Challenging the Internationalisation of Education: A Critique of the Global Gaze (Routledge Research in International and Comparative Education) [1 ed.] 103238235X, 9781032382357

Citation preview

Routledge Research in International and Comparative Education

CHALLENGING THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF EDUCATION A CRITIQUE OF THE GLOBAL GAZE Lucy Bailey

Challenging the Internationalisation of Education

This book presents a searing critique of the global take on education, questioning why the idea that education should be international has come to dominate the field and positing that the discourse of internationalisation has altered the way we conceptualise education. Using diverse examples from the Middle East, the UK and South-East Asia, the book gathers insights from international schooling, refugee education and the internationalisation of higher education to argue that the ‘global gaze’ renders other ways of looking at education as invisible. It suggests that an oversaturation of international comparison amongst individuals and institutions alike creates a culture of powerlessness, exclusion and silencing. Furthermore, this volume also debates the issues that are caused when education is required to transcend national boundaries. Ultimately questioning the global education system in its current form, this book will be an important contribution for academics, researchers and students in the fields of higher education, education policy and politics, and education and development more broadly. Lucy Bailey is an Associate Professor and Acting Dean, Bahrain Teachers College, University of Bahrain, Bahrain.

Routledge Research in International and Comparative Education

This is a series that offers a global platform to engage scholars in continuous academic debate on key challenges and the latest thinking on issues in the fastgrowing field of International and Comparative Education. Titles in the series include: Education Sector Plans and their Implementation in Developing Countries A Comparative Analysis Roy Carr-Hill Citizenship Education in a Divided Society Lessons from Curricula and Practice in Northern Ireland Elizabeth Anderson Worden Innovations in Peace and Education Praxis Transdisciplinary Reflections and Insights Edited by David Tim Archer, Basma Hajir and William W. McInerney Rethinking Education in the Context of Post-Pandemic South Asia Challenges and Possibilities Edited by Uma Pradhan, Karen Valentin and Mohini Gupta Citizen Identity Formation of Domestic Students and Syrian Refugee Youth in Jordan Centering Student Voice and Arab-Islamic Ontologies Patricia K. Kubow Challenging the Internationalisation of Education A Critique of the Global Gaze Lucy Bailey For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-International-and-Comparative-Education/book-series/RRICE

Challenging the Internationalisation of Education A Critique of the Global Gaze Lucy Bailey

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Lucy Bailey The right of Lucy Bailey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bailey, Lucy E., author. Title: Challenging the internationalisation of education : a critique of the global gaze / Lucy Bailey. Description: New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge research in international and comparative education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023002832 (print) | LCCN 2023002833 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032382357 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032382364 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003344131 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: International schools--Cross-cultural studies. | Education and globalization. | Refugees--Education. Classification: LCC LC1090 .B345 2023 (print) | LCC LC1090 (ebook) | DDC 370.9--dc23/eng/20230329 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002832 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002833 ISBN: 978-1-032-38235-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-38236-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34413-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

To Simon, Analysia, Miranne, Katiyah and Pietta, with love and gratitude for our international lives together

Contents

1 Introduction: Two faces of internationalisation

1

2 The international turn in education: A short history

20

3 The global education industry: Selling learning abroad

39

4 Policy borrowing in international contexts: West knows best

57

5 Preparing students for a globalised world: Global classroom

70

6 Travel and the construction of excellence: International schools

87

7 Refugee education: Permanently excluded

106

8 Imperial professors and academic tourists: Paid to be white

118

9 Certification and curriculum in international contexts: Colonialism by degrees

135

10 Conclusion: The global gaze

154

Index162

1

Introduction Two faces of internationalisation

Introduction Internationalising education sounds like an idealistic dream, but this book shows that for some, it has become a dystopian nightmare. Once we talk about the international, the visual image that is evoked is that of a world map or a globe, symbols that are used to connote journeys, holistic understanding and connections. From the international, it is a short step to the global, a concept that draws attention to the things that unite us. In consequence, the idea of internationalising education, by bringing a global element to it, sounds inherently good and important. The questions we want to ask about internationalising education focus on ‘how’ and ‘when’, rather than ‘whether’ or ‘why’. This book dismantles these presuppositions. It critiques the notion of internationalising education, and it questions the presumption that students benefit from becoming globally minded. It asks fundamental questions about who gets to benefit from these changes. Instead of starting with the presupposition that the ­internationalisation of education is a global good, it questions whether it is and why key stakeholders have so easily accepted this presupposition. This is a detective story, based first on a forensic examination of internationalisation. Then, like all good detective stories, it asks questions about means, motives and opportunities. This book will suggest that the idea of being international may be used to camouflage the inequalities that pervade education. It will assert that international educational institutions operate in a world that is constructed by the legacies of colonialism, but they help to foster the illusion of all nations being equal. They operate in a world that is shaped by the forces of global neoliberalism, but they help to perpetuate the illusion of all people being equal. This work will explore the world of international education through theory and empirical research. It will bring together data from disparate research projects I have conducted with colleagues into international aspects of education; these include the study of the internationalisation of higher education, exploration of the curriculum of international schools, interrogation of the recent international assessments of 15-year-olds’ global competence, examination of government education policies; critique of global rankings of schools and universities and charting the educational opportunities offered (or not) to refugees and asylum seekers. DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-1

2  Introduction I will use these empirical findings to theorise about common elements to internationalisation across these fields of education. This work is intended not only to make empirical and theoretical contributions but also to foster critical discussion amongst educators and academics about our own positioning in relation to these forces of internationalisation. My intention is to offer a provocation, but it is not to make personal criticism of the many inspiring people who work in the domain of international education, whom I have met over the course of my own international career. Indeed, my family and I have lived these very different forms of being international for more than two decades. I have worked at a British university in Malaysia, taught summer school for Danish students at an international school in Copenhagen, been part of an international faculty teaching exclusively Bahraini students in English in Bahrain and campaigned to promote access to international higher education for refugees and asylum seekers. My children have attended international schools of different flavours, one promoting British education, another populated mainly by Malaysians and a third offering the International Baccalaureate. They have also attended national (government) schools in different countries, once as some of the increasing numbers of children who are non-Danish speakers at Danish schools, another time as just another immigrant family at school in New Zealand. My older children have moved on to further studies in the UK, the US and the Netherlands. My personal positioning in relation to the internationalisation of education has given me certain insights into how it is operating in different parts of the world, and my research projects have offered me others. I have seen that the ideas of being ‘international’, ‘global’ and ‘intercultural’ have come to permeate education, but that these are slippery terms that elide definition and consequently are complex in their effects. The impetus for this book, however, came not originally from my own experience but from observing a friend. When I worked in Malaysia, a colleague who had been studying in the UK came to join our department. She ­returned after only a year, having secured a good academic post; she was only there, she told me, so that her resume was enhanced by the ‘international experience’. I was struck by that curious expression, wondering exactly what it was that she had uprooted her life for, and why a university would consider that so valuable. This chapter introduces two ways of understanding at the internationalisation of education; these are not the only ways of viewing it, but I divide them in this binary manner as a heuristic device to reflect the central debates that have hitherto dominated discussion of the internationalisation of education. The first approach construes the internationalisation of education as a moral journey, opening up educational opportunities to humanity and enriching the lives of all, regardless of their country of origin. The second approach sees it as a neoliberal project, in which education is commodified, and the internationalisation of education ­involves marketing education within a global market. The second approach places power ostensibly in the hands of the educational consumer; the first supposedly places a more democratic power in the hands of all. This debate over the true nature of internationalisation is a simplification, however, and this introduction problematises the idea that internationalisation is

Introduction 3 somehow Janus-faced, either good or bad (or with perhaps elements of both that it exhibits at different times or in different places). It introduces instead the concept of the ‘global gaze’ that incorporates both of these perspectives; the global gaze is a form of self-surveillance that demarcates educational possibilities and sees education as a global competition to become the best. The global gaze is simultaneously both enabling and restrictive. It promises a common global competence but pits students, teachers and schools in competition with one another. It sees education from an imagined global perspective, thereby ignoring differences between contexts – most importantly, overlooking historical injustices that mean that the national perspective remains important and different in each place. This chapter will begin by defining some key terms used throughout the book – internationalisation and globalisation. It will next provide an overview of how these two concepts have manifested in different aspects of education. This will lead to a discussion of different ways of conceptualising being international and the introduction of two key concepts used in this book – the global good and the global gaze. Finally, the chapter will conclude with an overview of the forthcoming chapters and highlight key connections that are made in the rest of the book. Globalisation and Internationalisation: A Contested Terrain Throughout this book, I shall engage with contested terms to describe the changes that we are seeing in the world of education. Globalisation is a term which is ubiquitous but diffuse in meaning so that Popkewitz and Rizvi (2009) describe it as ‘a floating signifier continually filled with excesses of meaning’ (Popkewitz and Rizvi 2009, 1). The concept of globalisation has been used to refer to different, but interconnected, economic, social, cultural, political and technological changes, resulting in the global flow of goods, policies, people and ideas. Globalisation has involved the development of international markets for goods, services and labour, leading to unprecedent levels of mobility of people. Technological advances have led to increased levels of social connection, and the mobility of cultural products and ideas across these borders. Faced with problems that are common to people from multiple nations, supranational organisations have been established to try to establish common solutions. As a consequence of such changes, identities are evolving – people may feel connected to those living far from them – and borders feel increasingly porous. Globalisation brings both the promise of connectedness and the threat of conflict (Rizvi and Choo 2020). Economic globalisation has been associated with a neoliberal approach to economic relationships between nations, which can be traced back to the ­restructuring of the financial system of the 1970s, and to the pursuit of neoliberal economic policies by various Western governments from the 1980s o ­ nwards (Ball, Dworkin, and Vryonides 2010). Neoliberalism is a political ideology which promotes the benefits of free-market capitalism, seeking to minimise government intervention in the economy, including by the commodification and marketisation of previously state-provided goods and services. Neoliberal ­approaches typically involve deregulation of markets, free trade and an increased

4  Introduction role for the private sector (driven by the profit motive) in economics and society. As an ideology, neoliberalism places an emphasis on the importance of individual freedom from state intervention. As an economic approach, neoliberalism values the benefits of the profit motive in ensuring efficient use of resources and meeting social demands. However, the term ‘neoliberal’ is often used in a pejorative sense, to condemn a range of practices and policies which are only loosely affiliated in terms of their intent and impact. Neoliberalism, as Ball points out, is ‘about both money and minds’ (Ball 2012, 19), denoting both the ways that individuals govern themselves as entrepreneurial individuals in neoliberal relationships, as well as the material exchanges and institutional forms necessary for neoliberal economics. Noting the different origins of the two concepts of internationalisation and globalisation, some commentators have distinguished their impact on education. Shahjahan and Grimm (2022) argue that internationalisation of education is a ­response to flows and connections between nation-states – for example, movements of people and knowledge, or institutional connections – whereas globalisation of education encompasses not only this, but also phenomena that transcend nation-states – for example, the rise of transnational actors such as publishing companies or organisations ranking higher education institutions. However, there are obvious connections between globalisation and internationalisation – between the tendency for things to become more global and the connected tendency for them to involve more crossing (literal and imagined) of national borders. As a result, at times, the two terms have been used interchangeably, and we shall see throughout this book that the two are intrinsically linked. Furthermore, once the core terms ‘global’ and international’ are no longer used to describe social changes, but instead of taken to refer to an outlook or mindset that students (and possibly teachers) aspire to develop, the distinction between them becomes still more elusive. Whilst academics might parse the distinction between being ‘internationally minded’ and ‘globally minded’, we shall see that the world of education has blurred the use of these terms in many ways. What these terms lack in precision, they make up for in power, and much of this book is dedicated to understanding how the notion of internationalisation in education has become a force for implementing change. We shall see below that this lack of precision has enabled an uneasy coalition of philosophically opposed educationalists in support of aspects of internationalisation. In the following section, we begin by gaining a sense of the diverse ways in which internationalisation and globalisation have manifested themselves specifically in education. Aspects of Internationalisation in Education Internationalisation and globalisation have affected many aspects of life, from our leisure activities to our supermarket shelves; education is one sphere amongst many where neoliberal globalisation has left its imprint. This is not an incidental matter; education is integral to the world economy, often functioning as key to productivity and national competitiveness (Ball, Dworkin, and Vryonides 2010).

Introduction 5 Education furthermore operates as a site for the construction of the identities necessary for the successful operation of global forces (Ball and Nikita 2014). The implications of globalisation for education have been discussed with equal lack of precision to the discussion of globalisation itself. As noted above, internationalisation is ostensibly different from being global; the international strictly refers to relations between nations. One of the things that we shall note throughout the book, however, is the ways in which the two are conflated in aspects of education. In schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma (and other IB programmes), for example, students are encouraged to become ‘internationally minded’, which is equated to developing intercultural understanding and the promotion of global understanding and peace. Globalisation within education has been variously seen as potential for change, a flag-bearer of standardisation, or a route to neoliberal commodification in education. Globalisation has sometimes been associated with an assumed tendency towards isomorphism in educational systems (Maxwell et al. 2018); it has been suggested that neoliberal forces indirectly impose standards for curriculum, instruction, teacher training and assessment (Ball and Nikita 2014). In fact, there is limited evidence of this tendency towards homogeneity, although there are common themes in much research investigating the infusion of neoliberal approaches to education, specifically marketisation and corporatisation (Maxwell et al. 2018). For some, globalisation is something that young people can actively shape t­ ogether, but for others it is an unstoppable behemoth; it is notable that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) notion of global competence, which it sees as necessary for all students worldwide, is a set of skills merely for responding to, rather than directing, social change (Ledger et al. 2019). For some, globalisation has been equated with an internationalisation of education – this is a term we shall discuss further below. Almost twenty years ago, Jane Knight sought to define this (in relation to higher education) as involving the i­ ntegration of an ‘international, intercultural or global dimension’ into educational ‘purpose, functions or delivery’ (Knight 2004). We might assume, then, that infusion of such a dimension would lead to commonalities in aspects of education across different national contexts. However, research has noted the persistence of national variability in educational provision and instead sought to understand the relationship between the international and the national; sometimes, this literature, seeking to acknowledge that the national is not necessarily the key dimension of difference in all contexts, refers instead to the relationship between the international and the local. It is the second nomenclature that I primarily follow in this book, unless explicitly seeking to refer to nationality and nationhood as a point of difference. The ‘local’ is a more general term that deliberately captures an opposition to the global that does not presuppose that nationhood is the key form of identification in a particular context. In some of the discussion, the ‘local’ is used to capture regional commonalities that are juxtaposed to international trends, for example, in the Middle East it is Arab culture and identity that is as important as national affinity. In other parts of the discussion, the ‘local’ is used to refer to the differences within smaller communities.

