Developing Collegial Approaches to Teaching Quality in TNE Partnerships: The Case of Professional Recognition

Increasing engagement with Transnational Higher Education (TNE) partnerships has brought increased scrutiny of the power relationships between home and host institutions. Questions have been raised about the benefit of the partnership to the host institutions. In countries such as the UK, home institutions operate in a regulatory context where the verification of ‘quality’ is a primary consideration and the pressure to demonstrate control of standards is therefore considerable. One approach to reconciling these tensions has been to engage developmentally with staff at host institutions through offering professional development in teaching and learning methods. Such an approach can be considered as building the capacity of the host institution, but it can also be viewed as perpetuating a deficit view of partner staff and reflecting an implicit assumption of the superiority of the home institution’s values and practices in relation to teaching. Drawing on the experience of a UK and Botswana partnership, this chapter outlines an approach to the demonstration of equivalence through professional recognition. This approach is predicated on an assumption of equality in the professional capability of partner staff. Some of the benefits of this approach to the TNE partner are outlined and the impact on the home institution in the development of its intercultural practice is illustrated.