Abstract

This paper represents a worldview about international education and its role in the context of globalization and global change. This paper is also about learning and the expansion of knowledge about international education, and about what makes it “truly” international in a global context in various countries that are so different, in the light of historical imbalance in international relations, and of the hypothesis that international education has own cultural boundaries, is supplementary to traditional domestic educational systems and is often in conflict with traditional educations. The Program of Mutual Interests is a concept about partnership in international education and global learning among cultures. This concept grew up throughout my own learning and experience of being an international student who came from non-Western country to the US to study the field of international education that hardly exists at home (or maybe exists in a very different way). Initially the concept was a simple exchange program building up equal partnership between Ukraine and Western Europe, later it expanded toward other countries, and in this paper it became a concept about a paradigmatic change in international education that would allow mutual learning and equal involvement in educational partnership among cultures. Ethnographic research conducted in University of Minnesota had the goal to explore the potentials of the Program of Mutual Interests and whether the concept is compatible with international education that already exists in the large US land-grant university. The research study analyzed the socio-cultural constructs of international education in the University of Minnesota. The research study and its outcomes are also my own learning about international education in the US and is an effort to integrate my ideas and experience with the existing infrastructure of international education.

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