So how does an organisation internationalise itself?
At the recent Internationalisation conference in Copenhagen we heard about one youth organisation’s experience.
The first thing that struck me was that experience was built up gradually and perhaps a little haphazardly but they are now at a stage where they have an explicit internationalisation strategy which is built on that initial experience. Svendborg Ungdomsskole is part of Denmark’s network of youth organisations that offer courses, training and events to the local teens.
Staff courses
As leader of the school, Cathri Jepsen, explained, their internationalisation started very tentatively when she signed up to a course in Turkey, unsure whether her English was good enough to get her through it.
What she discovered was that you can get by with surprisingly low levels of English as long as you are willing to participate.
The next step was to send staff on courses so that they could bring back their new expertise.
In the end Jepsen realised that the maximum benefit would be for the staff to attend the same course together so that they had a shared experience that they could work through together once back home.
But what if the course is terrible? Jepsen said that even then you could still gain a great deal from it by making partnerships with the attendees that could be used in later projects.
But it is not just about the staff.
Student exchanges
Danish Youth schools are completely dependent on the motivation of their target group for their continued existence so they have to keep working out what their target group would like to do and offer courses that meet that demand. The next step was to offer exchanges.
Project examples
- An exchange with Turkey about cooking and sustainability.
- An exchange with Poland on the topic of setting up an EU club, what would it be like? What would be the rules?
- The next trip is to Vietnam
Jepsen talked about the transformative power of these exchanges and told about one specific young woman who nobody expected to sign up for the trip and who afterwards declared it to be the best week of her life!
Here are two quotes from Svendborg exchange students:
The exchange has had a huge effect on me. In the future I won’t be afraid to exceed my boundaries and try something new.
There is no doubt that I will consider studying abroad for a year. In some ways I feel more adult and ready to continue my education and this has made me realise that I can do it.
Internationalisation at home
But not everybody is brave enough to sign up for these exchanges, so does that mean that those left behind are left out?
Svenborg Ungdomsskole have discovered the value of having an EU volunteer to help out at the school. The fact that their Spanish volunteer was not good at English, again was no barrier. It gave the teens an area of expertise that they could help him with so that there was a genuine exchange.
It also made it OK for languages other than Danish to be heard in the school and this brought out some students with a non-Danish background, more specifically their parents who were Albanian and who were prompted by the presence of the Spanish volunteer to offer to cook some typical Albanian food.
Sharing the workload
Organising a foreign exchange for young people is a great deal of work and Jepsen realised after the first exchange that this was not sustainable with her small staff. So she decided to increase buy-in from the feeder schools who provided her young participants by involving their staff. This had wider benefits as it made the school staff think about how to make the school curriculum more global in order to make the trips more meaningful.
Meanwhile back at Svendborg Ungdomsskole, the internationalisation process helped the staff to become more European, to think more about inclusion and what it meant and for everybody to be able to extend their identity a little.
Conclusions
- Your level of English does not have to be high (and will improve as you take part!)
- You can internationalise at home through various means
- An internationalisation strategy is multi-faceted
- Use the internationalisation activities to foster partnerships both with foreign and local partners.
- Share the workoad