Postgraduate Transnational Education in Nonbusiness Subjects: Can it Fit Conceptualizations of Curriculum Internationalization?

The issue of teaching and learning in transnational education has increasingly received attention through studies about "curriculum internationalization." To date, many of the examples and theorizations about curriculum internationalization are provided by business courses. This is largely a function of trade and commercial activities being inherently amenable to globalization forces, and hence facilitating the business subjects to adopt an international focus in curriculum planning and design. This article argues that curriculum internationalization also has significance for postgraduate science and social science programs delivered across borders, citing pharmacy and education as examples. However, the objectives of curriculum internationalization in these two are not narrowly focused on the functionalist notion of employability and performance as is found for business programs. Rather, they are considered to contribute toward the convergence of professionalization process of pharmacists worldwide for a postgraduate clinical pharmacy program, and the extension of a community of researchers to novice student researchers located overseas in the case of a professional doctorate in education. This difference in objectives calls for the construction of a more robust model of curriculum internationalization to guide international educators in their practice.