6  Introduction In many national, or local, systems of education, moves have taken place over the past thirty years to marketise education (Ball and Nikita 2014). This has involved various policy and discursive shifts designed to encourage students and parents to behave more like consumers, acting individually to maximise their social and labour market opportunities; so, for example, parents are no longer ­expected to send their children to the local school, but to ‘shop around’ to find the best. Conversely, educational institutions are exposed to market-like incentives; funding follows the student, so schools are incentivised to attract students and parents to choose them, creating a competition between schools to attract students (and, problematically, to attract the ‘best’ students, who will raise the reputation of the school). The logics of choice and competition have not been restricted to the confines of the nation-state. Students seeking higher education can now use global league tables of universities when making their choices. Schools and universities may build on a strong market position by opening additional branches in other countries, just like Starbucks or Nespresso. In addition, parents strategising their children’s future labour market opportunities may no longer conceptualise these within a national context, but seek global advantage. In other words, ­education has become a private good which can be used to seek advantage on a global stage (Ball and Nikita 2014). Commentators seeking to understand what is happening have commonly drawn on the notion of the Global Middle Class (GMC) to explain the role of education in reproducing global advantage (Bailey 2021b; Ball and Nikita 2014). This term is used to refer to the amorphous grouping of professionals and managers who have globally mobile careers, differentiating them from both expatriate workers who travel for less desirable, manual employment and from the global capitalist class, who control global capital (Ball and Nikita 2014). It is also used to encompass those professionals and managers who, whilst not necessarily mobile themselves, have adopted global aspirations for their children – for example, who see their families as part of a globally imagined community of like-minded professionals (Bailey 2021b). An emerging body of research has suggested that the GMC value their cosmopolitan identity and that they seek the development of cosmopolitan cultural capital for their children through their educational choices (at both school and university level) (Bailey 2021b; Ball and Nikita 2014). Cosmopolitanism is thus a further key concept that is used in this book, aligned to the consequences of globalisation and internationalisation (Rizvi 2005). In its etymological roots, a cosmopolitan is a citizen of the world (it is a combination of two Greek words cosmo – world plus polites – citizen). Cosmopolitans do not have a sense of being tied to a certain nationality or restricted to a particular place, but see themselves as belonging everywhere, like all members of the human race; for this, they may be reviled as rootless and without loyalty, or celebrated as humanistic and unprejudiced. A cosmopolitan is comfortable communicating with people from diverse backgrounds, open to experiencing the culture of different places and willing and able to take advantage of economic opportunities all over the world. Arguably, neoliberal globalisation needs cosmopolitans.

Introduction 7 To exemplify this point, it is of note that international educational i­ nstitutions – whether at school or higher education level – boast that they are exposing their students to a global exchange of knowledge. Both international schools and universities may substantiate this claim by pointing to the diversity of their student and staffing bodies, or to the international nature of their curriculum. An international university may point to the global research collaborations undertaken by its staff. An international school may mention the multiple overseas trips that can be undertaken by its students. In such claims, internationalisation is being positioned as the opportunity to develop a cosmopolitan outlook; in other words, it is being levered as a form of social advantage (Peter 2018) in order to attract students and faculty alike. Being international or global is often associated with aspects of privilege. When my colleagues and I examined the notion of global competence in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we noted that many of the attributes of being ‘globally competent’ were also the attributes of the affluent middle class (Ledger et al. 2019). For example, feeling happy and confident when travelling internationally, trying international cuisines, hosting an exchange student and giving money to charity are all mentioned as evidence of being globally competent – which are most readily available to students who take foreign holidays, eat out in restaurants, live in large houses and have money to spare. Affluence may not be a sufficient condition for global competence, but on this measure it certainly seems to be a necessary one. In addition, being international is also associated with geographical mobility for professional careers, which – given the high cost of travel and international relocations – again is largely associated with the privilege of the most well-paid. Alongside this investigation of the connections between the internationalisation of education and privilege, it is important to consider how disadvantaged students navigate this global terrain. Although the literature sometimes appears to equate the two, there is, of course, no intrinsic need to assume that being ­international is associated with privilege. Economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers also acquire skills as they move to a different country by necessity, and – often in very challenging circumstances – have to be resourceful in adapting to a new culture. However, discussion of the internationalisation of education rarely considers them as possible exemplars of global competence. We should avoid assuming that being international always involves Western institutions, although much of the literature discusses internationalisation as if it originates, or is driven by, the West or the Global North – again, the terminology to use is contested. By contrast, the universities my colleagues and I researched in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand were all non-Western institutions that described themselves as ‘international’ (Evison et al. 2021), and what this meant differed between each context. The Vietnamese university was franchised to deliver a Western programme to predominantly Vietnamese students. The Malaysian and Thai universities delivered their own programmes to predominantly non-­Malaysian and non-Thai students. This book investigates the diverse forms that internationalisation and globalisation have taken in education and identifies common threads.

8  Introduction It examines whether there are shared causes to processes of internationalisation and globalisation in different educational sectors, as well as whether there are diverse effects. Beside this, it interrogates the ways in which we talk about these changes and demarcates this discourse which has had such pervasive effects. Academic investigation of internationalisation and globalisation in education has been diffused across different literatures. There is an expanding body of work that examines the internationalisation of higher education, most conducted by people who have in some way been participants in this process, such as those opening overseas campuses of UK, US or Australian universities, or franchising out their programmes to overseas partners. There is a smaller, but growing, literature which examines the phenomena of international schools – institutions offering an overseas curriculum to students who might be the children of globally mobile professionals, such as diplomats and businessmen, but increasingly might be host-country nationals who want to opt out of their national system of schooling. Both of these two major areas of enquiry have looked at internationalisation abroad – the flow of educational goods, services and ideas that crosses borders. There is a further literature focused on ‘internationalisation at home’, that is, the ways in which domestic systems of education need to adjust to the pressures of ­internationalisation, whether to prepare their students for internationalised working lives, or to include the histories and perspectives of increasingly diverse populations. This includes a body of work which examines how the expectation to be international has infused domestic curricula, assessments and institutions, so that PISA has now expanded its portfolio of assessments of the world’s 15-year-olds by including a measure of global competence in order to compare the success of different educational systems. Such forms of internationalisation do not necessarily, or directly, involve border flows, but may lead to indirect border flows, such as when consultancy on how better to internationalise, or textbooks with an international flavour, is purchased from abroad. Internationalisation, then, is an extremely broad theme, which explains why most authors have sought to restrict their discussion of it to a particular arena. This book, by contrast, does not focus its attention on a particular domain of internationalisation, but instead seeks to chart the commonalities across varied aspects of education. Such an attempt is necessary so that the larger landscape, and the connections between these elements, can be examined. The aim is to look at the wood, not just the trees. When we examine these varied literatures on internationalisation, there are indeed common threads between them. First, across these fields of research, there is an interest in the causes of internationalisation, and one recurrent question has been at what level factors driving internationalisation should be studied. This is a trend that is happening concurrently, but in different ways, at different levels within society. At the micro-level, internationalisation is about the discourses to which individuals subscribe or resist, which lead to choices to pursue education overseas or to want an internationalised education within their home nation. At the meso-level, internationalisation is about the strategies adopted by institutions; for example, some have argued that internationalisation of higher education is

Introduction 9 driven in part by universities seeking to ‘fix’ the funding crises they face in their home context (Kleibert 2021). At the macro-level, national governments have developed international education strategies and have sought to pursue political, economic and sociocultural goals through internationalisation. Second, there is recurrent interest in the consequences of internationalisation of education. For some, this is a story about individuals, families and societies seeking knowledge and wisdom on a global basis, wanting to access humanity’s shared insights to solve our common problems. For others, this is primarily a story about elites (Maxwell et al. 2018) – about the new ways in which they protect their status in contemporary, ostensibly egalitarian, societies. For some, it is a story about neocolonialism or post-colonialism (Gibson and Bailey 2022) – about the ways in which some nation-states continue to reap economic benefits by positioning themselves as the transmitters and assessors of knowledge in postcolonial societies. Third, researchers have sought to critique and problematise a trend which is widely seen, at least by certain elites, as beneficial to society. Consideration has been given to some of the negative aspects of internationalisation and how to ameliorate them. For example, researchers into international schooling have sought to identify whether students’ local or national identities are being undermined or creolised by Westernisation (Bailey 2015; Gress-Wright 2022), whether the pro-social behaviour fostered by international schools is a form of noblesse oblige ­( Bailey and Cooker 2018), and whether curricular modifications needed to address such limitations (Bailey 2021b; Bailey and Cooker 2018; Stevenson et al. 2016). It is this tension between the perceived benefits of globalisation and some of the apparent dangers of internationalised education that are explored in the following section. Being International: The Global Good The idea of being international has appeal across the political spectrum. As a heuristic device, I shall expound a binary contrast between two versions of being international in this section. This is not to suggest that there are precisely two, and completely distinct, versions of being international; it is to identify tensions between different versions of what being international has come to denote. To those on the left, being international evokes the ideals of common humanity that underpin socialism and social democracy, and the internationalism that was at the core of the socialist movement from its start. To those on the right, it evokes the economic opportunities offered by globalisation, a way to expand ­individual liberties overseas through selling people the education they need in order to contribute to the global economy. To both sides, then, international education is a ‘good’. To the left, education is a way to empower oppressed people. To the right, international education is something that can be bought and sold under global neoliberalism. These two ways of seeing education, which for convenience I shall refer to by the shorthand of the ‘progressive’ and the ‘neoliberal’ view, have become blurred under the banner of being international.

10  Introduction These two perspectives rest on differing assumptions about the nature and purpose of education. The neoliberal vision of the internationalisation of education conceptualises education as a global product bought and sold in a competitive market, and students as future workers who must equally be able to compete on a global level. Education is essentially competitive in this framing of the international. By contrast, the progressive vision of the internationalisation of education conceptualises education as a contributing to efforts to improve the world and address problems facing all of humanity. Education is essentially cooperative in this framing of the international. However, these two understandings of the internationalisation of education are frequently intertwined, with a lack of clear distinction between them. For example, we see this on the website of Nord Anglia, one of the largest providers of international schooling, operating 81 schools worldwide (Nord Anglia Education 2022). Nord Anglia describes itself as collaborating with three key institutions to improve its students’ education: The Juilliard School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and UNICEF. Each of these collaborations is described in a very different way. The work with UNICEF involves helping students to ‘make a difference locally and globally’, to tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, therefore espousing a progressive vision for the international education offered in their schools. However, by contrast, the emphasis in the description of The Juilliard School work is on giving Nord Anglia students an advantage over others; the reader is informed that Juilliard is ‘the world’s most renowned arts institution’ and that its collaboration with Nord Anglia is ‘exclusive’. This is not about empowering all students through arts education, but about ensuring that Nord Anglia students have a unique advantage. Finally, the description of the collaboration with MIT teeters between these two alternative visions; as with Juilliard, MIT is placed as first in a global ranking (‘the world’s leading STEAM institution’), but allusion is also made to solving world challenges. It is also noticeable that even those proclaiming the benefits of international education for all do not spread its advantages equally. Nord Anglia operates 81 schools worldwide – at the time of writing, none of these is in the continent of Africa (the Nord Anglia school search engine curiously separates the world into Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East). A further example is the International Baccalaureate (IB), an organisation which provides international programmes and qualifications, delivered in both international schools and state schools worldwide, which also draws on both these ways of being international. Founded upon the premise of using education to promote international understanding, the IB seeks to promote internationalmindedness amongst its students. Equally, it is a major player in the commodification of education, with sales of its education services generating US$247.5 million in the year to June 2019 (International Baccalaureate 2022). The IB argues that the ten attributes that make up its Learner Profile together constitute international-mindedness. In a neat move, this equates being international with success on their programmes. Another way of understanding the distinction between these two versions of internationalisation is to ask what sort of ideal student is constructed as being a

Introduction 11 result of international education. In the neoliberal version of internationalisation, the purpose of education is to meet the needs of the global economy, and therefore the attributes of the ideal global worker should be nurtured and accredited. In the progressive version of internationalisation, the purpose of education is to meet the needs of the global community, and therefore the attributes of the ideal global citizen should be nurtured and accredited. However, analysis of the programmes of the International Baccalaureate suggests that there is a conflation of these two purposes of education. Whilst the rhetoric of the IB suggests it is focused on creating global citizens, the attributes fostered seem to match those needed for a global manager (Resnik 2008). Resnik (2008) identifies a range of cognitive dispositions and psycho-emotional predispositions that are celebrated in the IB programmes that prepare their students for the needs of global capitalism, including flexibility, risk-taking, problem-solving, adaptability and mobility. My own instinctive view of the global good of internationalised education perhaps most closely aligns with the progressive view, but in the chapters that follow I am wary of simplistically assuming that the progressive account is automatically preferable. Indeed, the progressive version of internationalisation somewhat problematically assumes universalised agreement on the social purpose of education. From the 1960s onwards, education in many Western countries became seen as a means to address social inequalities, and there has been considerable discussion about inequalities in educational attainment on the assumption that they are connected to life success; assumptions of meritocracy underpinned discussion of schooling (Brown 1990). Although more recently, a ‘parentocracy’ (Brown 1990) approach has to some extent superseded this, with its emphasis on parent choice rather than equality of opportunity, this understanding of education as core to the fair and proper allocation of individuals to their employment still pervades political discourse. However, as we shall discuss further below, in some contexts (such as certain Middle Eastern countries), there is scant evidence for either connecting education with labour market or other social outcomes (Thier 2017) or with an emphasis on parental entitlement; education is more peripheral to social life. I am also not assuming that being international is of universal appeal. In many Western countries, political discourse has been fractured in recent years by a division between the ‘anywheres’ and the ‘somewheres’ (Goodhart 2017). According to Goodhart, Britain has become politically divided between the Anywheres – the educated and mobile who feel an allegiance to ideas rather than places – and the Somewheres – the less educated and more rooted who feel an allegiance to familiar group identities. For Goodhart, this divide partly explains the bitter disputes that erupted over the UK’s Brexit referendum. He argues that this divide may also apply to other Western democracies, such as the schism in the US over attitudes to President Trump and his Make America Great Again movement. Those directly involved in the internationalisation of education are almost invariably ‘Anywheres’; the ‘international’ seems to be symbolically opposed to the ‘national’, which is a celebration of place, and international education institutions are often staffed by nomadic educators such as myself. They are, almost by definition, more educated than average. Both practitioners of internationalisation

12  Introduction and its academic critics are likely to be Anywheres, and therefore likely to be sitting within a discursive field which values the devaluing of specificity of place and celebrates mobility. Even the most hardened critics of internationalisation are likely to be presenting their findings at international conferences to international colleagues. We cannot sit outside of our social positioning, but we can examine it, and make the presuppositions and implications explicit. Because internationalisation is valorised, it is important to analyse what exactly is being celebrated in this discourse, and we shall see that this is not just an alternative to patriotism, but can also have more insidious and unequal effects. For example, when colleagues and I interviewed faculty in international universities in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, they told us that their universities equated being international with doing things in English; their professional identity as international academics was also connected to their English linguistic proficiency (Evison et al. 2021). In other words, this is a discourse that privileges Anglophone communities. More specifically, in some contexts, it is not just English per se but a particular mid-Atlantic accent that may be deemed international (Meyer 2021). These are issues that I discuss further below. The valorisation of the international may evolve. The idea that travel is desirable and enriching, for example, which is central to cosmopolitanism, may change with further climate change and environmental awareness. Further research is needed to see how the conception of being international and the value put upon it changes as a result of environmental catastrophes. For now, however, my concern is with understanding the entanglement of competing ways of understanding ­international education as a global good. Throughout this book, I will suggest – in relation to different aspects of education – that how being international is defined can serve to celebrate the habitus of a privileged social group, silence critique of social and economic changes and efface the legacy of colonialism. However, I will also point out that being international may widen access to education for millions of children, improve quality and transform lives. I will also demonstrate that current discussion of global aspects of education blurs the boundaries between two distinct discourses – those of progressive internationalisation with neoliberal internationalisation. Furthermore, I shall characterise the turn to the global as pervasive across all sectors and levels of education and suggest that greater clarity and critique are needed from theorists and practitioners if concern for maximising the global good is not to be distorted into concern for maximising the sale of global goods. Being International: The Global Gaze Let us summarise what has been asserted so far. Being global, international, intercultural – the terminology is contested – has become highly prized. We are not, perhaps, quite clear on what we are prizing – whether it is a mindset, a set of skills, an area of knowledge, a capability to act or perhaps some combination of these. For instance, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment places

