Call for papers

The call for papers can be downloaded from this link: Call for papers

According to the OECD, the internationalization of higher education has accelerated over the past fifteen years. With nearly 4.6 million international students in 2015, higher education institutions place the mobility of students at the centre of their metholodologies.

Most often student mobility takes the form of semesters and internships abroad as immersion in intercultural environments appears to facilitate the development of academic and non-academic skills. Numerous studies have shown the relevance of this type of educational experience (Ballatore 2006, Teichler and Janson 2007, Brandenburg 2014, Tarrant et al 2014, Potts 2015). Abroad, the student engages socially and academically with a culturally different environment, which leads to experimentation and related opportunities to develop multiple transversal skills. This encompasses the development of a set of attitudes and behaviors associated with individual skills, namely relational skills (ability to communicate, but also personal qualities/attitudes such as enthusiasm), organizational skills (the capacity to envisage solutions beyond the scope of personal reach), the aptitude to manage emotions and empathy, the building-up of complex attitudes (responsibility, open-mindedness, adaptability, tolerance, self-confidence, desire to learn) and even aesthetic skills which involve cultivating satisfactory images in coherence with those – put forward by the organization (Bailly and Léné, 2015, p.71). All these are generally known as intercultural skills.

However, mobility experiences abroad are not the only opportunities for students to engage with intercultural environments. Pedagogies can be equally effective in promoting internationalization of education. This is the case when international students work with local students on various projects, or when visiting professors from abroad introduce students to pedagogical approaches with which students are unaccustomed, or when two teachers set up, in two different countries, a project within which students must interact via information and communication technologies. In short, a multitude of pedagogical practices exist that can potentially provide all students with intercultural experiences. This 4^th International Teaching Forum will focus on these methodologies in order to identify them, to examine the skills they aim at fostering and to evaluate mechanisms used to measure their acquisition.

In line with the previous three conferences (two were held at Shanghai Normal University in China in 2016 and 2017 and one at Utah Valley University in the United States in 2018), the overall objective of the 4^th International Teaching Forum will be to address innovative pedagogical practices in higher education in different countries. Over two days, teachers and researchers together will work on issues related to the contributions and limits of innovative teaching practices, based on experiments conducted more particularly (but not exclusively) in the field of communication and management. This conference will take place in Clermont-Ferrand (France) on November 14^th and 15^th, 2019.

For this edition, the theme of pedagogical innovation will be addressed from the perspective of interculturality and skills. Papers will discuss how teaching pedagogies have fostered the creation of a context favorable to interculturality and facilitated the acquisition of transversal skills. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• How pedagogical practices promote the creation of an intercultural context
• What contribution information and communication technologies make to pedagogical innovations in intercultural situations
• What skills are developed by students (local and / or international) in the context of intercultural learning
• What assessment mechanisms are put in place to evaluate the acquisition of skills
• What skills are acquired by teachers in such intercultural contexts
• What mode of communication is developed between teachers and students acting in a culturally different environment
• What role intercultural communication plays in these pedagogical practices

The Forum aims to:

• publish the proceedings on the conference website;
• publish selected articles (finalized following the conference) in two journals (one in Information and Communication Sciences and the other in Management Sciences);
• publish a volume on Innovative Pedagogical Practices and Interculturality.

The main language of the conference will be English, but papers may be presented in French.