Collaborating for content and language integrated learning: The situated character of faculty collaboration and student learning

Abstract

Globalisation, internationalization, and widening participation are trends in higher education that require efforts to foster a culture of cooperation, reflexivity and learning among lecturers as well as among students. These central forces in education call for curriculum change to respond not only to workforce and student mobility but also to indirect effects like changing requirements for teamwork in the professional world and by extension also in education. These requirements might involve an emphasis on transdisciplinary teams, an increasing amount of information distribution, and greater cultural and disciplinary variety in student or co-worker profiles. One curricular approach exploring and problematizing this 'culture of cooperation' is Integrating Content and Language (ICL), where a disciplinary focus (content) is combined with a concurrent emphasis on the corresponding communication dimensions (language).[1]This special issue of ATD investigates understandings of Integrating Content and Language (ICL) through the exchange of knowledge and experience regarding collaboration between content (discipline-based) and language (communication / academic literacies) lecturers in higher education contexts. To date, it seems that this type of collaboration can be challenging to students and faculty alike for infrastructural, institutional, epistemological, disciplinary, rhetorical, and other reasons. The papers in this issue help us address some of these challenges and improve our understanding of ICL-collaboration.