Introduction 13 its attention on what it terms students’ ‘global competence’, which it defines as ‘a multi-dimensional construct that requires a combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values successfully applied to global issues or intercultural situations’ (OECD 2018). For the IB, international-mindedness is the consequence of behaving like an ideal learner, fulfilling each of the other ten characteristics on its Learner Profile (Open-Minded, Caring, Risk-Taker, and so on). Nor, perhaps, are we clear on why we are prizing it. Our adulation of what Meyer (2021) terms the ‘global imaginary’ allows us to ignore its opaque elements; Meyer points out that we can all agree that being global is something we value, whilst simultaneously holding very different understandings of what being global means. However, this fuzzy concept merits further inquiry. This is partly because being global is an idea is an influential idea and, like other influential but elusive concepts such as national identity, its brings with it the danger that someone can utilise its potency for unsavoury ends. It is also in part because being global is a lucrative idea. The internationalisation of education has become big business, with the UK government setting a target of educational exports being worth £35 billion by the year 2030 (HM Government 2019). We need to understand who is gaining this monetary advantage and why. Meyer examines what is connoted by the symbol of the global. One thing that is evoked is a sense of connectedness to others – it is relational. However, the idea of being global also references a kind of privilege, associated with travel and connections – it is aspirational. In addition, it has a cultural currency, which means that it can be sold – it has value. Fourthly, it is opposed to the local – it is exclusionary. For Meyer (2021), these are the four elements of the ‘global imaginary’. By the term ‘global imaginary’, she intends to suggest a particular kind of social imaginary – a way of perceiving the social world and in consequence orientating oneself to it. Meyer argues that some people and institutions have a ‘local imaginary’ – so, for example, a school may orientate itself towards its local community and preparing students to integrate and plan their lives in that locality – whereas others have a ‘global imaginary’ – so, for example, a school may celebrate the diversity of its students and be preparing its students for lives of mobility and difference. International schools, Meyer suggests, have a global imaginary. She notes how, for example, they may regulate the number of students they admit from a particular nationality in order to maintain what they see as the ‘international’ nature of the school. Meyer’s work provides an extremely useful backdrop to the current study. However, her preoccupation is with international schooling, and she doesn’t consider how this intersects with other sectors of education (including internationalisation at home – the introduction of global dimensions into domestic curricula and classrooms). In addition, Meyer’s ‘global imaginary’ implies a ­v ision for a social world that is not local. My work on the increasing numbers of host-country nationals attending international schools suggests that these students and teachers are not imagining a world in which the local does not matter, nor are they seeing themselves as belonging to a global community rather than a national one; on the contrary, their national identity remains important, but

14  Introduction they are ‘seeing’ the importance of international connections, intercultural skills and knowledge of other communities as key to success in their locality (Bailey 2015, 2021a). Meyer’s work is useful and will receive further attention in this book. However, her ‘global imaginary’ is simply one aspect of how what I term the ‘global gaze’ operates. I propose the term ‘global gaze’ instead of ‘global imaginary’ in order to emphasise that this is a way of looking at the world as it is, whereas the term ‘imaginary’ invokes an otherness – a dream for the future. I employ the term global gaze to explore not only international schooling but in addition how the global gaze works discursively through assumptions about what matters and doesn’t matter in multiple fields of education, through its delineation of the field of educational inquiry and through the linguistic devices used to describe new policies and their implementation. In summary, although the global gaze is at its most overt in the ‘imaginary’ community established in an international school, this volume will also analyse its discursive power in constructing other areas of education. In the chapters that follow, I do not suggest that the concept of being international is inherently negative in its impact; as mentioned above, I have spent a great deal of my life working in aspects of international education and I have seen positive outcomes from many initiatives. However, I argue we should be critical of a discourse that talks about being global or international as if it is inherently good. We should not assume that someone with international experience or credentials will be better in a role than a person who has lived their life without a global or mobile perspective. Anderson (2006) argued that nationality is an imagined community. For some within the world of international education, the global similarly is an imagined community. They feel an allegiance with others who operate in a global or ­international way. But nationality doesn’t only include those who are in the community; it also excludes or others those who are outside it. Similarly, the imagined global community is a club to which only those who are sufficiently international belong; others are outsiders because, perhaps, they do not have the material ­resources to be educationally mobile or the cultural resources to fit in with others who behave in a global way. The ‘global gaze’ is an imagined perspective from which education is judged independent of context. There is, of course, no such position or person who sits independent of their own context and community, but the idea of a universal gaze implicitly permeates discussion of the internationalisation of education. The global gaze influences how education is organised and evaluated, on the presumption that this can be assessed independent of context. I will demonstrate how aspects of this ‘global gaze’ incorporate Western assumptions about how social life, and specifically education, is organised. For example, we shall look at how the term ‘best practice’ is used, and by whom, in order to suggest policy changes for different contexts (Thier et al. 2020). Gaze theory has developed from the work of John Berger (Berger 1972). Berger examined representations of women in art and advertising to show that

Introduction 15 they were depicted as objects of desire from the perspective of a heterosexual man. To Berger, this way of viewing women was so pervasive that it had been internalised and seen as the natural or only way to represent them. He suggested that women viewed themselves and other women through this same male gaze. Since Berger posited his theory, the concept of the gaze has been both critiqued and adapted by other theorists. For example, some have pointed to the predominant ‘white gaze’ of development (Pailey 2020), a perspective on the world that sees people of colour as objects. More recent theorists have also critiqued Berger for failing to explore how the male gaze can be resisted and have sought to focus attention on agency to adopt an alternative gaze. The concept of the gaze is used in this book to understand the ubiquitous lens through which education is seen in contemporary discussions – the global gaze, whereby education is evaluated from the imagined perspective of an international onlooker. Gaze theory reminds us that the perspective from which a text is written is a form of power. When education policy and practice is written as if for perusal by an international visitor come to judge the system, this constrains as well as enables. We shall see that being international is constructed through this gaze as a subjectivity, a form of self-governance that compels particular ways of being; it demands enactment of a set of expressive practices. Trying to capture a similar phenomenon to this idea of the global gaze, Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal (2014) have written about the ‘global eye’ in comparative education research, arguing that the focus on making global comparisons is a form of governance that changes how we conceptualise education. They argue that education is simultaneously looked at through both a global eye and a national eye, with global comparisons being used to establish national priorities. Building upon this, I suggest throughout this book that, whilst the global gaze is constructive of educational identities, relationships and meaning, it should be understood as acting in interplay with contextually specific aspects of the educational landscape; the global gaze is therefore not deterministic but leaves space for agency. Forthcoming Chapters This book is organised by introducing important conceptual ideas at the start and then offering instances to elucidate them further by study of particular aspects of internationalised education in succeeding chapters. Chapter 2 provides a brief historical overview of internationalisation of education. It contrasts the focus on the need to create allegiance to the emerging nation-states in the development of mass education systems with an interest in international economic competitive in contemporary educational debates. It provides insights into the diverse ways in which education has been internationalised in recent decades and suggests that the global gaze has become a key determiner of what is good in education. In Chapter 3, I look at the economic interests that have powered the international turn in education – termed the global education industry. It is noted that profits from the internationalisation of education have been concentrated in

16  Introduction Western multinationals, whilst the countries of the Global South have been the customers for much of this industry. One key aspect of the global education industry has been policy borrowing, and this is the focus of Chapter 4. Here, it is argued that the export of policy solutions from Western nations to the Global South is a form of neocolonialism. This chapter contrasts the ostensible equality of the global gaze with the reality of whose visions for education dominate policy borrowing. In the second half of the book, I turn my attention away from the macro-forces determining the global market for education to explore the nature of internationalised education. Chapter 5 looks at the student subjectivities that are being created by internationalised education. This includes the ways in which school students are being prepared to be ‘globally competent’ and the importance given to the development of cosmopolitan identities in higher education. Chapter 6 focuses specifically on the rapid expansion of international schooling over the past two decades and explores whether they sell social advantage to students. In particular, it examines the thesis that international schooling constitutes the commodification of neo-colonial advantage. Chapter 7 is the counter-ballast to Chapter 6. Whilst international schooling serves a privileged elite, the focus in Chapter 7 is on refugees and asylum seekers, and their exclusion from discourses of the internationalisation of education. Through exploring the paucity of provision for refugees and asylum seekers in nations and institutions ostensibly celebrating internationalisation, this chapter exposes how the global gaze overlooks certain educational inequalities. Much critique of the internationalisation of education has focused on ­institutional and national practices. By contrast, the extent to which educators ­(academics, teachers and consultants) are complicit in these inequalities and the colonisation of knowledge is examined in Chapter 8. Patterns of epistemic exclusion are discussed, demonstrating the ways in which the global gaze marginalises the contributions of those who are constructed as being located on the global periphery and reinforces the privileges associated with whiteness. Whilst the preceding chapters have focused on educational experiences, Chapter 9 examines assessment. The development of international systems of certification deserves deconstruction for their assumptions about who decides what counts as knowledge and what constitutes expertise in a globalised world. The chapter explores the extent to which these are neo-colonial judgments, and the global gaze is a Western, white way of seeing what it is to be educated. Throughout these analyses, the book draws attention to two key moves that permeate the global gaze on education. First, it draws attention to the infusion of a competitive logic in internationalised education, whereby universities, schools and students are compared against a supposed global best. Second, it points to an international datafication of education, demanding compliance from students, parents and educators through constant comparison with an unachievable global best. In the concluding chapter, Chapter 10, I ask whether an alternative global gaze can be developed that truly promotes the global good, or whether any global gaze is inherently iniquitous. I conclude by suggesting that the key issue for international

Introduction 17 educators, students and leaders is not merely how we see the internationalisation of education, but how the internationalisation of education makes us see ourselves. Conclusion This chapter has introduced the main themes of this book. I have introduced some of the central terms that are used throughout the text. The key concepts of globalisation and internationalisation have been explored, and a brief overview has been given of the significance of internationalisation to contemporary education. I have argued that internationalisation is discursively portrayed as a ‘global good’ and that practitioners who advocate neoliberalism and those who advocate progressive values in the liberal-humanistic tradition have been unified under its banner. I have introduced the idea of the ‘global gaze’, the perspective through which internationalisation of education is avidly pursued as if the policies, practices and identities involved can be judged as effective independent of their context. An overview of the book has given a flavour of the discussions to come. The Janus-faced understanding of being international will be complemented by a more nuanced understanding of how the global gaze has come to influence both education systems worldwide and our work as international academics. References Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso books. Bailey, Lucy. 2015. “The Experiences of Host Country Nationals in International Schools: A Case-study from Malaysia.” Journal of Research in International Education 14 (2):85–97.    . 2021a. “Host-country Parent Perspectives on International Schooling: A Study from Bahrain.” Journal of Research in International Education 20 (1):3–18.    . 2021b. International Schooling: Privilege and Power in Globalized Societies. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bailey, Lucy, and Lucy Cooker. 2018. “Who Cares? Pro-Social Education Within the Programmes of the International Baccalaureate.” Journal of Research in International Education 17 (3):228–39. Ball, Stephen J. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. London: Routledge. Ball, Stephen J., Anthony Gary Dworkin, and Marios Vryonides. 2010. “Globalization and Education: Introduction.” Current Sociology 58 (4):523–9. doi: 10.1177/0011392110367987. Ball, Stephen J., and Dimitra Pavlina Nikita. 2014. “The Global Middle Class and School Choice: A Cosmopolitan Sociology.” Zeitschrift Für Erziehungswissenschaft 17 (3):81–93. doi: 10.1007/s11618-014-0523-4. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brown, Phillip. 1990. “The ‘Third Wave’: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 11 (1):65–86. doi: 10.1080/0142569900110105. Evison, Jane, Lucy Bailey, Pimsiri Taylor, and Tida Tubpun. 2021. “Professional Identities of Lecturers in Three International Universities in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia: Multilingual Professionals at Work.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51 (2):202–20.

18  Introduction Gibson, Mark T., and Lucy Bailey. 2022. “Constructing International Schools as Postcolonial Sites.” Globalisation, Societies and Education:1–12. Goodhart, David. 2017. The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics. London: Penguin UK. Gress-Wright, Catharina. 2022. “Creole Cosmopolitans: The Impact of the IB Diploma Programme on Enko Education Students in Three African contexts.” UCL Institute of Education. HM Government. 2019. “International Education Strategy: Global Potential, Global Growth.” Policy Paper. International Baccalaureate. 2022. “Financial Overview.” Accessed 18th September. https://www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/facts-and-f igures/ib-annual-review/year-inreview-2018-2019/financial-overview/. Kleibert, Jana M. 2021. “Geographies of Marketization in Higher Education: Branch Campuses as Territorial and Symbolic Fixes.” Economic Geography 97 (4):315–37. Knight, Jane. 2004. “Internationalization Remodeled: Definition, Approaches, and ­R ationales.” Journal of Studies in International Education 8 (1):5–31. Ledger, Susan, Michael Thier, Lucy Bailey, and Christine Pitts. 2019. “OECD’s Approach to Measuring Global Competency: Powerful Voices Shaping Education.” Teachers College Record 121 (8):1–40. Maxwell, Claire, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger, and Werner Helsper. 2018. Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education. Edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper. Cham: Springer. Meyer, Heather A. 2021. The Global Imaginary of International School Communities. Cham: Springer. Nord Anglia Education. 2022. “Homepage: Create Your Future.” Accessed 21st S­ eptember 2022. https://www.nordangliaeducation.com. Nóvoa, António, and Tali Yariv-Mashal. 2014. “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?” In Changing Educational Contexts, Issues and Identities, edited by Michael Crossley, Patricia Broadfoot and Michele Schweisfurth, 13–30. London: Routledge. OECD. 2018. “PISA 2018 Global Competence.” Accessed 28th February 2023. https:// www.oecd.org/pisa/Handbook-PISA-2018-Global-Competence.pdf. Pailey, Robtel Neajai. 2020. “De-centring the ‘White Gaze’ of Development.” Development and Change 51 (3):729–45. Peter, Tobias. 2018. “Exclusive Globality, Inclusive Diversity: Internationalisation as a Strategy of Inclusion and Exclusion.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger, and Werner Helsper, 57–73. Cham: Springer. ­ ducation.” Popkewitz, Thomas S., and Fazal Rizvi. 2009. “Globalization and the Study of E Teachers College Record 111 (14):1–3. Resnik, Julia. 2008. “The Construction of the Global Worker through International Education.” In The Production of Educational Knowledge in the Global Era, edited by J. Resnik, 145–67. Rotterdam: Sense. Rizvi, Fazal. 2005. “International Education and the Production of Cosmopolitan Identities.” In Globalisation and Higher Education, edited by A. Arimoto, F. Huang, and K. Yokoyama, 77–92. Hiroshima: Hiroshima University Research Institute for Higher Education. Rizvi, Fazal, and Suzanne S Choo. 2020. “Education and Cosmopolitanism in Asia: An Introduction.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 40 (1):1–9.

Introduction 19 Shahjahan, Riyad A, and Adam T Grimm. 2022. “Bringing the ‘nation-state’ into Being: Affect, Methodological Nationalism and Globalisation of Higher Education.” Globalisation, Societies and Education:1–13. Stevenson, Howard, Stephen Joseph, Lucy Bailey, Lucy Cooker, Stuart Fox, and Alicia Bowman. 2016. “‘Caring’ across the International Baccalaureate continuum.” In International Baccalaureate Organization. Accessed 28th February 2023. https://www.ibo.org/ contentassets/952a2e6109b144ac86485780bfc8f bec/caring-across-the-continuumeng.pdf. Thier, Michael. 2017. “Can Qatar Buy Sustainable Educational Excellence?” In Imagining the Future of Global Education, edited by Y. Zhao and B. Gearin, 99–118. London: Routledge. Thier, Michael, Charles R. Martinez, Fahad Alresheed, Sloan Storie, Amanda Sasaki, McKenzie Meline, Jonathan Rochelle, Lauren Witherspoon, and Huna Yim-Dockery. 2020. “Cultural Adaptation of Promising, Evidence-based, and Best Practices: a Scoping Literature Review.” Prevention Science 21 (1):53–64. doi: 10.1007/s11121-019-01042-0.

