by Cosmin Nada, Thais França and Biana Lyrio
Universities around the world, and particularly in postcolonial contexts, are investing significantly in international student attraction. International students feature prominently in brochures, recruitment campaigns, and institutional rankings. But what happens when this spotlight fades and students are left to navigate systems that were never truly designed for them? Our recently-published article, The pandemic as a ‘revelatory crisis’ – the experiences of international students during emergency remote teaching in a postcolonial context, suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for HE stakeholders to continue turning a blind eye to the epistemic injustice and systemic exclusion of international students.
The research examined the experiences of international students during the abrupt shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in Portuguese higher education (HE). Interviews were conducted with degree-seeking students from China, Brazil, Syria, and Portuguese-speaking African countries (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe), alongside focus group discussions across four Portuguese cities. To capture institutional perspectives, HE staff members were also interviewed. Drawing on critical pedagogical theories, rooted in the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, the article analyses how the pandemic did not merely create new problems but rather exposed and amplified inequalities that had been there all along.
One of the most striking findings of the article concerns the persistence of what Freire famously called the banking model of education: the idea that teaching means depositing knowledge into passive students. For international students, this dynamic takes on an added layer: it is not just any knowledge being deposited, but knowledge rooted in Western and Eurocentric frameworks, which is automatically positioned as inherently superior. The rich cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds that international students bring with them are routinely ignored or, worse, treated as deficits in need of correction. This is not merely a pedagogical shortcoming: it is a form of epistemic violence, rooted in colonial logics that continue to structure how knowledge is valued in most HE institutions worldwide.
The study also reveals that international students are often navigating educational systems that were not built for them. From curricula that assume a uniform cultural background to assessment methods that penalise linguistic diversity, HE institutions in Portugal – as in many other postcolonial contexts – treat international students as problems to be ‘managed’ rather than as valued members of the academic community. During ERT, these pre-existing deficit views and institutional stereotypes were dramatically amplified. Already struggling with the complexities of studying abroad, international students found themselves either invisible in the digital classroom or exposed to rigid pedagogies unadjusted to their needs. Moreover, the support systems that might have partially compensated for these failures in face-to-face settings vanished almost entirely in the online environment.
Rather than pointing the finger at individual HE staff, the study calls for a more systemic interpretation. Many of the HE educators we spoke with were themselves struggling, overwhelmed by the sudden transition to online teaching, often lacking both the digital skills and the pedagogical training to deal with diverse classrooms, while receiving minimal to no institutional support. This points to a significant elephant in the room in HE: in many contexts, including Portugal, academics become educators with little or no previous structured training in how teaching and learning works, let alone in how to engage meaningfully with diversity in the classroom. In other words, the decision to recruit international students is typically made at institutional level, yet the consequences of that decision fall on individual staff members who are given few resources and almost no preparation to adapt to the needs of diverse students.
Even well-intentioned educators, when operating within the colonial atmosphere that persists in most HE institutions and while lacking the pedagogical knowledge to do otherwise, end up reproducing oppressive practices. The findings show how transmissive, lecture-based, and non-interactive teaching methods – already dominant before the pandemic – were simply transferred to the online environment. When care, empathy, and dialogue are absent from pedagogy, even educators who genuinely seek to support their students can inadvertently reinforce the very exclusion they aim to prevent. Without deliberate and informed efforts to build inclusive classrooms, the default mode of teaching may be perpetuating the marginalisation of those who do not fit the assumed ‘norm’.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding of this study is what the pandemic revealed about contemporary internationalisation. Portuguese HE institutions – like many across the world – actively recruit international students following a neoliberal logic, treating them essentially as revenue sources. For instance, Portugal’s new International Student Statute marked a shift from viewing students from former colonies as beneficiaries of educational cooperation to positioning them as fee-paying customers. Yet, in this process, the pedagogical and institutional structures remained largely unchanged (and hence equally unwelcoming). During ERT, this contradiction became impossible to ignore: institutions prioritised continuity over quality, maintaining revenue streams while effectively abandoning any potential commitment to care-informed, culturally responsive teaching. Students repeatedly reported that, in such circumstances, their international mobility experience simply ‘wasn’t worth it’.
The article is clear that minor adjustments will not suffice. What is needed is a fundamental transformation of how HE institutions approach international students. Institutions must invest in equipping academic and non-academic staff with the necessary knowledge and competences in diversity and care-based pedagogies. In addition to staff training, it is fundamental that they create participatory structures where international students’ voices are heard and where they can actively contribute to curricular and pedagogical decisions as equal co-creators of knowledge.
The pandemic has passed, but the challenges it exposed remain. As universities now face new pressures – from the widespread use of artificial intelligence to geopolitical uncertainties, and to the reversal of internationalisation and cooperation agendas – the lessons from this crisis are more relevant than ever. If HE institutions are to remain meaningful actors in forming future generations of workers and citizens, they must stop treating students as commodities to be recruited and start working towards the provision of a truly meaningful and powerful learning experience for all.
Cosmin Nada is an education expert and researcher based at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa. With over a decade of experience in conducting research on education, he focuses on migration and education, diversity and inclusion, internationalisation of higher education, social justice, educational policies, and wellbeing in education.
Thais França is an Assistant Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa. Her research focuses on the everyday experiences of racialised and gendered subjects. She is Vice Chair of the European Network on International Student Mobility and Coordinator of the Inclusion+ project (2024–2026): Tackling the Challenges of Erasmus+ Mobility Inclusion and Diversity at HE Level.
Biana Lyrio is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT-Portugal). She is a doctoral student in Urban Studies, a joint programme between Iscte-IUL and the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon.
