Alan Ruby: Theory and Reality

Alan Ruby is a senior fellow and senior scholar of the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy, part of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. International Educator had an opportunity to ask Ruby, a widely respected expert on international higher education, about the state of the field and why research findings must guide its practice.

What areas of international higher education research do you think need greater attention, and why?

Higher education institutions contribute to globalization by forming alliances with other research institutions or other teaching institutions by exchanging faculty, by exchanging students, by working on problems of common interest. But we need research to identify the benefits of those engagements and test whether they’re as real and as deep as we’ve always tended to assume.

We are the people who favor this sort of thing, interconnection. But we’ve not been fabulous at [researching it]. In fact, we’ve been quite poor about it. We’ve tended to make the argument that diverse classrooms, diverse seminar rooms, and diverse laboratories are good things: students from different cultures, different affinities, different forms of preparation for further study coming together and working on a shared body of knowledge or a shared learning problem tend to have a richer and more powerful and more successful learning experience than a classroom that’s completely homogeneous.

That’s the theory. There’s not a real lot of solid evidence that that’s in fact the case. And how would we go about documenting that? And I’m not talking about psychometric tests