2025/07/07 by Jan Palmowski, Jo Angouri · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Higher Education Governance and Development #Higher Education Learning Practices #International Student and Expatriate Challenges
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14767724.2025.2524479
openalex publication_date 2025/07/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/25
Five years after the European University Initiative's creation, we examine how the transnational collaboration it fostered has impacted Europe's higher education institutions (HEIs) in pedagogical innovation, excellence across all missions, the strengthening of a European identity and institutional transformation. Based on semi-structured interviews and publicly available documents, we examine how European university alliances have addressed their objectives, evaluate the new activities they generated and discuss their key challenges. We argue that each European university alliance has created conditions for transnational communities of practice (CofP) to emerge. Within each alliance, these CofP have developed as sites of mutual learning, pedagogical innovation and challenging institutional structures and 'what counts'. They are sustained by a new and emerging European edu-spatial imaginary, articulated by a desire for inclusion and transnational collaboration, which is distinct from the institutions' national and global frames. However, institutions have been largely unable to bring the innovation created by CofP into the institutional mainstream. The HEIs' capacity to integrate ‘horizontal' alliance activities ‘vertically’ into workload and reward models, as well as administrative practices, will be critical to the long-term functioning of the CofP and the sustainability of the alliances themselves.