Understanding and fostering sustainable behaviour in international student mobility
Creators: name: Whitwill, Theo
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2024
Subjects: 378: Hochschulbildung

description: International mobilities are a vital component of internationalization strategies of higher education institutions and have grown over the past three decades thanks to collaborative efforts like the Erasmus Programme. Within the same time span, the world’s attention has been drawn to climate change and the negative impacts of heavy travel emissions and overconsumption. Yet students are tendentially young, open, people oriented towards the future and no strangers to change and the climate discourse. Higher education institutions like the ZHAW face both ambitious internationalization goals, where the exchange of students and staff is to be increased, and simultaneously goals to reduce emissions and become sustainable institutions. This presents conflicting goals or rather a wicked problem. This paper aims to study and understand the motivations and behaviors of students going on stays abroad and how the experiences changed them, with a focus to determine their awareness of and development on environmental sustainability topics. 
To gather the relevant data a mixed-methods approach was used. First an extensive literature review was conducted to understand the existing academic context on sustainable behavior and motivations as well as sustainable mobility in higher education. Based on elements from the literature review a survey was created to generate new ideas and premises. Pre-test interviews were conducted to optimize the quality and outcomes of the survey. The responses were analyzed alongside and compared to existing population data from a software managing international exchange programmes. 
Analysis of the results indicated that environmental sustainability factors were consistently rated at low importance or in fact even the least relevant when considering stay abroad destinations. Moreover, the environmental impact of their stay abroad was absent in the mind of most students, with over a third never thinking about these issues during their stay. In general, the students indicated significant personal development in all measured factors, including topics of environmental sustainability, albeit those grew the least. Finally, students selected the most impactful university interventions to maximize the impact of stay abroad experiences from their perspective. 
The paper does not reach any groundbreaking conclusions; however, it opens many doors and opportunities for research and institutional actions. The positive effects of international mobility were confirmed: However, the disconnect between the experience and the participant’s awareness and consideration of their environmental impact present a call for action. Many ideas for further research and proposals on university interventions to change behaviors and address cognitive dissonance in IM are presented. Higher education institutions and the wider education community are encouraged to study the challenge further and consider implementing the university interventions outlined in this paper.