Context
Cross-cultural collaboration and communication is a necessary part of everyday life in a globally connected world and is not just an aspect of geographic mobility. Intercultural learning should be an important aspect of lifelong learning and work because it builds competence and capacities for living and working together.
The development of a global higher education and research space increases mobility and relationship building in academic work. This means that cross-cultural competence and capacities are increasingly significant features of academic work, which demands new approaches to academic apprenticeship.
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Revitalising academic apprenticeship
A model of academic apprenticeship has been piloted through the CROSSLIFE project. The 5-step learning pathway was an integrated approach to education and socialisation. This approach is centred on boundary-crossing experiences that bring participants into peer relationships across cultural differences. Within these horizontal (rather than hierarchical) social relations of learning, experiences are problematised and interrogated through content and process learning within a secure learning environment that provides interpersonal support (See figure 2).
Figure 2: The CROSSLIFE approach to integrated boundary-crossing learning
The CROSSLIFE learning pathway was implemented from 2007-8. Students were enrolled in the learning pathway through the partner universities. They worked with tutors in their home universities and also participated in cross-national workshops in London (November 2007), Tampere Finland (March 2008), and Malta (September 2008). Each workshop had a rich program of lectures, discussion, visits and reflective learning activities organised through peer (horizontal) relationships. ICTs were integral to these activities and were extensively used to mediate communication and as a focus for learning and researching.
Evaluations of this pilot study provide evidence that the CROSSLIFE teaching-learning approach builds cross-cultural competence and capacities. It supports a revitalised academic apprenticeship that inducts students into academic work, while also enhancing their capacity to work cross-culturally. They become more able to negotiate academic work practices, cultures and traditions, and more self-directed and autonomous in their academic learning and research.
However some design features of the CROSSLIFE implementation model are not yet fully optimised. These limitations make the 5-step learning pathway unsustainable within current resource levels and institutional settings. The model therefore requires further development in order to facilitate integration of this approach to academic apprenticeship in existing university-level degree structures, institutional arrangements and resources.
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Towards a sustainable revitalised academic apprenticeship
A more feasible approach to academic apprenticeship is indicated by the local solutions designed by partner universities as they integrated the CROSSLIFE learning pathway into their own universities. These localised initiatives:
Focus implementation on challenges that arise in partner universities because there is increased global interconnectedness and mobility in academic work;
Identify practical ways of addressing these workplace challenges by designing solutions that develop work practices that are more appropriate to global times. The CROSSLIFE approach to cross-boundary peer learning is implemented as a means to build cross-cultural competence and capacities; and
Address academic apprenticeship among students and also support learning amongst academic and administrative staff at work.
These localised initiatives suggest that the revitalisation of academic apprenticeship depends upon institutional renewal within academic workplaces. In this respect the CROSSLIFE approach to boundary crossing peer learning has application in research training but becomes more sustainable when it is also linked to workplace learning.
Conclusions
The CROSSLIFE pilot has developed an approach to academic apprenticeship that develops competence and capacities in cross-cultural collaboration and communication relevant to global times. This approach emphasises learning and researching that builds knowledge and expertise, and supports problem solving, through boundary crossing peer learning. While the 5-step learning pathway used to implement this approach in the CROSSLIFE pilot is not a sustainable model in current resource and institutional settings, the project has identified elements of a more feasible implementation strategy.
Despite the attractiveness of organising a ‘European Higher Education and Research Area’, and facilitating this construction through mobility programmes, it is essential that the Commission recognise the pervasiveness and challenges involved in working across ‘cultures’, in the polyvalent way that this term is being used in the CROSSLIFE project.
Further effort should be invested in identifying the obstacles to cross-cultural collaboration in academic teaching, learning, research, and in university administration and management. Effective problem solving depends upon sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the challenges involved, as well as their roots.
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