Intercultural Competence and Pedagogical Design in Transnational Higher Education: A Critical Analysis of the MARIHE Programme Framework

Abstract

Intercultural competence and transformative learning are central priorities in transnational education (TNE), as student mobility and cross-border programmes expose learners to diverse cultural, institutional, and epistemic contexts. This paper critically analyses the Master in Research and Innovation in Higher Education (MARIHE), an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s programme, by examining how its pedagogical design mediates the development of intercultural competence and perspective transformation. Drawing on Deardorff’s Process Model of Intercultural Competence, Byram’s Model of Intercultural Communicative Competence, Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and Transformative Learning Theory (TLT), the study uses qualitative document analysis of official MARIHE curriculum materials, programme structures, pedagogical arrangements, and professors’ questionnaire responses. The findings indicate that MARIHE promotes intercultural competence through mandatory transnational mobility, comparative curriculum content, collaborative learning, and applied research experiences. These features align with Deardorff’s dimensions of intercultural attitudes, knowledge, and skills, and with Bennett’s progression toward ethnorelative orientations. From a transformative learning perspective, mobility, collaboration, and research-based learning function as disorienting dilemmas that stimulate critical reflection and perspective transformation. However, Byram’s framework reveals that critical cultural awareness, especially engagement with epistemic power relations and global knowledge hierarchies, remains implicit rather than systematically embedded across the curriculum. The paper contributes to TNE scholarship by emphasising pedagogical design as a key mediator of intercultural and transformative learning outcomes.