Global Leaders Release Action Agenda for Ethical Internationalization

Last week, CGS released the principles and action agenda on internationalization in graduate education created by attendees at the Strategic Leaders Global Summit held last October.

The summit was co-hosted with the Australian Council of Graduate Research (ACGR) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) with financial support from ETS.

Summit participants discussed how to create a student-centered approach to increasing the flows of knowledge, people, and resources between nations. In doing so, they aim to improve knowledge production and increase transnational understanding. The ability for countries to be better collaborators in scholarly research will be crucial to helping solve global grand challenges like poverty and climate change.

The participants developed principles and an action agenda to help education leaders move toward a holistic approach to internationalization. Guiding principles included:

• Decenter international graduate student recruitment and place greater value on the role of international graduate students as knowledge producers.
• Embrace a global university approach that works with students and scholars from groups and regions historically underrepresented or marginalized from international graduate research.
• Foster support for student mobility and work to create a network-of-networks approach to connect graduate education communities.

Suzanne Ortega, president of CGS, said that the action agenda will help provide holistic support for global students and research and ensure a prepared international workforce.

“To solve global issues, we will need graduate students to become the scientists, engineers, and scholars who understand the contexts in which their proposed technological, policy or other solutions will be used,” Ortega said. “Applying these new approaches now will prepare our international graduate students to be the global citizens we need.”

Imelda Whelehan, 2023 ACGR president and dean of the Graduate Research School at the University of Western Australia, said that it is important for graduate education leaders in different countries to work toward consensus about values.

“What will endure are those agreed-upon principles and actions. Our areas of common ground can help ensure future graduate education leaders are equipped with the knowledge and resources to support international student success and encourage our domestic students to see themselves as global citizens,” Whelehan said.

The 2024 Strategic Leaders Global Summit will be held October 6-8 at the University of Guadalajara in Guadalajara, Mexico, featuring the theme: Transdisciplinary and Transnational Research to Solve Global Grand Challenges.