2

The international turn in education A short history

Introduction In recent decades, there has been an increased focus on international aspects of education. For example, international activities in higher education have risen in status and in financial importance (de Wit 2011). International schooling is a rapidly expanding sector in large parts of the world. International assessments have been developed to compare educational systems at the national level. However, the idea of a single global market for, say, higher education, is a political invention; the national identity of higher educational institutions continues to be important to student choice, and it is governments who are driving national-level deregulation (Marginson and Wende 2007). In other words, internationalisation is a way of framing educational activity rather than an inexorable trend. This chapter places the international turn in education in its historical context. In seeking to identify commonalities across extended historical periods and ­between diverse cultures, this work risks being overambitious, overgeneralising and omitting key issues – I happily concede each of these points. Nevertheless, I follow Caruso (2014) in seeing this as inherent to grasping the slippery, grand concept of internationalisation itself, because: the very substance of ‘internationalisation’ leads to the risky task of ‘thinking large’ and, in doing so, of reducing culturally highly diverse – and conflicting – realities in education and society to a few significant constellations. (Caruso 2014, 12) The following discussion is, therefore, illustrative of the change in how international education is conceptualised. It points to the dangers of assuming that it has an essential nature or trajectory. It does not attempt to provide a comprehensive account, but instead to capture episodes to exemplify wider points. Whereas others attempt to unearth history as archaeologists, meticulously scraping back each layer to understand the pattern of the landscape, instead I work more like a fossil hunter, opportunistically seizing on fascinating artefacts that provide glimpses of an entirely different terrain. DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-2

The international turn in education 21 The chapter opens by charting some historical samples of internationalisation. It then explores how the development of the schooled society was a response to the needs of the nation-state. Thereafter, it describes some key developments in various arenas of more recent internationalisation – higher education, supranational measurement and evaluation of educational outcomes, and the expanding sector of international schooling. Again, these do not cover all aspects of recent history of internationalisation, but serve as examples of the range of institutional changes that have occurred. The second half of the chapter is devoted to theorising the changes that were described previously, identifying some key commonalities and acknowledging important differences. This theorisation draws on the concept of the global gaze. Origins of Internationalised and Global Education Some of the patterns of scholarly mobility that we see as ‘international education’ have been occurring since ancient times. The first king of the Ptolemaic dynasty sought to shift the centre of learning from Athens to Alexandria, in part by attracting the movement of scholars (Logue 2009) – perhaps the first example of competition over students and scholars that has come to characterise our own times. From the fifth century, Nalanda University, more than 500 years older than the University of Oxford and acclaimed by some as the world’s first university (Chambers 2017), attracted students from around the world. Located in modern-day India, these were, if conceptualised in modern terms, p­ erhaps the first international students. However, although ancient scholars sought to contribute to circuits of knowledge beyond their own location and identities, universities remained embedded in their localities and higher education only served a tiny national elite (King, Marginson, and Naidoo 2011). The history of education, especially the development of universities from the Middle Ages, shows how educational institutions and the social construction of scholarship are interwoven with our concepts of both internationalisation and globalisation. These early movements of scholars and students were not seen as internationalisation, as the units that we identify as ‘nations’ had not yet been conceptualised. It was not until the nation was seen as a unit of belonging that the idea of internationalisation developed – and Medieval universities were instrumental to this (Caruso 2014). At the Universities of Bologna, Paris and Padua, students were organised according to their places of origin. Each ‘­nation’ elected officials and organised worship and other rituals together; in other words, birthplace served as a form of identity. Of course, these ‘nations’ didn’t equate to what we think of today as countries, but might rather be neighbouring cities or ­regions; Caruso points out that at the University of Paris, the ‘nations’ included ‘the French, the Normans, the Picards, the English and the Alemannians’ ­(Caruso 2014, 13). What is interesting in Caruso’s account is the interplay between the national and the international. Just as the international presupposes a concept of the nation, equally the concept of the nation was born out of scholarly exchanges between

22  The international turn in education people of different origins and languages. The word ‘nation’ comes from the Latin word ‘nasci’, which means ‘to be born’. By its semantic origins, a nation just refers to people who were born in the same place. The modern connotations we have of a nation, referring to a shared history, culture and sense of belonging are a product of increased travel by people during the Middle Ages (Caruso 2014) – a conceptualisation of roots emerged out of movement. Caruso’s work has been complemented by case-studies by other theorists investigating both European and non-European experiences of early internationalisation of education. Much of this has focused on the movements of key ­individuals and the establishment of global or quasi-global networks of educational influence. For example, experts from the Ottoman Empire were sent overseas to extract educational ideas from Mainland Europe. In nineteenth century, Western Europe and North America, various networks and philanthropic organisations sprang up to enable cross-border exchange of understanding and ideas (Droux and Hofstetter 2014). However, the significance of these examples remains unclear; it is contested to what extent advocacy networks were responsible for the elements of educational convergence that we have seen by the latter half of the twentieth century or whether, as seems more likely, broader social forces were primarily at work. The modern notion of the global has also evolved from early European universities. The globe or orb was used on coins and other depictions of power in Roman times to depict unified or immeasurable power, and this symbolism became usual amongst European kings and queens during the Middle Ages, and signified Godgiven imperial power. However, a second understanding of the global developed from the twelfth century origins of the first European university, the University of Bologna (Mitterle 2021); in this second, more prosaic, conceptualisation, the global is embedded in our knowledge of the physical world. Science – through cartography and cosmology – was instrumental in making the terrestrial globe knowable, and the mission of the university was to pursue such knowledge. The global and the university became inextricably connected, in a complex power– knowledge relationship (Mitterle 2021). These glimpses into the emergence of scholarly centres of excellence show how the notion of being educated has contributed to our understanding of what it means to be both internationalised and global. The global gaze, discussed throughout this book, identifies a third, contemporary understanding of the global, in which it is seen as a moral (not a purely scientific) crusade. The Evolution of the Schooled Society In its origins, the development of mass education was tied to the development of the nation-state. Green (1997) argues that: Historically, education has been both parent and child to the developing nation state. (Green 1997, 5)

The international turn in education 23 During the nineteenth century, systems of mass schooling developed to meet the needs of the nation-state, namely, to address human resource needs of changing economies and to support emergent forms of national identity (Green 2013); as a result, educational debates were domestic in focus. For colonial powers, the purpose of education in their colonies was to supply colonised labour and to promote the integrity of the Empire. For example, education in many parts of Africa during colonial times was focused on preparing workers to serve the colonial powers and enforcing cultural assimilation. For example, in the French colonies, only a small urban element were given education focused on assimilating them as ‘black Frenchmen’ while the majority had access restricted to vocational education (Gress-Wright 2022). Since independence, economic challenges have forced many African nations to rely extensively on private provision of education; at the secondary level, many wealthier families have sought private provision as limited state resources are focused on ensuring access to basic education. The international was not entirely ignored as mass education systems developed. During this period, governments sought to emphasise the supposed glories of their national systems of education by making global claims. In Germany, for example, government documents proclaimed that their universities were admired worldwide. At this stage, however, the focus was on the exclusivity of the national model, rather than on capitalising from this envy (Peter 2018). It was not until the wake of the Second World War that this discourse receded, being replaced by emphasis on international understanding and peace as key components of the internationalisation of German higher education. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, scholarly discussion led to the importation of educational practices. However, debates of that time are notable for their emphasis on what their participants saw as distinct national characters that made imitation worthless. German commentators believed that German children needed a focus on their inner life; French theorists mentioned the brightness and rapidity of thought amongst French schoolchildren. So, although some practices were shared between different contexts, belief in the inherent superiority of their own national character limited this approach (Caruso 2014). Patriotism both influenced educational policy and was seen as an aim of ­national schooling. In the late nineteenth century, the use of education to instil patriotic fervour became widespread; after the loss of the Franco-Prussian War (1870), French education policy became explicitly focused on nurturing the type of Frenchman who could defend the country in future conflicts. For example, there was a new emphasis on developing physical prowess, in contrast to previous disdain for physical sports. Similarly, in Britain, the poor state of recruits to the army for the Boer War (1899–1902) led to a revaluation of education; the curriculum of the late nineteenth century expanded to include physical and para-military training in schools, in part through the Boy Scouts Movement, complemented by the inculcation of colonial mythology. Elsewhere in the British Empire, education was tied to the construction of colonial subjects – the legacy of this is an issue to which we will return throughout this book.

24  The international turn in education Extreme nationalistic movements in the twentieth century, such as Fascism and Nazism, used their state education systems to foster their extremist ideologies (Green 1997). For example, teachers were trained in, and encouraged to use, quasi-military discipline, and textbooks were censored to ensure that a story of racial purity and dominance was told. However, in the Cold War era after the Second World War, education was tasked with the job of political and economic reconstruction, both in older and post-colonial nation-states. For example, German’s new apprenticeship structure was largely credited with its economic transformation after the devastation of war. Japan sought to distance itself from its history with the implementation of a revised structure of meritocratic primary, middle and high schools modelled on US education. By the end of the twentieth century, there had been a shift in how education was conceived in many Western democracies (Green 1997). First, there had been a move from education being seen as a tool for national unity and citizenship to an emphasis on the nation’s economic competitiveness. Second, in increasingly diverse, multi-cultural nations, there was uncertainty about the kinds of citizens that schools should seek to produce. At the same time, changes in the nation-state resulting from immigration, the changing political world order and economic globalisation meant that education was one of the few remaining policy instruments that could be effectively used by national governments (Green 1997). In consequence, the development of mass education systems that occurred in the nineteenth century was followed by a less dramatic, but no less impactful, shift in education starting in the latter part of the twentieth century. Many ­societies committed themselves to extending the education of their citizens. The length of compulsory schooling, the expansion of higher education to incorporate ­increased sections of the population and attention to the quality of education for all through the comprehensive school movement led to what Baker (2018) terms the ‘schooled society’. By 2001, for example, the Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair, ­declared his policy priorities to be ‘Education, education, education’ (“Full text of Tony Blair’s speech on education” 2001). We should be wary of over-generalising this story; Green’s work, for example, focuses largely on Europe, the US and parts of Asia, thereby omitting other parts of the world. He notes that emerging doubts and uncertainties about the purpose of education did not extend to all nations, with newer states continuing to conceptualise education as integral to nation-building. For example, in Singapore, a small nation-city with few natural resources, cut adrift from first the British Empire and later Malaya, education was seen as essential to national viability. Singapore is a multi-cultural state, with multiple language, ethnicities and religions. Singapore’s education system has been central to its economic development, and to forging a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic identity. Bilingual schooling has enabled shared communication without threatening mother tongues. An emphasis on Asian values has sought to buttress Singapore against Westernisation and also offer a unifying vision for its diverse ethnicities.

The international turn in education 25 The aforementioned overview is illustrative of the evolving historical connection between education and the nation-state. Writers have begun to wonder what future roles may emerge for national systems of education. For Green, national education systems are becoming more ‘porous’ (Green 1997, 221) as a result of movements of students and staff, policy borrowing and curriculum change – all ­issues that we will discuss further below. According to Green, if globalisation leads to the end of the national economy, the erosion of the nation-state as the primary source of belonging, the emergence of borderless communication and hybridised identities, then, in the most ‘full-blown’ form of globalisation: The historic functions of national education systems, to transmit national cultures and to reproduce national labour power, would become obsolete. (Green 1997, 169) The international turn is arguably part of a fundamental transformation in the social formation of elites through education. The advent of the ‘schooled society’ means that it is no longer enough to hold have a high-school diploma, a degree or even a higher degree to be considered part of the educated elite; meanwhile, other paths to elite status, such as the ‘old school tie’ or personal patronage have become disparaged or even illegal. Nowadays, other sources of prestige must be sought to differentiate elite education and enable elite social formation – that educational distinction which is conferred by international education (Baker 2018). Whilst such theorising remains speculative, we are already seeing specific ­institutional changes that are leading to education becoming increasingly internationalised, as a result of the changes described above. In the following sections, we consider three particularly salient areas of change: first the internationalisation of higher education; second, the emergence of supranational organisations administering international educational comparisons; and third, the growth of international schools. History of Internationalised Higher Education There is a sense in which universities are intrinsically international (de Wit and Altbach 2021), due to their concern with advancing the shared knowledge of humankind. However, in practice, their work until recently has been embedded in national contexts and used to serve national ends. Although movement of students and professors across Europe was common in Medieval times, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, universities had become more national in their orientation and mobility was discouraged or even prohibited (de Wit and Altbach 2021). Even when we see emergent emphasis on mobility in previous times, its impact and philosophy differ markedly from internationalisation efforts today. For ­instance, the Rhodes Scholarship programme, founded in 1902 to offer scholarships to young people from across the world to attend the University of Oxford, was initially limited to male applicants from within the British Commonwealth, Germany and the US, and was conceptualised by Cecil Rhodes as a way to

26  The international turn in education strengthen Britain’s imperial ties. In addition, although Rhodes did not include any racial criteria in his will, the scholarships were rarely given to students of colour until recent decades (Maylam 2003). National security was a key motivator in early moves towards internationalisation of higher education. The impact of the First World War led to an interest in how education could promote international peace and reconciliation, with for example the US Institute of International Education founded in 1919 and the British Council established in 1934. Similarly, after the Second World War, there were further moves in this direction; the US established its Fulbright Program to provide higher education scholarships for mobility in 1946. There was nascent awareness of how such educational mobility could foster soft power, which I discuss further below. These early educational mobilities were only for the few; after all, until the 1960s, a university education remained the preserve of a small elite. Since then, there has been what de Wit and Altbach (2021) term the ‘massification’ of higher education. Emerging economies, such as China, India and Latin America, are moving towards 50% enrolment, a figure which is surpassed in high-income countries. As increasing numbers of students have enrolled in higher education across the world, universities have developed new conceptions of their purpose, modes of delivery and governance (Dagen and Fink-Hafner 2019). In many countries, such as the US, Europe, Australia and the UK, there has been a marketisation of higher education over recent decades, characterised by deregulation of the higher education sector and a shift to viewing students as customers. This has created financial incentives for universities to recruit foreign students, export research, and take an entrepreneurial approach to international activities (e.g. franchising of universities, or opening of overseas campuses). For example in 1980, the Thatcher government in the UK allowed universities to charge full-cost fees to international students; these then became seen as a major potential revenue source. University education thereby became commodified – seen as something to be bought and sold. Alongside this ‘internationalisation abroad’ (the mobility of staff and students), there has also been ‘internationalisation at home’, such as curricula change and attendant professional development (de Wit and Altbach 2021). This has involved the internationalisation of the curriculum so that students feel that they are prepared for global careers. Alongside these changes, a number of international bodies began to develop policies and practices that influenced national level higher education policy in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) first developed its Higher Education Program in 1969; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) developed a higher education agenda in the 1980s; the World Trade Organisation facilitated the idea of internationally tradable services, such as higher education; and more recently the World Bank has become involved in higher education projects (Dagen and Fink-Hafner 2019). Internationalised higher education has become seen as an important form of ‘soft power’ (HM Government 2019, 23). The European Community/Union has

