Abstract
International education is a powerful force for connection, growth, and global understanding — and the sector is at its best when it reflects honestly on both its contributions and its responsibilities.
This session brings together CANIE Oceania Leadership (Climate Action Network for International Educators) for an interactive café-style conversation exploring the full picture of international education’s impact.
The session invites participants to move beyond passive listening and into genuine dialogue — mapping the transformative outcomes international education makes possible alongside the environmental, cultural, and ethical dimensions the sector is increasingly called to address.
Together, participants will explore what it looks like to move toward models that are sustainable, intercultural, and genuinely beneficial — for students, institutions, communities, and the planet — and leave with practical insights and shared momentum for what comes next.
Learning objectives
Participants will:
- Understand the dual nature of international education’s impact — its genuine benefits and its documented harms
- Explore how sustainability, intercultural capability, and ethical accountability can be embedded across institutional practice
- Examine the environmental footprint of international education and practical frameworks for reducing it
- Identify how cultural identity and lived experience can be centred — rather than commodified — within international education models
- Learn from cross-organisational collaboration as a model for driving sector-wide change
- Gain actionable insights for moving their institutions toward approaches that do good without doing harm
Target audience
- International education practitioners and institutional leaders
- Sustainability officers and environmental strategy leads
- Curriculum designers and intercultural learning specialists
- Student experience, wellbeing, learning abroad and student services teams
- Government, policy, and peak body representatives