Intercultural Exchanges in Internationalization of University: Study-Abroad Doctoral Students’ Lived experiences in Iran

Abstract

The present article describes and interprets the experiences of study-abroad doctoral students studying in Iran. The theoretical backgrounds behind the issue relate to "academic exchanges" and "doctoral studies" as important subdivisions of internationalization of higher education. Academic exchanges are not merely epistemic, but mainly cultural and social. Doctoral studies are also a relatively new field of study in higher education, which has grown dramatically with the massification of higher education in recent years. In order to understand the doctoral students’ lived experiences, ethnography as methodology and research method has been used. The informants included eleven PhD students in both gender, from Afghanistan, Lebanon and India in different disciplines and universities who studied in Iran in 2018. MC Alpine and Norton (2012) conceptual schema has been used to understand the overall student experiences as a heuristic, and integrative framework of nested contexts. Students' lived experiences with the consideration of societal/supra‐societal, institutional and departmental/disciplinary contexts are studied. The framework allows recognizing the layers and complexities of study-abroad doctoral students’ experiences and integrating factors that influencing the outcomes across the contexts. The research findings were categorized in nine categories and they were described and interpreted subsequently. Finally, suggestions for future research and action are presented.

Keywords

• internationalization of universities
• doctoral studies
• study-abroad students’ experiences in iran
• higher education in iran