The international turn in education 27 been particularly active in fostering the internationalisation of higher education. Since the 1980s, Europe has encouraged student mobility, first through its Erasmus programme and later also the SOCRATES programme. The most significant move, however, was the 1999 Bologna Declaration, signed by 29 European ministers of education, which proposed a European Higher Education Area and a European Research Area, and stated that the aim was to increase the competitiveness of European higher education in relation to the rest of the world, especially the US. Emphasis on competition has infused this new, marketised construction of higher education. The first global ranking of universities was published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003, as the Chinese government sought to compare Chinese universities to the best institutions worldwide. Since then, a number of other world rankings of universities have been developed, such as the Times HE Rankings, each employing different criteria for comparing universities. These rankings construct universities as being in competition with one another, and are now commonly used by higher education institutions for marking purposes. Interest in the internationalisation of higher education and its relationship with globalisation became a salient research topic by the late 1980s (Dagen and FinkHafner 2019), and continues to attract considerable interest from commentators. The current dominant discourse is focused on the merits of internationalising higher education; it remains seen as a global good. However, it is acknowledged by commentators that climate change, the re-emergence of populist nationalism in Western democracies and the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic may all ­i mpact on the future internationalisation of higher education (de Wit and Altbach 2021). The global gaze may not continue to be the only lens through which global universities are seen. Supranational Organisations and the Growth of Educational Comparisons The first supranational organisations developed in the late nineteenth century, with the founding of, for example, the International Red Cross in 1864 (Caruso 2014), and included the World Congress of Education, which was supported by national governments. However, the first intergovernmental educational organisation was the International Bureau of Education, founded in Geneva in the interwar years. This presaged both the use of educational policy borrowing and the emphasis on international educational comparisons, which are now a normalised way by which national education systems are judged. The work of supranational organisations has complemented and reinforced the internationalisation of higher education that we discussed in the previous section. For example, Buckner (2017) examines shifting discourses around higher education policy from 1960 to 2101 through analysis of UNESCO publications. She identifies shifts in the rationale for higher education, its regulation and its funding. She notes that at the start of this period, the dominant model was public provision and funding of higher education in pursuit of national development, but that over the years, this was displaced by a focus on privatisation and internationalisation. She

28  The international turn in education further notes a parallel move from discussion of manpower planning to consideration of market competition. Over the same period, the purpose of the university – its mandate and its contribution to social development – shifted from the national to the global. Although emphasising that the previous discourses have not been completely displaced, Buckner argues that overall the role of higher education in these documents has shifted from nation building to global competitiveness. Accompanying greater supranational dialogue around education, we have seen an increase in ‘policy borrowing’ between national contexts. Educational policy borrowing is not new; educational policies in Japan in the post-war period were based on ideas from the US. What is new about policy borrowing in recent decades is the emergence of international networks, fluidly involving both the public and the private sector, who advocate for educational policy-convergence. Stephen Ball has memorably named this loose network of individuals and organisations as ‘Global Education Inc’ (Ball 2012); it forms the focus of the following chapter. One of the most important moves in international education has been the development of international comparison of the achievements of students in different national systems of education. Various international comparisons of educational attainment were developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Since 1960, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which is based in the Netherlands, has conducted international assessments. Its most notable instruments are the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), first implemented in 1995, and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), first implemented in 2001 (Lewis 2020). The OECD has taken a lead in placing weight on such comparisons. The OECD was instituted in 1961, replacing the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which had been set up to facilitate economic ­reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. Membership included nonEuropean countries and progressively expanded. The OECD does not have an explicit mandate for education, beyond a passing commitment to develop science and technology resources through vocational training (Lewis 2020), and i­nitial educational work by the OECD was concerned with adult education, rather than compulsory schooling. In the 1970s, its education budget was subjected to successive budgetary cuts in response to the 1973 oil crisis (Centeno 2021). At this point, critics objected that the OECD’s work on education was too speculative and was primarily preoccupied with issues related to manpower planning. Despite this, work on education survived major reorganisation of the OCED not least, Centeno (2021) suggests, due to the intervention of key, forceful individuals. The OECD has embraced education as a key tool for effecting economic change, adhering as it does to a conceptualisation of the ‘knowledge economy’, in which knowledge and skill are the key factor in economic success. However, although the OECD perceived a link between schooling and economic outcomes, member countries, especially the US, felt there was a lack of scientific data to guide their educational policy-making. This led to the OECD’s creation of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was first administered in 2000 and has been repeated every three years since.

The international turn in education 29 PISA measures the skills of 15-year-olds, an age chosen because this is the last year of compulsory schooling in many education systems. It initially assessed their competencies in reading, maths and science; more recently, other assessments have been added to PISA’s suite of tests. In 2018, PISA first assessed students’ global competence in countries that agreed to participate, arguing that this was a key set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed for success in the contemporary world. Here, then, we see PISA centring the global in its definition of a successful education system. Each school participating in PISA receives a report on their schools’ performance and their own contextual data, as well as examples of best practices from high-performing school systems. PISA stresses that solutions have to be adapted for local contexts, but the examples of best practices sent to schools in PISA 2012 were identical for all participating schools in the US and the UK. In other words, PISA did not use the contextual information it has available, such as whether a school is high-performing or low-performing, to adapt its recommendations of ‘best practice’ (Lewis 2020). The release of PISA data has led to certain education systems (such as Shanghai, Singapore and Finland) being elevated as examples to the world. This, in turn, has provided further impetus to the global education industry, as experts from these systems sell their policies to the rest of the world. The invention of the idea of ‘best practice’, that some countries can provide examples to the rest of the world as to the optimal way to organise education, which is constructed through the framing of such assessments, has therefore been a central force in the internationalisation of schooling systems. In summary, as a result of international assessments, we have seen nations ­engage in overt comparison of their educational performance in compulsory schooling through international league tables. Educational products and services that are marketed as means to move up these league tables have emerged as major exports for some knowledge-based economies. Policy discourse in many contexts now focuses on policy borrowing – transferring practices from other national contexts that are lauded as successful – and the aspiration to match the best in the world. The signifiers of ‘global best practice’ and of ‘world-class education’ have emerged, even as what they signify remains contested. History of International Schooling A third key institutional thread in the internationalisation of education has been the rapid growth of international schooling. The history of international schooling very much depends on your definition of an international school. For those that see an international school as one that serves an expatriate student body, ­perhaps missionary schools serve as the earliest examples. There is a long history of missionary schooling, with schools opened in Japan and the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to serve the children of those preaching overseas ­(Çelik 2022). In 1890, for example, the Maseru English Medium Preparatory School opened for missionary children in Lesotho – a school which is still in existence to this day (Hayden and Thompson 2008).

30  The international turn in education International schools are sometimes defined as those offering a non-national curriculum; indeed, this is the government definition of international schools in some contexts, such as Malaysia. This points us to a different history where a foreign entity opened up a school in another country. For example, France opened a French high school in Istanbul in 1868 (Haigh 1974) and since then, a number of governments have either directly run state schools overseas, such as the French and German, or inspected private international schools in other countries, such as through the UK governments’ accreditation system for British Schools Overseas (Çelik 2022). Çelik (2022) argues that these nationally oriented, state-endorsed international schools constitute a form of ‘cultural diplomacy’ (Çelik 2022, 161). However, some such schools are not so much cultural outposts as a service for employees. For example, the US Department of Defence operates a number of overseas schools for military personnel. The Shell Corporation also operates several schools for its employees who are living and working in remote locations. Other commentators have seen the history of international schools as those schools which purported to promote an international ethos; the title of the first here is equally contested. In 1868, the International College at Spring Grove, London was established by a group of individuals (including Charles Dickens) who had a vision of students who could move easily between one country and language and another. However, the first modern international schools in this tradition were founded in 1924. In this year, the International School of Geneva (known as Ecolint) was founded to serve employees of the newly formed League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation (Ecolint 2022); the foundation of this school has been mythologised as an ideological endeavour to promote global understanding, but archival study has debunked this, showing that the founders, their investors and the initial American-dominated student intakes suggest instead it was motivated by the pursuit of education distinction (Dugonjić 2014). On the other side of the world, 1924 also saw the advent of Yokohama ­International School, founded to cater for the city’s expatriate population. The nomenclature of ‘international’ is an inaccurate way of demarcating the historical development of the international school movement. Some schools – such as the Alice Smith School in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – did not use this word in their name. This school was founded in 1946 by a mother who wanted to avoid sending her own child away to boarding school in the UK. Similarly, the United World Colleges also do not term themselves ‘international’, despite arguably sharing key features with other international schools. Since 1962, the United World Colleges have brought together children from diverse countries for residential English-medium education in the last two years of secondary education, with an ideological commitment to promoting peace and international understanding. In 1949, the Council of International Schools was formed, followed only two years later by the International Schools Association ( James and Sheppard 2014). It is perhaps at this point that the modern international school movement was formed. The European School Movement was opened in 1953 to serve employees of the European Economic Community and the European Coal and Steel Community. In these early years, international schools almost exclusively served

The international turn in education 31 expatriates; indeed, many countries prohibited the enrolment of their nationals in international schools within their own borders. For example, Malaysia set tight restrictions upon Malaysians attending ­international schooling until 2006; an exemption was required from the Ministry of Education, granted only if certain criteria were met, such as that one parent was a foreigner or that the child had previously been studying overseas for an ­extended period of time. From 2006 to 2011, Malaysians were permitted to a­ pply to ­attend international schools under a wider set of circumstances, but schools were ­restricted from admitting them, as Malaysians were not permitted to exceed 40% of the school’s student body. It was only from 2012 that all such restrictions were removed, and thereafter the number of Malaysians attending international schools rose rapidly (Bailey 2015). With growing numbers of children attending international schooling, curriculum and assessment have been developed to meet these schools’ needs. Perhaps the best known of these is the suite of programmes offered by the International Baccalaureate (IB), an organisation established in the 1960s. These are spearheaded by its IB Diploma Programme, which is designed to provide school-leavers from such schools with certification that would enable them to access universities worldwide. The IB now also offers its programmes to government schools in several countries so that demand for international school assessment is impacting on curriculum and assessment in state schools worldwide. Some salient changes have occurred in international schooling over the past two decades. First, there has been a significant shift in demand for such schools. This has involved a rapid increase in the number of host-country nationals ­attending international schools; indeed, this is now a majority of international school students (Bailey and Gibson 2020). This increased demand for international schooling has primarily taken place in the Middle East and Asia (Bailey 2021). Africa is a new area of growth, as of 2018 there were only 80 IB schools in sub-Saharan Africa; as Gress-Wright (2022) notes, the African middle-class is heterogeneous, and large sections of it remain precarious, at risk of falling back into poverty. This perhaps makes parts of Africa less appealing to voracious educational investors. Second, there has been a change in the ownership of international schools. Whereas previously international schools were parent run or operated on a notfor-profit basis, most of the recent expansion has been in for-profit international schooling. There are now a number of companies operating chains of international schools, sometimes across multiple countries (Gibson and Bailey 2021). ­Furthermore, several prestigious Western schools have opened for-profit campuses in other parts of the world, for example, Dulwich College – an elite public school in London, founded in 1619 – now has six campuses (at the time of writing) in China and Singapore (Dulwich College International 2022). In summary, the international school movement has evolved rapidly from ­being a small network of schools serving a handful of globally mobile expatriates to being a significant type of schooling worldwide, serving the expanding middle-class in emerging economies.

32  The international turn in education Theorising Historical Change in the Internationalisation of Education In the preceding sections, I described internationalising moves that have occurred in these three different aspects of education. Various theories have been proposed to explain these changes. I shall provide a brief overview of some key concepts that have been put forward to understand the scale and types of i­nternationalisation that have occurred. I shall then conclude the chapter by synthesising these concepts in discussion of the global gaze. World Culture Theory World Culture Theory attempts to offer an explanation for an apparent convergence in education policies across the world. It notes common threads across diverse systems of education, such as marketisation, commodification and the ­influence of supranational organisations, and proposes an common underpinning cause. World Culture Theory suggests that educational similarities have not arisen by chance, or even as a result of common causal factors, such as different countries experiencing similar economic pressures. Instead, it suggests that theorists should shift their focus away from the nation and the national to examining global similarities, which it sees as being rooted in ‘a supranational-level world culture of education’ (Griffiths and Arnove 2015, 90). Griffiths and Arnove (2015) identify two weaknesses in this theory: first, that it ignores conflict over the development and implementation of education policy, and second, that it has little to say about how economic considerations impact on education systems. For example, there has been extensive local resistance to policies that are perceived as externally imposed, and in addition, the common challenges ­imposed by neoliberal capitalism may explain some policy commonalities. They ­argue that the division between global and local is an unhelpful and simplistic binary that doesn’t capture the complexity of education policy formation and the factors driving the internationalisation of education. However, it does point to the importance of common factors that cut across national boundaries, and the limitation of national-level analyses of the changes that have occurred. This book is informed by this perspective; the global gaze can be seen as part of the supranational – a discourse that has common characteristics across diverse nation-states. The Nation-State Another way to examine shifting notions of the international is by looking at their relationship with the ‘national’ and how societies conceptualise the nationstate. The key theorist who has tried to categorise the history of the international by e­ xamining how it connects with the evolving concept of the nation is Caruso (2014). Caruso identifies four distinct phases in the internationalisation of education, each characterised by a different relationship to the national. The first phase, in Medieval times, was the emergence of nations as an organising category within the university (internationalisation within). The second

The international turn in education 33 phase was the reinforcement of national boundaries by internationalisation between nations in the nineteenth century (internationalisation between). The third phase was the emergence of supranational connections in the period 1850–1980 ­(internationalisation above). Caruso contrasts each of these with the fourth, most recent phase of internationalisation of education – which he calls internationalisation beyond – characterised by new global considerations, in the context of the emergence of a transnational civil society, and the contested legitimacy of the nation-state. C ­ aruso stresses that these are dominant trends within each period, and do not capture the full complexity of everything that happened within that time-frame, but that an attempt at such a narrative enhances understanding of common processes influencing diverse phenomena of internationalisation. Building on Caruso’s work, it is important to note that the idea of making international comparisons such as PISA is still rooted in a focus on the national. PISA creates an image of a competition in which all nations participate. The ­assumption here is of a shared route, a shared goal and comparable measures. Education is no longer seen as directed towards achieving national development through cooperative endeavour; rather education is focused on individual development through competition and comparison (Robertson 2012). The international implicitly delineates, and is demarcated by, our conception of the national. As with the work on World Culture Theory discussed above, such work on the role of the nation-state is a reminder that efforts to synthesise understanding of various aspects of internationalisation are essential to gaining a stronger conceptualisation of it as a phenomenon. It is partly in reply to such a call that this book is written. The Anywheres of Education In 2022, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had unexpected consequences for education; Russian students at schools and universities in the UK faced an uncertain future. The 2,327 Russian students at the UK’s private schools struggled to pay their fees, after the government introduced financial sanctions on Russian individuals and banks (Goss 2022). Some British Members of Parliament demanded that Russian children should be kicked out of top UK schools, claiming they were using education as a ‘weapon’ by which they could gain entry to British society (Pilditch 2022). What was interesting about this debate was how these students were seen as national representatives; their identity and allegiance was represented as tied to their citizenship. One of the key questions raised by internationalisation of ­education is to what extent identities are constructed by these changes – in other words, the extent to which this is a technology of subjectification. Various writers have tried to capture the shifting identity patterns that are happening in our globalised world. For Goodhart (2017), a key distinction is emerging between the Anywheres, who feel no particular allegiance to place and live mobile lives, and the Somewheres, who are bound by geographically specific identities. He uses the division between these groups to explain recent political phenomena, such as the British schism over Brexit, and the US’s divisions over Donald Trump.

