Straddling the global and national: the emerging roles of international schooling

ABSTRACT

Reflecting the growing spotlight on international schooling over the last three decades, this special issue aims to illuminate how education is straddling complex tensions between global and national forces across various contexts. Taking a comparative perspective, the special issue addresses the following key questions: How does the growing provision of and desire for international programmes affect education not only in international schools but also in other types of schools in their local/regional/national/international arenas?; How are schools across diverse contexts engaging with what international programmes represent as a global education for a global future?; How might a focus on “the global” facilitate or undermine engagement with local and national citizenship?; How have public schools and local governments responded to the expansion of international programmes into national education systems?; How are the educational opportunities and experiences of marginalised communities influenced? Eight research articles and a commentary in the special issue deepen our understanding of the changing nature of international schooling and its influence on national education systems.

KEYWORDS:

• International schooling
• International Baccalaureate programmes
• national education systems

In the past few decades, global influences can be traced in the educational trajectories of many countries – through their compliance with global examination regimes, the comparative nature of international rankings and their appearances in the media, and the expansion of global mobility (Adhikary & Lingard, 2018). These trends are met with counter-processes of increasing nationalism, as witnessed through anti-immigration legislation, independence movements, recent victories of nationalistic parties and leaders in national and regional elections in many formally left-leaning countries and vaccine nationalism as recently expressed by countries struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic (Dvir et al., 2019; Gusterson, 2017; Rutschman, 2021). Nevertheless, even given rising nationalistic trends, the desire to globalise is interwoven with the neoliberal rhetoric of global competition over talent (Brown & Tannock, 2009) and discourses about how schools should promote “global competencies” to enable students to compete in the global economy (Robertson, 2021). In some other cases, global dimensions are embedded within a cosmopolitan outlook, a way to go beyond national consciousness by emphasising empathy, peacefulness, and mutual understanding amongst people worldwide (Gaudelli, 2016).

Within these contexts, many schools are becoming more globally oriented (Fielding & Vidovich, 2017); they promote international programmes and rearrange existing programmes according to the national and cultural variety of their students (Pak & Lee, 2018). The clearest illustration is the expansion of international schooling. In education systems worldwide, deregulation and marketisation have enabled a steady expansion of English-medium schools offering international programmes by the International Baccalaureate, Cambridge Assessment International Education, and other international educational providers (Bunnell, 2020). Moreover, international schools are shifting from an international solution for mobile professionals to a form of education that offers affluent local families an internationally oriented and internationally-validated alternative to national curricula (Yemini & Dvir, 2016; Wright et al., 2021). A further complexity is that international programmes are expanding into public school systems (Maxwell et al., 2020), which can foster “all against all competition” (Resnik, 2020) and recreate various regimes of inequality (Doherty, 2013).

The implications of the expansion of international schooling are tremendous both for the students involved and for the societies where they are situated. Students may be socialised in ways that create identities and opportunities that are fundamentally different from their counterparts in mainstream schools. Traditionally, international schooling has been associated with idealistic aspirations of promoting cosmopolitanism — the ideology that all human beings belong to a single moral community where people as global citizens have obligations to others beyond their nationality, race/ethnicity, religion, etc. (Appiah, 2015) — as well as more instrumental functions of a pathway to international higher education. In this respect, students taking international programmes may be well-placed to build intercultural understanding and respect to create a more peaceful world (Tarc, 2009). They may also accumulate the “cosmopolitan capital” of intercultural competencies that supplement internationally recognised credentials to thrive in higher education overseas and globally-oriented careers (Wright & Lee, 2019; Weenink, 2008). However, international schooling changes over time and space. The local socio-cultural, economic, political context will inevitably shape why families choose international schooling, the international schooling experience, and the impact of international schooling on society. At the same time, new types of international schools are emerging that operate on a for-profit commercial basis and do not fit neatly with normative constructions of the traditional international school (Bunnell et al., 2016; Kim, 2019; Poole, 2020).

Reflecting the growing spotlight on international schooling, the collection of articles in this special issue unveils the major tensions encountered by national education systems in incorporating international schooling. Taking a comparative perspective, the special issue addresses the following questions: How does the growing provision of and desire for international programmes affect education not only in international schools but also in other types of schools in their local/regional/national/international arenas?; How are schools across diverse contexts engaging with what international programmes represent as a global education for a global future?; How might a focus on “the global” facilitate or undermine engagement with local and national citizenship?; How have public schools and local governments responded to the expansion of international programmes into national education systems?; How are the educational opportunities and experiences of marginalised communities influenced?

