International schools’ leadership and Christianity

ABSTRACT

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a secular educational franchise, educating the globally advantaged and potential future leaders. Drawing on Bourdieu, this article involves original interpretivist research, reviewing data surrounding the international IB school and its educational leadership. It presents findings pertinent to the remarkable pervasiveness of Christianity and Christian values in the orientation of IB directors in a Western European context.

IB directors foreground Christianity in their make-up. In the fluid global market-place of IB schools, consistency is rare, and highly valued. Through Bourdieu, IB directors emerge as islands, with relative freedom from the State. They lead a secular school, with an implicit Christian orientation. The IB purposefully pluralises the culture of the IB experience through the IB learner Profile (IBLP). In the main, IB school leadership rejects the operational consistency of the IBLP and embraces pluralism through the consistency of Christianity.

The international school is an incubator for Anglo Christian values providing cultural laundering, ontologically tied to the imperial gaze in this globalised neo-liberal schooling context: the international gaze.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational leadership
• Bourdieu
• Christianity
• international schools
• global citizenship education
• International Baccalaureate

Acknowledgement

With special scholarly thanks to my former student at the Rudolf Steiner school Pötzleinsdorf in Vienna: Mattias Reiter-Pazmandy, Deputy Head of the Department for Social Sciences and Humanities in the Directorate General for Scientific Research and International Relations in the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research (BMBWF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Alexander Gardner-McTaggart http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3150-0561

Notes

1 Emphasis added.