34  The international turn in education We already know that education is an important factor in shaping these political choices. Expertise, the consequence of being educated, is scorned as anathema by many of the Somewheres. In these circles, being educated is potentially elitist. Being international is borderline treachery. We may suppose that being internationally educated is doubly suspect. International education doubles the depth of the chasm between the Anywheres and the Somewheres. Perhaps internationalised education is replacing national identity with the shared identity of a global elite. For example, the international-mindedness cultivated in elite international schools may be the shared class consciousness that holds together the Transnational Capitalist Class and the Global Middle Class (Bunnell et al. 2022); students develop a common discourse, a sense of shared experiences as globally mobile individuals and emotional commitment to the global, whereas the IB Diploma gives them shared symbols, imagery and vocabulary for expressing this. Furthermore, we may see the global gaze (discussed further below) as part of this shared elite mindset. We should not exaggerate the extent of this change. Cultural differences and national identities continue to be important to elites. Although there is some global homogenisation of culture, in 2022 (the time of writing), several Middle Eastern and Asian countries banned the Hollywood cartoon, Lightyear, ­because it featured a same-sex kiss (Richwine and Chmielewski 2022). Meanwhile, the European elite had unified in defence of the national identity of the people of Ukraine. In other words, the global economy and global culture may dominate in some contexts but have less impact in others, and it is important not to overgeneralise from the experiences of elites in a few Western democracies. To conclude, the impact of the global gaze on identities constructed through education merits further examination. The degree to which internationalised elements of education impact on identities will be a recurrent theme throughout this book. Internationalisation and Numbers Critical analysis by sociologists of numbers reminds us that statistics are not neutral descriptors of the world; rather, the categories and comparisons that they create are constitutive of identities (Hacking 1986). Statistics organise our social world while appearing unchallengeable (Saetnan, Lomell, and Hammer 2011). Internationalisation has marched hand-in-hand with the use of numbers to describe educational outcomes, and the degree of internationalisation of an institution is measured by the quantitative rather than connected to qualitative change (Knight 2011). Being international is a status normally accorded to rankings and ratings, such as the number of languages spoken on campus, the number of countries accrediting a course or the number of students from overseas enrolling in a programme. Being international is therefore entwined with the creation of ­administrative entities – at institutional, national and supranational level – who can generate the numbers required to make such claims (Mitterle 2021). Interestingly, Mitterle contrasts this to the concept of being global, which he suggests is noncountable, referring as it does to a spherical shape, an encompassing entity;

The international turn in education 35 whereas the international can be measured and located, the global is singular, indivisible and unlocatable. International testing creates big data-sets that purport to describe each educational system. The PIRLS and the TIMSS collect data from students, teachers, principals and parents in participating countries about literacy education and mathematics and science study respectively. If educators in Egypt, Israel, Australia or Singapore want to know how their students are doing, they don’t need to walk enter the classrooms in their schools; instead, they can download a database housed on website from Boston College. As Biesta (2009) has pointed out, the ‘age of measurement’ is affecting what we think of as good education; this is because it is a short step from measuring what we value to valuing what we measure. Thus, the increased use of statistics, such as those offered by PISA, moulds schools. We have seen an exponential growth in the use of such data to judge the performance of schools and entire education systems (Grek and Ozga 2008). This data both shapes education, by giving increased focus on the economic outputs of education, and is a means by which surveillance can be conducted. Actors invest in PISA in part because of the seductive power of numbers ­( Biesta 2015). Using numbers in this way is dangerous partly because in reducing education systems to numbers, Biesta points out, we also thereby reduce them to their qualification role, and omits their roles of socialisation and subjectification. In other words, numbers omit the immeasurable aspects of how we develop our identity and how we learn to relate to others through our educational experiences. In addition, PISA and other similar statistical generators are linked to an implicit idea that education can be scientifically managed because it is a causal system – in effect, that it operates like a perfect input–output machine (Biesta 2015). Educational rankings of this sort are a form of governance that operates through assuming or enforcing commensurability to facilitate comparison (Grek 2009). Such governance replaces the work of government; it takes control over framing of educational decision-making out of the preserve of national governments, and to an imagined global level. In effect, it re-spatialises the imagined topology of schooling (Lewis 2017). The Global Gaze: Initial Conclusions This chapter has charted parallel shifts in education (and educational discourse) occurring across policy-making, practices in all sectors of education and the roles of educators, parents and students as internationalisation becomes an increasingly important part of educational practice. We have seen that this international turn has enabled other, indirect shifts in discourse concerning education. The purpose of education, the measurement of outcomes and the roles of stakeholders are constructed as beyond agency and domestic decision-making, but as lying in the purview of ‘best global practice’, a murky concept that permits no transgressions. Thus, a discourse that is ostensibly about empowerment, through raising opportunities and improving education for

36  The international turn in education all, may fundamentally disempower stakeholders in national discourse. Instead, the ‘global gaze’ could become the determiner of what is ‘good’ in education. This global gaze is not hegemonic, at least until this point. National governments have not lost all control over education, although there is a growing emphasis on the purpose of education being preparation for the global economy rather than for national development or belonging. Indeed, the dream of ‘glocalisation’ – of blending the global with the local, the universal with the particular – need not lead to homogenisation, but instead may create new possibilities for difference. The global gaze is not a determining world culture, but as we shall see in the succeeding chapters, it is a pervasive aspect of current educational thought and practice shared by many Anywheres from different cultural contexts. I shall ask to what extent contemporary understandings of the international and the global are embedded in a neoliberal economic worldview. In this chapter, I have distinguished between seeing internationalisation as a narrative to describe changes in education, and seeing it as a way of looking at and valuing education. In the forthcoming chapters, I will contend that in certain communities being international is seen as unarguably good, being educated is also unarguably good, and ergo internationalised education is supremely good – but that others are excluded from this global gaze. References Bailey, Lucy. 2015. “The Experiences of Host Country Nationals in International Schools: A Case-Study from Malaysia.” Journal of Research in International Education 14 (2):85–97.    . 2021. “Host-Country Parent Perspectives on International Schooling: A Study from Bahrain.” Journal of Research in International Education 20 (1):3–18. Bailey, Lucy, and Mark T Gibson. 2020. “International School Principals: Routes to Headship and Key Challenges of Their Role.” Educational Management Administration & Leadership 48 (6):1007–25. Baker, David P. 2018. “Where Have All the Elites Gone? Cultural Transformation of ­Elitism in the Schooled Society.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Kruger and Werner Helsper, 25–39. Cham: Springer. Ball, Stephen J. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. London: Routledge. Biesta, Gert. 2009. “Good Education in an Age of Measurement: On the Need to ­Reconnect with the Question of Purpose in Education.” Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability ( formerly: Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education) 21 (1):33–46. doi: 10.1007/s11092-008-9064-9.    . 2015. “Resisting the Seduction of the Global Education Measurement Industry: Notes on the Social Psychology of PISA.” Ethics and Education 10 (3):348–60. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2015.1106030. Buckner, Elizabeth S. 2017. “The Changing Discourse on Higher Education and the ­Nation-State, 1960–2010.” Higher Education 74 (3):473–89. Bunnell, Tristan, Michael Donnelly, Hugh Lauder, and Samuel Whewall. 2022. “International Mindedness as a Platform for Class Solidarity.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 52 (5):712–28. doi: 10.1080/03057925.2020.1811639.

The international turn in education 37 Caruso, Marcelo. 2014. “Within, between, above, and beyond: (Pre)positions for a History of the Internationalisation of Educational Practices and Knowledge.” Paedagogica Historica 50 (1–2):10–26. doi: 10.1080/00309230.2013.872678. Çelik, Metin. 2022. “International Schools in the Context of Cultural Diplomacy: Actors and New Approaches.” In Education Policies in the 21st Century, edited by Birol Akgün and Yusuf Alpaydin, 161–89. Singapore: Springer. Centeno, Vera G. 2021. “The OECD: Actor, Arena, Instrument.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 19 (2):108–21. Chambers, Crystal Renée. 2017. “Discovering Nalanda and Other Institutions of Higher Education before Solerno.” Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education 2:195–205. Dagen, Tamara, and Danica Fink-Hafner. 2019. Impact of Globalisation on Internationalisation of Universities. Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede, Založba FDV. de Wit, Hans. 2011. “Globalisation and Internationalisation of Higher Education.” International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 8 (2):241–8. de Wit, Hans, and Philip G. Altbach. 2021. “Internationalization in Higher Education: Global Trends and Recommendations for Its Future.” Policy Reviews in Higher Education 5 (1):28–46. Droux, Joëlle, and Rita Hofstetter. 2014. “Going International: The History of Education Stepping beyond Borders.” Paedagogica Historica 50 (1–2):1–9. doi: 10.1080/00309230. 2013.877500. Dugonjić, Leonora. 2014. ““A Miniature League of Nations”: Inquiry into the Social Origins of the International School, 1924–1930.” Paedagogica Historica 50 (1–2):138–50. doi: 10.1080/00309230.2013.877499. Dulwich College International. 2022. “Find a School”. Accessed 15th June. https://www. dulwich.org/find-a-school. Ecolint. 2022. “Our History.” Accessed 15th June. https://www.ecolint.ch/overview/ our-history. “Full text of Tony Blair’s speech on education”. 2001. The Guardian. Accessed 28th February 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/may/23/labour.tonyblair. Gibson, Mark T., and Lucy Bailey. 2021. “Navigating the Blurred Lines between Principalship and Governance in International Schools: Leadership and the Locus of Ownership Control.” International Journal of Leadership in Education:1–18. Goodhart, David. 2017. The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics. London: Penguin UK. Goss, Louis. 2022. “UK private schools told not to accept fee payments from Russia.” In City A.M. Accessed 28th February 2023. https://www.cityam.com/uk-private-schoolstold-not-to-accept-fee-payments-from-russia/. Green, Andy. 1997. Education, Globalization and the Nation State. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1057/9780230371132_8.    . 2013. Education and State Formation: Europe, East Asia and the USA. Basingstoke: Springer. Grek, Sotiria. 2009. “Governing by Numbers: The PISA ‘Effect’ in Europe.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (1):23–37. Grek, Sotiria, and Jennifer Ozga. 2008. Governing by Numbers? Shaping Education through Data. Edinburgh: Centre for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh. Gress-Wright, Catharina. 2022. “Creole Cosmopolitans: The Impact of the IB Diploma Programme on Enko Education Students in Three African Contexts.” UCL Institute of Education.

38  The international turn in education Griffiths, Tom G, and Robert F Arnove. 2015. “World Culture in the Capitalist WorldSystem in Transition.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 13 (1):88–108. Hacking, Ian. 1986. “Making up People.” In Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, ­Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, edited by Thomas C. Heller and Christine Brook-Rose, 222–36. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Haigh, Anthony. 1974. Cultural Diplomacy in Europe. New York: Manhattan Publishing Company. Hayden, Mary, and John Jeffrey Thompson. 2008. International Schools: Growth and Influence. Vol. 92. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. HM Government. 2019. “International Education Strategy: Global Potential, Global Growth.” Policy Paper. Accessed 2nd March 2023. https://assets.publishing.service.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/799349/International_ Education_Strategy_Accessible.pdf. James, Chris, and Paul Sheppard. 2014. “The Governing of International Schools: The ­Implications of Ownership and Profit Motive.” School Leadership & Management 34 (1):2–20. King, Roger, Simon Marginson, and Rajani Naidoo. 2011. Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Knight, Jane. 2011. “Five Myths about Internationalization.” International Higher Education Vol. 62. doi: 10.6017/ihe.2011.62.8532. Lewis, Steven. 2017. “PISA for Schools: Respatializing the OECD’s Global Governance of Education.” In The Impact of the OECD on Education Worldwide, edited by Alexander W. Wiseman and Calley Stevens Taylor, 181–206. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.    . 2020. “PISA, Policy and the OECD.” Respatialising Global Education Governance through PISA for Schools. Singapore: Springer. Logue, Danielle. 2009. “Moving Policy Forward: ‘Brain Drain’ as a Wicked Problem.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 7 (1):41–50. Marginson, Simon, and Marijk van der Wende. 2007. “Globalisation and higher education.” In OECD Working Paper No. 8. Paris. Maylam, Paul. 2003. “History of the Rhodes Trust.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (4): 1004–6. Mitterle, Alexander. 2021. “Making the Global Big. The Academic Roots of Global Size Building.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 20 (4): 463–78. Peter, Tobias. 2018. “Exclusive Globality, Inclusive Diversity: Internationalisation as a Strategy of Inclusion and Exclusion.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 57–73. Cham: Springer. Pilditch, D. 2022. “Russian oligarchs’ Children Should Be Kicked out of Britain’s Top Public Schools, Tory MPs Say.” In Daily Mail Online. Accessed 2nd March 2023. https:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10586873/Russian-oligarchs-children-kickedBritains-public-schools-Tory-MPs-say.html. Richwine, L, and D Chmielewski. 2022. “EXCLUSIVE Disney/Pixar’s ‘Lightyear,’ with Same-sex Couple, Will Not Play in 14 Countries; China in Question.” In Reuters. ­Accessed 2nd March 2023. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10586873/ Russian-oligarchs-children-kicked-Britains-public-schools-Tory-MPs-say.html. Robertson, Susan L. 2012. “Placing Teachers in Global Governance Agendas.” Comparative Education Review 56 (4):584–607. Saetnan, Ann Rudinow, Heidi Mork Lomell, and Svein Hammer. 2011. The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society. New York: Routledge.

3

The global education industry Selling learning abroad

Introduction In 1999, the Institute for Economic Affairs, a prominent right-wing thinktank, published James Tooley’s ‘The Global Education Industry: Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries’ (Tooley 1999). This charted the growth in private educational investment, offered advice on factors for success and proposed policies encouraging public-private partnerships. Tooley sought to replace ‘the wastefulness, inefficiency and lack of innovation in state education’ (Tooley 2005, 11) with an increased role for the private sector in the education systems of ­‘developing’ countries. For Tooley, the private sector and market-motivated entrepreneurism offer a solution to the educational challenges of developing ­ countries, bringing in low-fee education for all. Tooley introduced readers to case study educational businesses that were seen as exemplifying the innovative partnerships and branding initiatives that he ­advocated. From their successes, he distilled advice for future educational entrepreneurs. For example, Tooley advised educational businesses to ‘carefully manage the risks of non-payment of tuition fees, by employing a variety of techniques of incentives and punishment’ (Tooley 2005, 45). Some of the case studies described by Tooley operated solely in one country, but others diversified internationally or drew on international partnerships to strengthen their brand. Some were profit driven, others were not. What mattered, according to Tooley, was that they were challenging the tired ways of the public sector, which he characterised as populated by lazy teachers who did little to help their students learn. Thompson and Parreira do Amaral (2019) note how purveyors of the benefits of this Global Education Industry (hereafter termed the GEI) portray themselves as visionary innovators, casting off the staid, Luddite ways of the past. Through economisation, marketisation, privatisation, commodification and financialisation, their economic approach has infiltrated global education. Economisation involves the reframing of educational activities as economic transactions. Commodification refers to the depiction of education as a good that can be bought and sold. Marketisation refers to how educational goods, services and people are made market-ready. Privatisation refers to the movement of public resources for education towards the private sector. The related DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-3

40  The global education industry concepts underpin a sea-change in how education is viewed, that is in large part a product of the GEI. This chapter gives the reader a flavour of the varied, but interconnected, components of the GEI. It connects the development of a global knowledge economy to the emergence of this industry (Tooley 2005; Verger, Steiner-Khamsi, and Lubienski 2017). Whereas Chapter 2 focused on how education is reconceptualised by the global gaze, this chapter looks at the financial flows that result. It charts the economic interests that benefit from this ‘international turn’. The chapter begins by examining the concept of a global knowledge economy that is replacing the manufacturing or service-based economies of the past. In the knowledge economy, knowledge and information are the main drivers of productivity and economic growth. Both work and consumption are centred on individuals’ intellectual capital – in other words, their skill in the buying and selling of ideas. The chapter argues that the GEI is itself a part of this knowledge economy (Kostrykina, Lee, and Hope 2018), yet it gains its profits by telling schools and universities how and why they need to prepare their students for the knowledge economy. In other words, a major element in the growth of the knowledge economy is its effectiveness in selling belief in its own importance. A key silence in these sales, however, is how profits in the GEI are distributed. The exhortation to ‘be international’ and to match ‘global best practice’ generates profit for Western multinational companies ( Johnstone and Lee 2017). It offers the promise of knowledge economy growth to the Global South while entrenching the beneficiaries of the global knowledge economy in the Global North. The global gaze, then, is not a democratic gaze, but a way of seeing education that supports specific economic interests. In this and the following chapters, I use the term ‘western’ to refer to the cultural, economic and social domination by Western Europe and Northern America. At points in the book, I also refer to the Global North and the Global South instead, which is alternative terminology to capture those nations which have economic advantage versus those who are on the social and economic p­ eriphery, and generally preferable to potentially value-laden alternatives such as ‘Thirdworld’ or ‘developing’. The terms cannot be equated – Japan, Taiwan and Singapore would be considered to be in the Global North, but are evidently not western – but both are used to discuss related issues of dominance and exclusion. I acknowledge the limitations of both terminologies – the simplification of such dichotomies and the risk that they may become equated with hierarchies (Khan et al. 2022) – but believe that they are needed to discuss structural inequalities on a global scale. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on private sector involvement in the GEI and how this has been fostered at governmental level. It is no longer possible to see government and the private sector as distinct (Ball 2012; Steiner-Khamsi 2018); the private sector has become involved in policy networks and a business mind-set has infused public decision-making. Although I defer detailed discussion of policy issues to the following chapter, and focus on non-policy aspects of

