“Walking the Talk”: A Conceptualization of International Mindedness to Inform Leadership in International Schools

Abstract

In many of the most highly regarded international schools, international mindedness (IM) represents an overarching value orientation and a “mindset” to be developed in students. Over the last 2 decades, there has been increasing attention to both understanding and supporting IM in the explicit and formal curriculum in international schools; however, the theorization of the more implicit or hidden curriculum of international schools has been much less engaged. This article presents a broad conceptualization of IM from a synthesis of the most recent IM literature and, more specifically, digs deeper into the implicit forms of learning and subjectivity via a “post-informed” analysis of a critical anecdote of international school teaching. The article seeks to inform leaders of how they might more robustly understand IM and work to walk the talk of IM through a more open embrace of human difference and cultural conflict under complex, power-laden, and sometimes fraught social relations.

Author Bio

Paul Tarc is Associate Professor in Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies at the Faculty of Education at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. He is coordinator of the online Master of Professional Education in ‘International Education’ and of the ‘International Education’ Cohort Specialization in the Teacher Education program. His research centers on progressive and critical forms of education in global times.

Notes

1 For some notable exceptions, see Allen (2002), Caffyn (2015), Drake (2004), Tamatea (2008), Tarc (2013), and Zsebik (2000).

2 International education remains strongly embedded in the Kantian Enlightenment imaginary (Tate, 2016).

3 Hill (2014) attributes the term organized hierarchy to March (1976).

4 One of the “flashpoints” of international education, where the terms IM, global citizenship, and intercultural competence take on different inflections, occurs in addressing the specific relation between understanding and action (Tarc, 2015). In this regard, IM may be placed closer to the liberal orientation (in contrast to the critical/social justice) with its focus on learner dispositions, given IB’s positioning of its learner profile (International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO), 2006) as the embodiment of its mission. Of course, with multiple statements and spokespersons, there is a mix of different orientations in the assemblage of IB discourse, but the dominant policy orientation centers on learning over action.

5 There remains a developmentalist residue in their conception, where knowing oneself comes before knowing the other. To fully embrace relationality, one would pose that subjectivities are built through self-other relations as synchronous, beginning with the infant-mother relation (Mishra Tarc, 2015); however, the popular concentric circles model of the developing self and the self’s subsequent developing relations to larger levels of the social—self, family, clan, state, global—unfortunately interferes with the productive conceptualizations of relationality and hybridity as material and existential givens rather than as future outcomes to be developed (de Souza, 2011).

6 Retrospectively I see my own response as lacking and passive; I include it here to highlight the principal’s preoccupation with the allegation of racism.

7 Indeed, when the Grade 10 cohort did go on the cultural trip, some of the Korean students who had been part of the group raising the initial concern displayed some culturally insensitive behaviors.

8 See Shuck (2006) for an account of how accent becomes a marker of racialization in intercultural contexts.

9 For one example, one day at lunch time, a very astute mixed-national Grade 8 student very matter-of-factly and calmly came to disclose that her local-Asian father was removed from the school, as someone who did not belong, by the local-Asian security guards on “meet the teacher” night. The incident was never reported.

10 I do not mean that exclusions are not produced or that they happen by themselves. But, following Foucault (1980), power flows through nodes that are epistemically assembled; performing knowing—English fluency in this case—reconstitutes the nodes through which power is deployed. Knowledge induces power, in this case as the elevating of and making important the one who knows.