Multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding ‘international education’

We start this issue by celebrating a new format for our book reviews, which we have introduced for the International Studies in Sociology of Education. Our book reviews editor, Dr. Luke Lu, interviews Professor Pam Christie about her new book Decolonising schools in South Africa: the impossible dream? By hearing directly from the author about her findings, as well as the process of writing the book, we gain deeper insights into the contributions made by her ethnographic study of schooling in a small, rural town in a remote regional area in the Northern Cape. The interview format facilitates a strong, affective engagement with Christie’s portrayal of a deeply divided and unequal community. By tracing the history of the town, she illuminates how these fissures have been exacerbated to greater and lesser degrees by policy and financial frameworks governing schooling in South Africa over time.

The theme for this issue is international schools and the internationalisation of education explored through different theoretical and conceptual frameworks. In the first paper, Tristan Bunnell takes on the task of developing a ‘sociology of international schooling’. More specifically, he examines how ‘traditional international schools’ are constructed as a privileged, even elite form of education. Drawing on Collins’ work around the role of rituals and the generative positive emotional energy rituals emanate, he argues that an ‘expressive culture’ (Bernstein) is deeply embedded in these traditionally-defined international schools. These collective rituals form the basis of an enduring sense of group belonging and collective memory (Halbwachs), which Bunnell sees as a critical element of previously-identified ‘elite’ education. Bunnell’s research illuminates an important area for future research – what are the differences and similarities between the practices that shore up group cohesion in traditional international schools and those operating with their non-traditional counterparts or schools considered elite in national contexts. Bunnell’s work is an important first step in ensuring that the fields of international schooling and elite education can better converse – something missing to date.

The next paper moves to a specific focus on a nationally-elite school in Bogota, Columbia that teaches the International Baccalaureate (IB). Lucía Guerrero Farías’ study investigates how Global Citizenship Education (GCE) – a hallmark of the IB curriculum – is taught at the ‘Henry Marlowe School’. Farías’ study found that the school’s delivery of GCE does nothing to challenge the students to understand their social class position as actively contributing to Columbia’s highly stratified and unequal social and economic organisation. Farías concludes that the school promotes a form of ‘soft’ GCE, promoting a superficial tolerance for, and charity towards, others, rather than a critical understanding of the students’ roles in perpetuating inequalities. Adding to what Howard and Maxwell (2021) have found in their study about the future leader formation work occurring under the framework of GCE in elite schools across the Global South, Farias’ study further affirms the need to take a more critical approach towards the way GCE is taught in those schools where future leaders are cultivated.

The third paper also features a study of an international school, but a different type of international school, one that brands itself as distinctly ‘international’, yet, at the same time, embracing a strong nationalistic Indian identity. Baba and Mahajan’s article shows how the ‘Golden Harvest International School’ (GHIS) located in Bengaluru, India selects elements of the ‘international’ to fulfil the accreditation of the Middle Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate while incorporating an ‘appropriately Indian’ ethos, set of values and practices so as to appeal to its local elite clientele. The authors illustrate how students pick up globally valued credentials that will enhance their future global mobility while retaining ‘Hindu forward caste sensibilities’ such as encouraging vegetarianism, respecting Ganesha festivals as common history, speaking in desirable accents and female students having to observe a modest dress code. Their study contributes to our understanding of a new prototype of international schools they call ‘‘inter’national schools’, one that fuses the international with the national, and where the international is also arguably more attentive to the national.

Next, the paper by Minghui Hou, Natalie Cruz, Chris R. Glass and Sherrie Lee moves the focus to transnational postgraduates. Here, themes of mobility, belongingness and international education qualifications are taken up again, as across the three previous substantive papers of this issue. Significant too, is that Hou and colleagues draw on discussions of neo-colonialism to emphasise the ways qualifications, mobility patterns, aspired-to futures and forms of knowledge valorise the Global North, just as Farías, and Babu & Mahajan did in their discussions of elite education in Columbia and India respectively. Hou and colleagues set out to develop a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of the trajectories taken by transnational postgraduates, to move beyond a binary push/pull framework that sees people either seeking to stay in a ‘host’ country or return to their ‘country of origin’. The authors specifically focus on doctoral students and early career researchers operating within a transnational network and engaged in a form of cross-border academic capitalism. The nine participants in this research discuss their mobile lives as continuously transcending boundaries and being multi-located, but also feeling an intense frustration at the need to secure legitimacy as a scholar by having to study in an Anglophone country. The postgraduate scholars highlight their continuing reliance on mentors to secure their access to glocalised networks (networks with both global and local connections), which is variously experienced, and their strong desire to feel accepted and as if they belong to a like-minded academic community. The article ends by calling upon higher education institutions to use this multi-dimension framework to better understand the lives of transnational postgraduates and to develop more appropriate support structures for them.

Adding yet one further new framework for understanding international and elite forms of education, Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin uses field theory (Bourdieu) to discuss ‘international education’. Combining a field analysis of the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) with geometric modelling of IBO’s student data, Dugonjic-Rodwin offers a new perspective on how education can be international while still largely embedded within nation states. Alongside a comprehensive theoretical exposition of field theory, the paper draws on extensive data collected while at two of the most prestigious IB-schools in the world, and IBO data on 1,579 schools in 124 countries. Dugonjic-Rodwin analyses the various aspects of the field of IB schools which unify it. However, in examining the conflicts and struggles within the field, the author is able to illuminate the stakes being competed over and how hierarchies of traits of a successful international school are formed. Critically, Dugonjic-Rodwin argues that drawing on field theory allows us to side-step two other dominant theoretical influences in the field of international education – world systems theory and neo-institutionalism. Furthermore, by conceptualising international education as a global field, we are able to undertake comparative analysis without ‘comprising context-dependent determinants’, Dugonjic-Rodwin argues.

In a nice book-end to a conceptually rich issue of the journal, and to Dugonjic-Rodwin’s focus on Bourdieu, we include our final ‘Research in Translation’ piece by Elisabeth Hultqvist and Ida Lidegran, who reflect on how and why Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural capital’ was adopted and has evolved within Swedish sociology of education scholarship. This essay emphasizes that despite the promotion of meritocracy as the objective of the Swedish education system, Bourdieu’s work grew in its relevance to explain what scholars noticed in fact to be an education system that perpetuated inequalities.

Finally, there is a review of a new edited book examining the ‘Teach For All’ initiative, which now has an almost global reach. Abbey Jones discusses Matthew A. M. Thomas, Emilee Rauschenberger and Katherine Crawford-Garrett’s Examining teach for all: International perspectives on a growing global network.

This issue has offered various theoretical frameworks within which to examine international schools and internationalisation in education, as well as some rich empirical material to substantiate these conceptual contributions. All the papers illustrate how ‘the international’ is drawn on to create distinctions and extend the many inequalities already present across education systems. While countries and policymakers often see international curricula as a solution to local inequality problems (Engel & Gibson, 2019; Maxwell et al., 2020; Yemini & Dvir, 2016), research illuminates how in most cases the introduction of international curricula will be exploited by those with more means and power, and thus exacerbate local inequalities (Maxwell et al., 2017). Yet, these effects are not always straightforward and leave some room for unexpected outcomes (Engel et al., 2019). Given what appears to be the interminable march of ‘internationalisation’, identifying ways such endeavours do not always simply reproduce and extend inequalities, or where internationalisation offers opportunities for schools in the Global South to negotiate new local meanings and values of ‘the international’, is vital. Furthermore, as some of the papers in this issue, and other recent developments (see Maxwell et al., 2020) have done, new frameworks for analysing the way ‘the international’ is being taken up by schooling are very much needed.