The global education industry 41 the GEI in this chapter, these are increasingly entwined. This chapter is laying the groundwork for the more explicit focus on the changing role of the state that I examine further in Chapter 4. The Knowledge Economy In the early 1970s, Daniel Bell described how society would move to a postindustrial economy, in which knowledge would replace capital as the main factor needed for economic success. He suggested that as a result knowledge would ­become the key organising principle not just for economic life but for wider society (Bell 1973). While an array of terminology and concepts has been proposed to understand the myriad economic changes of recent globalisation, such as postindustrial society or the information society, in this chapter I focus on the concept of the global knowledge economy, a term that captures the centrality of education to recent economic change. The conceptualisation of knowledge in economic terms is a social construction. The early universities, such as Bologna and Oxford, saw themselves as secular institutions engaged in research, but science was seen as a gentlemanly leisure activity without needing any practical purpose. It was not until the nineteenth century, and the industrial revolution in Western economies, that universities had much engagement with applied research. And it was only after the Second World War that government funding of applied science in universities was established, resting on the conceptualisation of research knowledge as a public good (Temple 2012). Nowadays, universities in the UK and elsewhere are routinely judged for the ‘employability’ of their students, but it is important to remember that the pursuit of knowledge is not intrinsically linked to economics. The knowledge economy centres on the buying and selling of intellectual capital – knowledge and research – so that knowledge-intensive activities are of central importance to the knowledge economy. While knowledge has evidently always played some role in economic activity, what is new about the knowledge economy is its reliance on high-skill labour to drive economic growth, ­often through ­ increasingly technology- and science-based activities (de Wit 2019). Those writing about the knowledge economy are often enthusiastic advocates of it, seeing it as ‘the most advanced’ form of economic organisation (Unger 2022, 1). Educational stakeholders, specifically universities, are exhorted to ­reflect on their role as the ‘key motor of the knowledge economy’ (Temple 2012). The term ‘knowledge economy’ has been used by the World Bank, which argues there are four ‘pillars’ (World Bank 2013) needed by a country to enable it to fully participate in the global knowledge economy: education and training; an information infrastructure; incentives for entrepreneurship; and a network of innovation systems in both the public and private sector. Deploying the concept of the knowledge economy is therefore not purely descriptive; it performs a normative role, being used by key players to shape economic futures. We should be cautious of assuming movement towards a knowledge economy is a universal trend. While there is some evidence of a move away from

42  The global education industry manufacturing and service-based economies towards a more central role to be played by knowledge, there are also national economies and regions where this has not happened; for example, oil continues to play a central role in the economies of the Arabian Gulf, despite government efforts to reduce economic dependency on this resource. In addition, knowledge elements often underpin or complement manufacturing or service elements; it is over-simplistic to see these as distinct economic sectors. These are broad terms and acknowledging the heterogeneity of experiences within economic contexts, and the interdependence of different economic jurisdictions, is important. Within discussion of the knowledge economy, education is sometimes portrayed as a panacea, a non-economic factor that can determine competitiveness (Erfurth 2019). However, education is linked to the knowledge economy in multiple, complex ways. First, educational institutions are expected to produce the human resources needed for the knowledge economy. Second, they are, through their research endeavours, often the key producers of the knowledge that is used in this economy, although corporate and political interests may also have an i­ncreasing role in knowledge generation in neoliberal times. Third, the idea of an unstoppable global knowledge economy – with which we must keep up at all costs – has been used to legitimate the emergence of a vast GEI (which we ­examine in this chapter), and a consequent restricting of the relationship between education and the state (which we turn to in Chapter 4). The Global Education Industry The term the ‘Global Education Industry’ refers to the emergence across the world of a for-profit market for educational products and services, as well as to the ­relationships constructed through the buying and selling of these on a global scale. These products and services include those targeting parents and students with different levels of wealth and income, from the global elite to marginalised groups in countries in the Global South. The GEI is just one aspect of a more general reworking of the economic, social and political organisation of responses to public need and inequalities, including services as diverse as healthcare, incarceration and transportation, which has led to seismic shifts in the relationship between the public and private sectors – this will be discussed further in Chapter 4. The GEI is a multi-billion dollar industry that is powered by proponents of the free market based mainly in more affluent countries, particularly in the US, the EU, Japan, New Zealand and Australia (Robertson 2003). One estimate has suggested that the GEI is worth US$4.9 trillion (Verger, Steiner-Khamsi, and Lubienski 2017). There are several markets within the GEI (Ball 2012); these include policy advocacy, venture philanthropy, the commodification of educational policy and multinational edu-businesses. For example, Pearson is one of the world’s largest edu-businesses (Ball 2012), with sales exceeding 5  ­billion Euros in 2016 (Thompson 2019). However, as Ball demonstrates, the demarcations between advocacy, not-for-profit and business have become blurred by GEI activity.

The global education industry 43 The GEI entails opening up various aspects of education internationally to marketisation, and hence generation of profits. Verger, Steiner-Khamsi, and Lubienski (2017) analyse three very different examples of the GEI. First, they note the exportation of the concept of Charter Schools to different locales, so that the idea of quasi-markets in education is now widely accepted, creating opportunities for private investment, but diverting resources and people away from public education. Second, they explore the standardisation of education policies and practices, creating business opportunities and economies of scale for education companies but reliant on public resources. Third, they critique the expansion of low-fee private education in the Global South, a lucrative new market for businesses absorbing the scarce resources of low-income parents although there is no evidence that they offer better quality schooling than government schools. Their work demonstrates the diversity of businesses operating within the GEI, with the commonality being that profit-motivated education is unlikely to promote the public good. There is an emerging literature on the relationship between edutech (educational technology industries) and the GEI, although prior to 2020 research ­concentrated primarily on the use of technologies at a national level and the implications of that for educational governance (Hartong 2019; Lingard 2019). However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the market penetration of a few global companies in the edutech industry was made evident, as terms like ‘Zoom’, ‘Teams’ and ‘Googlemeet’ peppered parent, student and teacher interactions. In early April 2020, worldwide users of Google’s Classroom platform had doubled over the previous month to reach 100 million (Williamson 2021). As a consequence, a handful of companies were making critical decisions about the tools they provided that were structuring student activities for millions. Government control over the nature of online schooling was minimal beside that of a few coding-engineers. Private providers were reimagining the world of education using learning analytics and artificial intelligence (Williamson 2021). There is a need for more literature that explores the financial connections ­between supra-national educational organisations and large businesses operating in the GEI. For example, the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is a multilateral donor organisation committed to education for all, but as a result of its close ties to various private sector organisations, its mission has become ‘diluted’ and it has become a ‘brand for sale’ (Ridge and Kippels 2019). It has actively sought partnerships with private companies, using the language of marketing, partly to meet funding shortfalls and partly to address fears that it is becoming irrelevant. However, these partners are also pursuing their own business ends through such partnerships – for example, Pepsi has b­ ecome ­involved in training programmes, thereby raising its profile among potential young consumers, and IT firms such as Nokia have become involved in projects promoting the use of technology in education. Ridge and Kippels (2019) suggest that companies are using their work with UNESCO to enter new markets and boost their brand image; their involvement is influencing UNECSO’s educational priorities; and their business activities are often at odds with UNESCO’s professed values. This analysis exemplifies the importance of further such research.

44  The global education industry Ball (2012) charts the growth of large businesses in education, often built through merging, diversification and globalisation. Diversification enables i­ncreased revenue generation, as a single business taps into several sub-markets. For example, the CEO of GEMS Education, which operates international schools worldwide, has announced that it operates like an airline, offering different kinds of education based on what families can afford. Building on this analogy, Steiner-Khamsi categories GEMS schools in the UAE into first class, business class and economy, according to their fees. She points out that the top-fee schools offer extensive facilities and North American teachers; the middle-tier of schools offers slightly fewer facilities and slightly bigger classes with mainly UK teachers, while the schools with the lowest fees offer few facilities and mainly teachers from India, Pakistan and non-Gulf Arab countries (Steiner-Khamsi 2018). GEI businesses develop their global brand image to sell their educational products worldwide, and any diversification is done with careful attention to the ­i mpact on the brand. A key feature of the GEI has been the export of the campuses of elite private schools from the UK and North America to non-Western parts of the world, primarily the Middle East and South East Asia. What these schools seek to sell is an elite form of Englishness – they are characterised by their emphasis on tradition and history, thereby selling a colonial image. This phenomenon began in 1997 when Dulwich College – an elite school in South London that was founded in 1619 – opened a campus in Thailand (Bunnell, Courtois, and Donnelly 2020) in partnership with local investors. This initial college bore Dulwich’s name, and the appointment of headteachers, annual inspections and curriculum advice were provided by Dulwich College in London; by 2005, however, the partnership fell apart as the Thai investor demanded more involvement and Dulwich College pulled out of the deal, demanding that the school change its name (Curtis 2005). This contentious history does not feature on Dulwich College’s website, however. Here, Dulwich College International describes itself as having launched in 2003 with the opening of a campus in Shanghai, and there are now eight international schools/high schools worldwide under this brand, with the majority in China. North London Collegiate School, another elite British school, has used its ­export of elite branch campuses to promote a subsidiary company offering educational consultancy services. This prestigious private school now has international campuses in Jeju, Dubai, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok, operated on a franchise model, and it is actively seeking partners to establish further franchises with governments or real estate developers. Its subsidiary, Canons Park, offers international consultancy services in school design, curriculum ­design, organisational structure, project management, recruitment of senior staff and teacher training. The information on North London Collegiate School’s website about Canons Park’s educational work is permeated with the language and perspectives of business (North London Collegiate School International Ltd. 2022). These schools widen access to an elite form of Western education; the expansion in recent years may be in part explained by the 2008 financial crisis, which raised the price to Asian parents of sending their children to be educated overseas, and therefore increased demand for cut-price Western education. However,

The global education industry 45 demand has also been stimulated by the expansion of the middle-class in many countries, so that growing numbers of parents are demanding access to the social mobility offered by international education. What is interesting about the export of elite schooling, however, is that it subverts the whiteness and exclusivity upon which these schools have built their identity, by offering their product to both more, and more ethnically diverse, populations. This expansion has been driven in part by amendments to UK law surrounding charitable institutions (Bunnell 2008). In order to maintain their tax status as charities, UK private schools have to evidence how they are of public benefit, and therefore have sought to expand their scholarship offerings to under-privileged students; funding for this can be gained by opening lucrative campuses overseas. This has led to the unedifying spectacle of students in lower-income countries, sometimes former colonies, subsidising the education of students in the UK (Bailey 2021). This phenomenon has been mirrored by the export of university branch campuses, the franchising of higher education qualifications and HE partnerships, with again the brand being used to sell educational status. Universities have ­become involved in a range of such arrangements, in pursuit of profits to reinvest in their home campus. These have often been supported by national governments in the host nation; the Singapore government has encouraged elite transnational universities from the US, France and India to open campuses there (Ball 2012). Just as the globalisation of other markets means that you can now buy a ‘Rolex’ of suspect provenance at street markets across South-East Asia, similarly some parts of GEI have inevitably involved the exploitation of brand recognition. The name of EtonHouse, a chain operating schools and preschools, arguably draws on the name of Eton College, with which it has no connection. Similarly, many international educational businesses include the word ‘Oxford’ in their title. The Oxford School Dubai is operated by LEAMS Education, an organisation based in the UAE. The Oxford School in Panama is a separate organisation operating a chain of international schools across the country. In neither case is there any evident connection to the University of Oxford, with the name simply symbolising educational quality. Similarly, the Oxford and Cambridge University images are leveraged by various companies who hire their college facilities during university vacations. Oxford Royale Academy, for example, enables students aged 13–18 to study a summer course while living on the campus of a prestigious university – Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrew’s or Yale – but employing their own teachers who have no connection with the university itself. A two-week course costs ambitious parents, for whom such names are alluring, in the region of £5000. I have written elsewhere, in my analysis of the Spears index of the best schools in the world (Bailey 2022), about these discursive moves that construct the idea of education being a global competition. Students and parents are positioned as consumers who want only the ‘best’ (which, in the case of the limited supply of places at a coveted school or university, means that someone else inevitably gets worse). Instead of education being a collective enterprise, the GEI promises that its products can give you advantage. It preys on parental fears that their children

46  The global education industry will miss out if they don’t spend sufficient on educational products and services. I will return to analysis of the consequences of marketisation of education below. The UK’s International Education Strategy The importance of the GEI, and the significance of these changes, is captured by examining the UK government’s International Education Strategy. The UK has published two key documents on this strategy – first, its document introducing the UK Government’s International Education Strategy (HM Government 2019) and, two years later, a document reporting on progress in implementing the strategy (HM Government 2021). Both contain a foreword co-written by the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for International Trade. I have undertaken Critical Discourse Analysis of both these documents, a ­research method extensively used by critical policy analysts (Lester, Lochmiller, and ­Gabriel 2017), and it is helpful to summarise the key findings here. Discourse is loosely understood as the set of unwritten rules about what can and cannot be said in a situation, and by whom. Critical discourse analysis seeks to understand the relationships between language and social practice, and is often used to analyse ‘powerful texts’ such as government policy documents (Simmie 2021). The GEI is noted as a major area of growth for the UK economy. British education exports and transnational education activities are together worth £23.3  ­billion, with an increase in value of 46.7% since 2010 (Department for Education 2020); of this, approximately, 69% came from higher education (and 1% from further education), 4% from independent schools, 8% from English Language Training and 9% from each of transnational education and education products and services. The International Education Strategy sets a target of increasing education exports to £35 billion, and increasing the number of international students in UK higher education to 600,000, by the year 2030 (HM Government 2019). Britain’s educational success is therefore measured in two ways – through numbers of students and the value of exports. Size and money therefore push aside consideration of educational quality or philosophy. The strategy establishes five key strategies for achieving this planned growth. First, an International Education Champion is to be appointed (by the time of the review document, this has occurred and the Champion is reporting on initial progress made). Second, attention is paid to the marketing of education, in particular to emphasise diverse aspects of higher education. Third, it is argued that education must be made more attractive and competitive, in particular the visa process must be streamlined. Fourth, there should be improved coordination ­between g­ overnment departments. Fifth, there should be improved documentation of education exports. What is notable about this education strategy is the emphasis on marketing, growth and trade rather than on anything that is educational. The foreword is couched entirely in the language of trade. It is about the reputation of education, how to export it and grow its market, rather than a consideration of what is actually being sold. The quality of UK education is mentioned later in the document,

The global education industry 47 but as a secondary consideration. With the Secretary of State for International Trade as the co-author, it is evident that international education is being framed as primarily an economic activity. Overall, the report identifies 23 actions that need to be taken by the British Government. Of these, 13 are actions for the Department for International Trade alone, 5 are for both the Department for ­International Trade and the Department for Education, and the remaining a­ ctions are assigned vaguely to the British Government. This evidences how the government envisages this policy being driven, and the commercial philosophy that underpins it. This way of framing international education omits other ways of viewing it. A trade and investment conceptualisation of a degree, for example, challenges the notion of education as holistic self-development or a collective social good. Instead, at each turn, the discussion returns to the financial. International students in higher education are lauded for the benefits they bring to British students and the British economy, plus the longer-term strategic benefit of having people friendly to the UK overseas. Improving the student experience of international students is presented not as a right or duty but as the way to maintain demand, so that ‘international students continue to see a UK higher education as a valuable, long-term investment’ (HM Government 2019, 11). A secondary aim for the strategy is included. There is explicit reference to the UK’s ‘soft power’ that is exercised through education (HM Government 2019, 2). Here, international education is being constructed as a political exercise, away to influence other countries. The wish that other countries around the world have to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals is mentioned as another opportunity increase demand for UK products. There is some acknowledgement of other reasons for education beyond making money, but these considerations are buried inside the document. For example, at one point it is mentioned that the world has ‘complex education needs’ (HM Government 2019, 10). The importance of providing enriching education to international students is briefly mentioned (HM Government 2019, 12), but this is presented as something that has already been accomplished rather than something on which institutions should be actively working. Discussion about making students feel welcomed is primarily focused on improving the visa application process. Other ways to approach international education are mentioned, such as meeting international objectives or British students benefiting from exposure to other cultures, but they appear late in the document. It is not until page 23 that the needs of other countries are considered. Here, issues such as girls’ education and raising children out of poverty are mentioned, and it is suggested that UK education can assist other countries with achieving their own goals. At a similar late stage in the document, it is also acknowledged that perhaps the UK could learn from education overseas, and German and Dutch vocational education, and Singapore and Shanghai maths teaching, are mentioned. It is noticeable that these are industry- and technology-focused aspects of education. On the following page, the importance of UK students studying overseas is mentioned; however, this is a passing mention and is not explored in detail.

