The Future of Education

This paper, a part of my PhD project, is on the impact of academic mobility on Bangladeshi academics who have studied in Western countries on various scholarship and self-funded programmes. This qualitative study involves semi-structured interviews from 35 returnee academics working in various public and private universities and complemented by elite interviews of stakeholders like VCs, Heads of the Department, British Council and American Centre. The interviews were all transcribed and translated then thematically analysed. Academic mobility in the higher education sector especially from the developing countries to the developed ones has become a recurring phenomenon benefitting learners across the globe for ages (Canagarajah in Hossain, 2017). In the same line, the higher education policy of Bangladesh encourages academic mobility. However, my findings suggest a huge gap between the expectations of the stakeholders and the challenges academics’ face on return from overseas study. The stakeholders when interviewed disclosed that their cardinal expectation that the returnee academics would contribute to the national development and act as agents of change by trying to restructure the current educational system, has remain unsatisfied in many cases. The participant academics all agree on academic mobility to be an enriching and life changing experience as indicated in studies like Gill (2010). However, my study identifies various socio-cultural factors including academics’ motivation to study abroad and unaccommodating workplace issues that puts constraints on their contribution towards sustainable development. The participant academics feel that the trending neoliberal education policy of producing sellable manpower associated by an age-old higher education policy without proper directives has been destroying the core essence of education. Does that mean the academic experience abroad has had some negative impact along with the positives on the education and thought process of the academics or is it the stakeholders are keeping high expectations? This study would try to provide valuable insight into the reality of academic mobility from the perspective of the academics as well as the stakeholders and also suggest ways to mitigate the gap that eventually leads towards sustainable development in the higher education sector.

Keywords: Academic mobility, Higher education policy, Impact, Sustainable development;

References:
[1] Hossain, R. (2017). An Interview with Dr. Suresh Canagarajah. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Languages & Literature, Vol. 10 (4).
[2] Gill, S. 2010. The Homecoming: An investigation into the Effect that Studying Overseas Had on Chinese Postgraduates’ Life and Work on their Return to China. Compare. Vol. 40 (3), pp. 359–376.