By engaging with these questions, this special issue provides a robust, coherent, and critical contribution to understanding how education is straddling complex tensions between global and national forces across a diversity of contexts.

First, Adam Howard's multi-sited global ethnography explores global citizenship education at six elite schools worldwide. His research builds on growing evidence about how elite schools are realigning missions, curriculum offerings, structures, and affiliations to prepare their students to flourish in a globalising world. He identifies four domains that permeate how schools engage with the global and help their students become globally oriented: cultural, relational, emotional, and material. The significance of the research is in illuminating the transnational practices of elite schooling and how they contribute to the social reproduction of elites in an era of globalisation.

Second, Hadas Flesh, Moosung Lee, and Miri Yemini’s article focuses on complex intersections of global and local identities. Their case focused on Israeli youth studying at United World Colleges (UWC) and their counterparts studying at local secondary schools. Although educational experience differed in significant ways, both groups of students were “pushed away” from a cosmopolitan outlook. The UWC Israeli students, despite the global outlook of UWC, often resisted a global identity narrative and had imagined futures that were tied to the nation. The article is an important addition to the literature on identity formation by problematising notions that international schools and their students are detached from their national contexts.

Third, Tristan Bunnell's article discusses the “crypto growth” of international schooling. He demonstrates how international schooling's nature and character are rapidly changing with demand from local middle-class parents and supply by a Global Education Industry. All this, he argues, has occurred in a creeping fashion with minimal critical discussion within the national arena. Only recently has the expansion of international schooling and its implications come under scrutiny. The article's contribution is a comprehensive analysis of recent trends in international schooling and the potential directions of the sector over the coming years.

Fourth, Wenxi Wu and Aaron Koh’s article unpacks the meaning of “international” at international schools in the Chinese context. They argue that international schooling constitutes a transnational positional good by enhancing the competitiveness of students seeking to apply to overseas universities. At the same time, they demonstrate how American-style (meishi), British-style (yingshi), and Sino-Canadian (zhongjia) international schools position themselves differently in China. The value of the article is applying the lens of transnational positional good theory to investigate the growing diversity of international schools and the different pathways they create for students in China.

Fifth, Quentin Maire and Joel Windle consider the social impact of the permeation of international school options for inequalities in a socially and academically stratified school system. Based on quantitative data from Australia, they demonstrate how the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme has become a “premium product” that is strategically used by powerful families to consolidate advantages in education and reproduce their social status. The article's contribution is illuminating how international school options can reinforce inequalities through creating educational marketplaces that are stratified both by the segregation of schools and an academic hierarchy of curricula.

Sixth, Paul Tarc compares how two powerful transnational actors advance pedagogical ideals for international education: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Baccalaureate (IB). Through comparative, critical discursive analysis, Tarc demonstrates how the OECD advances a “harder” governance modality through international standardised testing of “global competence” via PISA. This contrasts with the IB’s “softer” governance that relies on a modality of persuasion for schools to cultivate “international mindedness”. In so doing, the paper illuminates the prospects of different directions for international education.

Seventh, Jung Won Park and Won-Pyo Hong explore policy moves in South Korea to adopt the IB Diploma Programme (DP) in public high schools with the ambition of solving inherent problems and generating change in the education system. Based on in-depth interviews with IB DP graduates, they demonstrate how students’ experiences of the IB in Korea were affected by contextual factors, such as school ethos, academic culture and belief systems, as much as the IB educational philosophy. The implication is that curriculum change, such as the introduction of the IB into education systems, will be nestled within a complex web of global-local dynamics.

Eighth, Moosung Lee, Hyejin Kim, and Ewan Wright compare the influx of the International Baccalaureate into local education systems in Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. The analysis focuses on the IB's institutional legitimacy. Through documentary analysis, they explore the motivations, justifications, and interpretations of key local agents involved in implementing or promoting IB programmes in the local education systems. The major contribution of the article is detailing how socio-historical contexts and needs mediate the IB’s institutionalisation process across the three societies.

Lastly, Paul Morris provides a commentary piece on the articles in this Special Issue. He shares reflections on the big picture of the changing nature and rapid growth of international schools over the past few decades. The piece situates the developments in international schools within the broader trend of globalisation and the internationalisation of education. In so doing, it discusses the implications of a shift in international schooling from being relatively small, insulated, and detached to becoming an increasingly prominent part of school systems. The piece draws attention to the contribution of the articles in this Special Issue for a comparative analysis of the tensions and issues created by the proliferation of international schools globally.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).