Apprenticeship in new worldviews in international higher education : an international comparative study

International education has been associated with an immersive experience in the host country. It involves taking classes within the university premises, but it is never limited to it. The inner processes involved in how students form themselves outside the university premises often slips from scholarly attention, although their existence and importance are recognised. This paper focuses on this gap and argues that international students undergo an apprenticeship in new worldviews as part of their self-formation during international higher education. The paper builds on international-comparative fieldwork consisting of interviews with 50 recent Turkish international higher education graduates who studied in four purposefully selected destination countries, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Germany, and the UK. It proposes that international student apprenticeship in new worldviews takes place through three temporal stages: encountering the new, interacting with the new, and formation of the self. Apprenticeship in new worldviews is a cyclical process, and its temporal stages follow each other fluidly and sometimes in a nonlinear way, feeding into each other. They are mediated by reflexivity in the Archerian sense, which sometimes involves cognitive dissonance reduction.