one of their top five priorities. However, the focus has been on inbound student mobility (King, 2018). Institutions have aggressively and successfully pursued student recruitment with international student populations increasing by approximately 78% from 2014/15 to 2019/20 (Statistics Canada, 2021). While rationalizing internationalization as a vehicle to improve academic and sociocultural outcomes, the literature suggests that universities are subjugating these objectives to economic and political motivations (de Wit, 2020; Garson, 2016). Strongly under the influence of neoliberal ideologies, post-secondary institutions focus their efforts on branding and other market-based initiatives to entice international students, while ignoring the investment required to engage faculty and develop quality internationalized curricula (Heringer, 2020; Nyangau, 2018). My organizational improvement plan (OIP) argues that faculty engagement is critical for meaningful and sustainable internationalization and recommends a comprehensive approach adapted from Childress’ (2008) Five I’s model of faculty engagement. The OIP is set in the context of a mid-size, primarily undergraduate university in British Columbia and is based on the principles of critical pedagogy as a foundation for quality learning (Freire, 2005; Giroux, 2013) and Bandura’s (1982) social cognitive theory as a mechanism to increase faculty engagement. The Competing Values Framework (Cameron & Quinn, 2011) is used to diagnose the gap between the current and desired state of internationalization. The OIP further outlines how a hybrid model of transactional/distributed leadership can be used to build faculty internationalization skills, improve self-efficacy, and increase engagement.