Crossing Borders: Voices from the Margins

Loshini Naidoo 
(School of Education, Kingswood Campus, University of Western Sydney, Australia)

Abstract: In responding to contemporary geopolitical shifts, universities around the world are increasingly entangled in intersecting local, national, and global relations. Transnational students are using the “internationalization of higher education” to extend and deepen their capacity for thinking and acting globally, nationally and locally in order to enhance their education life chances. As universities in Australia are being integrated into the new global system of transnationalism in higher education, particularly with students from the Indian sub-continent, there is a need for re-strategizing in universities in the areas of curriculum and pedagogy to enable transnational learning communities and generate and sustain empowering knowledge networks. This paper will explore the impact of the “Crossing Borders” mentoring support program at the University of Western Sydney that aims to foster educative relationships and community engagement amongst and between Master of Teaching students. As a result of such an initiative, the School of Education at the University of Western Sydney is able to provide a welcoming and culturally diverse learning and social experience for Indian international students so that the problematic connections between university imaginings of the “internationalization of higher education” and transnational students’ uses of international education to enhance their life opportunities as global/national/local citizens, workers/employers and learners are blurred.

Key words: literacy, service learning, transnationalism, higher education