This paper looks at classroom practices as products of faculty level policy. It takes it outset in three different courses taught as parts of English medium programs at different faculties of the University of Copenhagen to discuss how motivations for university internationalization should be thought-about in the light of classroom realities.
For the past decades, internationalization has been on the agenda for most European universities. However, there seems to be diverging ideas about what internationalization means (or should mean) represented in different motivations for university internationalization. Internationalization can mean a shift in language (i.e. embracing English Medium Education, EME) – a simple solution to accommodate a changing educational market. It can mean a shift in content in terms of welcoming new perspectives on the curriculum. Moreover, the aim of the universities to attract international talent means a shift in the student body. What is somewhat overlooked is that classroom realities are products of policy. In this paper, I take as cases three courses on different EME programs at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) to foreground the consequences of the faculties’ different approaches to internationalization on classroom practices. The thrive towards EME is seen most dominant in the natural and technical sciences and least in the humanities, and this is no less true at the UCPH. The data presented here was thus collected across disciplinary settings; at the faculty of natural sciences, health and humanities. The study was conducted as a linguistic-ethnographic study of student experiences of studying in “international classrooms” taught through English. The courses on which the fieldwork was conducted differ greatly in relevance and enactment of “the international” and in faculty level language policies. Furthermore, the courses represent different levels of English competencies amongst the students. By taking its outset in three “real world cases”, this paper highlights the importance of investigating the unarticulated behavior and implicit structures in the process of internationalization. Furthermore, it adds to a discussion of how and why we internationalize and shift teaching language by pointing to examples of “blind spots” in the faculties’ policies versus the aims of the specific course or program.
