Transnational governing for the pedagogical ideals of K-12 international education: contrasting PISA and IB

ABSTRACT

In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) added to their PISA regime the assessment of “global competence”. Given this novel, data-driven approach to governing the internationalisation of K-12 education, this study compares this recent intervention to a longer-standing mode of governing for the pedagogical ideals of international education – the approach of the International Baccalaureate (IB) across its 50-year lifetime. It employs a comparative, critical discursive analysis of how these two influential transnational organisations advance the pedagogical ideals of international education in neoliberal times. It illuminates the history and development of the IB’s soft governing for “international mindedness” and the OECD’s more recent approach to governing for “global competence” via PISA. As an entity without state authority, the IB has used a regime of centralised examinations for curricular control and quality assurance in the international schools where it was first adopted. However, IB has never attempted to use formal assessment as a direct technique of governing for international mindedness. Arguably, its liberal-humanist foundations and the need for “malleability” of IB across its many sites of adoption has mitigated from taking a too direct approach to its idealist ambitions. Whereas OECD’s testing for “global competence” is more ambitious and problematic. Despite the OECD’s use of liberal and social-justice vocabulary, its human capital development orientation remains active in its neoliberal conception of global competence. Contrasting these two transnational modalities of governing for the pedagogical ideals of international education, offers insights into the trends and prospects of internationalisation of K-12 education.

KEYWORDS:

• International education
• International Baccalaureate
• OECD
• PISA
• global competence
• international mindedness

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The IB Organisation states: “International-mindedness is a multi-faceted and complex concept that captures a way of thinking, being and acting that is characterized by an openness to the world and a recognition of our deep interconnectedness to others” (IBO, 2017, p. 2).

2. The OECD states: “Global competence is a multidimensional capacity. Globally competent individuals can examine local, global and intercultural issues, understand and appreciate different perspectives and world views, interact successfully and respectfully with others, and take responsible action towards sustainability and collective well-being” (OECD, 2018, p. 4).

3. While OECD’s response to delimit scoring to “cognitive components” and to engage the attitudinal dimensions by self-reporting questionnaires (see the Appendix questions in OECD, 2018) is welcomed by these authors, it does illustrate quite a contradiction between the need to measure the whole “multi-dimensional” construct of global competence and how data will be ultimately collected to make comparative claims and elevate OECD’s status as an authoritative assessor of “soft skills” and dispositions.

4. Perhaps this question has already been internally criticised and thus would not show up on an actual future test. Regardless, such singular criticisms tend to find ready responses that obscure the more paradigmatic problem. OECD’s/ PISA’s “scientific” approach of constant improvement through greater (international) consultation seems to be an ever-ready answer and one that Sälzer and Roczen (2018) and OECD key spokesperson Schleicher (2017) imply. Clearly, what we witness in the inclusion of this sample question (and in parts of the OECD’s conception of global competence) is the parochial constitution of PISA’s conception of global competence. Beyond a lack of wider international collaboration, it also appears that the “experts” generating the content have more expertise in test development and an individualised, de-historicized/politicised notion of global competence in the tradition of “intercultural competence,” which represents a theoretical precursor to OECD’s global competence (Engel et al., 2019b). And ultimately global competence (pedagogy) will be defined via the paradigmatic content of these test questions that represent the “harder” steering mechanism, over the inclusion of liberal-humanist (and critical) vocabulary in the OECD’s evolving policy rhetoric.

5. One is reminded of the trending, polished pharmaceutical commercials on television that transparently include a whole litany of potential life-threatening side effects somehow seamlessly integrated into the branding of their product. Cautionary caveats it seems do not have to be a deterrent to selling.

6. Notably, families and schools are targeted over the media or governments (Ledger et al., 2019).

7. Will participating countries, for example, be compelled to show that their students are “competent” to individually adapt to the needs of the global economy and navigate as elites under heightened intercultural relations? See Ledger et al. (2019).