Global citizenship, sojourning students and campus communities

Abstract

The paper argues for situating today's students as ‘global citizens’, emphasising self-in-the-world identity over act-in-the-world agency. It draws upon a three-year investigation into the lived-experience of sojourning UK undergraduate students, which surfaced examples of significant learning among new communities of practice. Their experiences of crossing learning thresholds is presented as change to the lifeworld, and argued to have enhanced their sense of self-in-the-world. Because primary sites of learning identified within the narratives were within inter-subjective encounters outside the host culture and beyond what was planned within their mobility programmes, I suggest that similar learning might be enabled among diverse campus communities at home.