International education in secondary schools explored: a mixed-method examination of one Midwestern state in the USA

Abstract

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to international education in schools in the USA. Education professionals, business leaders, and politicians realize that schools and school leaders must identify multiple opportunities for students to interact with and experience a global society. Nationally, there has been a considerable investment of funds by several key foundations and much political talk about the need to push American education towards a model of schooling that expressly responds to the need for internationally competent citizens. Using mixed methodology design, this study is fueled by a desire to better understand several overarching elements in international education. In short, the authors of this paper posit that no further research, policy formation, or program development within the realm of international education for public schools can be undertaken until an understanding of the current state of international education and the capacity for internationalization is empirically explored.

Keywords:

• international education
• global education
• educational reform
• secondary school
• twenty-first century skills

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank Dr. Joshua Smith, Shanna Stuckey and Caterina Blitzer for their support of this research. This research was conducted at the Center for Urban and Multicultural Education at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Research was supported by a grant from the Indiana Department of Education through a grant from the Longview Foundation.

Notes

1. Multicultural education in the USA emerged in the 1960s, essentially as a part of the civil rights movement (Sutton 1999). For many years, many of the major writers in multicultural education, in particular James Banks (2003), emphasized the need to diversify the curriculum based on internal diversity rather than internationalization per se. However, Dolby and Rahman (2008) point out that multicultural education grew out of similar questions and concerns about other, in their words ‘trajectories’ in the school internationalization literature. Further, it should be noted that Banks (2003) has subsequently recognized the need to understand and include international dimensions as a part of multicultural education.

2. Reorganization of the state department of education after the election of a new chief of schools collapsed international education into foreign language as a curricular content area of leadership. Further, the current chief of schools has not emphasized international education a major objective in the same manner as the previous chief of schools (who was in leadership during data collection).