48  The global education industry The second half of the document focuses on what the Department of Trade will do to support specific sectors, such as ECE or independent schools overseas. Most of this is couched in terms of helping them to identify export opportunities. There is mention of quality – but it is in terms of selling the British Schools Overseas accreditation process. The Education Champion is given a clear remit: They will be tasked with opening up international opportunities for the UK sector, connecting the education sector to overseas opportunities, and helping to overcome any challenges and barriers to growth. (HM Government 2019, 10) Again, what is telling here is what is omitted. There is, for example, no mention of whether British education should be adapted to fit other contexts, or of reflection on whether other nations’ needs can be met. In other words, this is an entirely UK-centric view of international education, about UK economics, rather than anyone or anything else. The document states that it is committed to educational diversity. However, in relation to this, it sets itself two targets: first, to deliver forms of education overseas other than higher education and, second, to welcome overseas students to various parts of the UK, beyond the main educational centres. In other words, this is not respectful diversity to ensure that complex needs of other nations or parts of the world are being met; this is diversification to increase market share. This framing of international education as an economic pursuit has implications for domestic education in the UK. First, the commitment to expand the number of international students in UK universities will impact on home students. Second, the document makes it clear that it wants this entrepreneurial mind-set to permeate domestic education when the strategy states that ‘Our objective is to drive ambition across the UK education sector …. To make a real difference, the government’s action must be met by the ambition and activity of the sector’ (HM Government 2019, 5). In the second report, providing an update on implementation of this strategy (HM Government 2021), there is a similar commodification of international education, but with a slight shift in emphasis. This time, the joint foreword by the two secretaries of state is accompanied by an additional foreword by Steve Smith, the International Education Champion whose appointment was a key a­ ction in the first document. Steve Smith places more emphasis on what British education has to offer the world, but sees his key role in terms of advancing trade, as he affirms: ‘I will passionately support every part of the sector’s ambitions and will work tirelessly to advance its interests’ (HM Government 2021, 6). The context of the new document is somewhat different than the original – it mentions the unforeseen impact of Covid-19 on student mobility, and it is noted that the UK now has a new relationship with the European Union. In this new context, there is more emphasis on political aspects of education than there was in the original document, stressing ‘a desire to build lasting and positive relationships around the world and establish the UK’s global position as a partner of

The global education industry 49 choice’ (HM Government 2021, 12). Here, then, education is conceptualised as something that can build Britain’s international relationships. However, the centrality of economics to politics is mentioned, as the UK’s new relationship with the EU is described as ‘centred on free trade and inspired by our shared history and values’ (HM Government 2021). As in the earlier document, international students are instrumentalised – they are welcomed for the benefits they bring to UK students and for being useful after graduation, either because they stay in the UK or b­ ecause they return to their home country and are useful to the UK there. As in the previous document, there is little mention of other ways of conceptualising education, and when these occur, they are linked back to financial and economic concerns. For example, international students are described as developing a warm relationship with the UK – and this is linked to future trade possibilities. Opportunities for British students to study overseas are seen as enriching – and connected to their preparation for the ‘global marketplace’. When the quality of education is mentioned, it is framed in terms of product reputation rather than as an intrinsic good. It is evident from this document that the assumption is that the world has much to learn from the UK, but there is no indication that the UK thinks it was anything to learn from the rest of the world. International Qualified Teacher Status (IQTS) is introduced as giving teachers worldwide the opportunity to train to British domestic standards, and it is specifically mentioned that this doesn’t apply just to international schools, but to government and other private schools overseas. Mention is made of more altruistic conceptions of education, but the priorities outlined in the document push these to one side. For example, the document talks briefly about girls’ access to education and support for students with special educational needs and disabilities. However, when Sir Steve’s immediate priority countries are identified – India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Nigeria – it is stated that they have been chosen because of their growth potential, rather than any of these other needs. In summary, in the UK, the financial returns to international education have transformed it into an important strand of the service sector, seen as a key driver of economic growth (De Wit et al. 2015); there is an emphasis on quality assurance to maintain the brand reputation of UK higher education. This exploration of UK policy documents echoes the claim by De Wit et al. (2015) that comprehensive internationalisation focused on the internationalisation of the curriculum has received little attention from European governments, with national strategies instead typically focusing on human resource development, economic gains and international reputation. It supports the suggestion that ‘within dominant institutional discourses, the value and extent of the internationalisation of HE is defined in terms of scale’ (Guion Akdağ and Swanson 2018, 68). Furthermore, the findings echo analysis of Canada’s international education policy by Johnstone and Lee (2017), who argue that it serves a neo-imperial agenda, with international students seen as a source of future human resources and soft power, with current eagerness to embrace global education reminiscent of ‘gold fever’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

50  The global education industry Overall, the role of the government in these documents is primarily to promote ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). These documents construct international students ‘as vectors who are assumed to serve British national interests and to increase the country’s soft power abroad’ (Hayes and Cheng 2020, 498). These documents display epistemic inequality, with post-colonial implicit assumptions of intellectual superiority of the previously conquering over the previously conquered (Hayes and Cheng 2020). Analysing the Global Education Industry The above critical discourse analysis of the UK government’s international ­education strategy points us to key recurrent aspects of the Global Education Industry that I shall consider in the following sections. First, I shall critically examine the marketisation and commodification of education through the GEI. Second, I shall consider specifically the ways in which the GEI replicates postcolonial inequalities. Third, I shall consider wider issues of power and inequality that are raised by these phenomena. A fourth wider consequence of the GEI, the revision of the relationship between the state and the private sector in education, is considered in the following chapter. Marketisation

Marketisation – the increased use of neoliberal market solutions to issues related to educational provision – has been noted above as one of the key tenets of the GEI. Proponents of the GEI argue that this will raise educational standards, suggesting that edupreneurs will offer dynamic alternatives to staid state education, but there is little evidence that this has occurred. Indeed, there has been extensive critique of the consequences of the commodification of education. Commodification positions education as an individual good rather than a public good; it is something that benefits the individual (to get them ahead of others), rather than something which serves society. This leads to shifts in what is seen as appropriate curriculum and assessment. We have seen what Biesta (2009) terms the ‘learnification’ of education, whereby there is a focus on measurable learning outputs for individuals. This marketised model conceptualises students as a future human resource in the labour market, so that there is an emphasis on the employability of students, instead of on their holistic development as fulfilled individuals and engaged citizens. Marketisation of higher education has led to increased emphasis on educational quantity rather than quality (De Wit et al. 2015), which has led some commentators to argue that we are seeing a McDonaldisation of education (Altbach 2013) – the marketing of a cheap, standardised product across the world, often through franchising of programmes. However, the reality of marketisation is more nuanced than the McDonaldisation thesis suggests. First, the international market for education maximises profits through careful market segmentation rather than rabid expansion. As a result, while some universities are servicing a mass market, where they aim to

The global education industry 51 deliver a low-cost product, seeking profit through expansion, on the other hand, elite institutions of higher education market a positional good – a prized credential from a ‘top’ university – by restricting supply (Marginson 2006). Second, there are early indications that there may be political limits set to such expansion. In the UK, for instance, tightened visa restrictions on people coming from overseas have been introduced, with suspicion of people’s motives for wanting to study there (Tannock 2018). Altbach and de Wit (2017) posit that the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, epitomised by such phenomena as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, will result in little government interest in internationalisation at home, and a reduction in UK government funding for internationalisation of higher education. Finally, the disdainful use of the term ‘McDonaldisation’ merits critique. Those who condemn the McDonaldisation of higher education rarely see the metaphor through to its logical conclusion and ask whether they would prefer education to remain a cosy little bistro, enjoyed only by a few gourmands. There are some massified aspects of the GEI that have had widespread benefits, complementing state provision; for instance, the edutech sector had a transformative impact in enabling continued access to education for millions of children during the Covid-19 pandemic. We should therefore avoid reaching a simplistic condemnation of a complex, multi-layered industry. Westernisation

Although nations in the Global South are emerging as strong players in international academic markets (De Wit et al. 2015), hitherto the dominant model of internationalisation of education has been ‘westernized, largely Anglo-Saxon, and predominantly English-speaking’ (de Wit 2019, 10). The processes of knowledge production and the reification of knowledge that form the foundation of the GEI come from a predominantly Western tradition. Within the patterns of student migration that are fostered by the GEI, European epistemic traditions are positioned as a ‘gold-standard’ (Ploner and Nada 2020). Arguably, this form of internationalisation of education constitutes an act of ‘epistemic violence’. Based on a feminist, post-colonial perspective, Spivak defined epistemic violence as ‘the remotely orchestrated, far flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’(Spivak 1988, 280). Empirical study of the consequences of the marketised pressure on educational institutions to attract international students shows how attention to income generation can negatively impact on non-Western students. A study of internationalisation at two Scottish universities identified a post-colonial othering of international students and an emphasis on superficial multicultural (Guion Akdağ and Swanson 2018). In another study, international students from both Germany and England reported universities behaving in an unethical way towards international students, for example not warning them about potential difficulties they might face because the university didn’t want to risk losing their fees (Hayes 2019). In addition, the idea of selling ‘best practice’ internationally that is baked into GEI markets can lead to cultural difficulties. Thier et al. (2020) show how

52  The global education industry prestigious research universities from Anglo-Saxon contexts are notable for their lack of engagement with cultural considerations in designating something ‘best practice’. Where acknowledgement of cultural difference is made, it is ­often cursory, with scant attention given to the practicalities involved in making cultural adaptations. I shall return to the ways in which internationalisation has been conflated with Westernisation later in this book. Power

The GEI’s reframing of education demarcates educational possibilities, which Steiner-Khamsi has termed ‘Businesses seeing like a state, governments calculating like a business’ (Steiner-Khamsi 2018, 382). This has led to shifting power relationships within education, with a move away from a focus on the state as the key player in educational decision-making towards a networked governance of schools, with figures and organisations in the GEI creating the shared sense of what is possible or desirable in education. For example, for Johnstone and Lee (2017), the marking of practices as ‘best practice’ by the OECD serves as an indisputable form of power. They describe the form of governance employed by the OECD as ‘coercive normalization’ ( Johnstone and Lee 2017, 1074). They see this as a form of governmentality whereby individuals are self-responsibilised, governed not by direct exercise of power but by an internalised way of thinking. International students then seek out the ‘best’ opportunities for education, travel in search of them, develop their human capital, seek employment – and become part of the data that is then used to support the claim that this is the ‘best’. The use of data systems, virtual learning environments and other educational technologies sold and promoted by key players in the GEI are transforming our sense of what it is possible and desirable to do within education. New forms of surveillance of students, teachers and parents are enabled by these technologies; using these, school management can monitor teachers’ and students’ behaviour out of school hours. During Covid-19, the overt use of algorithms by the UK government for national assessments provoked a public outcry. Yet, the algorithmisation of education had been identified as an emerging trend prior to the pandemic (Amos 2019), with the covert use of algorithms for personalised learning delivered by digital technologies already widespread. While commentators point to these concerning consequences of the GEI, the sector represents itself as having an unstoppable momentum. The GEI provides a rationale for its own continued expansion by describing its own work as ‘innovating, growing, sharing’ (Parreira do Amaral and Thompson 2019, 277). Built into its work is an assumption that education is a global good because it leads to economic growth and innovation. Whether economic growth is necessarily desirable and who gets to benefit from such growth (or, indeed, the environmental impact of such growth) remain unexamined. The economic interests of stakeholders in the GEI are conflated with a moral mission to improve the world.

The global education industry 53 Conclusion The growth of the Global Education Industry constitutes a seismic change in global education, which is instigating a new way of looking at education – the global gaze. The global gaze is not neutral. It privileges certain ways of ­conceptualising education, which are Western (Ploner and Nada 2020) and commodified (Thompson and Parreira do Amaral 2019); in which individuals are self-­responsibilised for their schooling ( Johnstone and Lee 2017) and international students are ­instrumentalised (Hayes and Cheng 2020); in which economic growth is unquestioned (Parreira do Amaral and Thompson 2019) and technological surveillance is normalised (Williamson 2021). Yet, this way of looking at things has remained largely unquestioned because the growth of education has felt like a global good, and the push towards internationalisation of education has felt like a moral mission that can promote peace and understanding. While parts of this industry may indeed have brought educational opportunities to millions, it has also brought millions in profits to a few. This is, we have seen, a multi-billion dollar industry primarily profiting Western multinationals (Ball 2012; Johnstone and Lee 2017; Robertson 2003). James Tooley’s advice to budding edupreneurs (Tooley 1999) may have brought them financial returns, but its educational benefits remain unproved. In the following chapter, we explore how this global gaze has impacted on the role of the state. References Altbach, Philip G, and Hans de Wit. 2017. “The New Nationalism and Internationalisation of HE.” University World News 474. Altbach, Philip G. 2013. “Franchising—The McDonaldization of Higher Education.” In The International Imperative in Higher Education, edited by Philip G. Altbach, 111–3. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Amos, S. Karin. 2019. “Digitization, Disruption, and the “Society of Singularities”: The Transformative Power of the Global Education Industry.” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 225–49. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Bailey, Lucy. 2021. International Schooling: Privilege and Power in Globalized Societies. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.    . 2022. “‘The Very Best Private Schools in the world’: Critical Discourse Analysis of the Spear’s Schools Index.” Globalisation, Societies and Education:1–13. doi: 10.1080/ 14767724.2022.2143329. Ball, Stephen J. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. London: Routledge. Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books Inc. Biesta, Gert. 2009. “Good Education in an Age of Measurement: On the Need to ­Reconnect With the Question of Purpose in Education.” Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability(Formerly: Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education) 21 (1):33–46. doi: 10.1007/s11092-008-9064-9. Bunnell, Tristan. 2008. “The Exporting and Franchising of Elite English Private Schools: The Emerging ‘Second Wave’.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 28 (4):383–93.

54  The global education industry Bunnell, Tristan, Aline Courtois, and Michael Donnelly. 2020. “British Elite Private Schools and Their Overseas Branches: Unexpected Actors in the Global Education ­Industry.” British Journal of Educational Studies 68 (6):691–712. Curtis, Polly. 2005. “Dulwich Pulls Out of Thai Partnership.” In The Guardian. de Wit, Hans. 2019. “Internationalization in Higher Education, a Critical Review.” SFU Educational Review 12 (3):9–17. De Wit, Hans, Fiona Hunter, Laura Howard, and Eva Egron-Polak. 2015. “Internationalisation of Higher Education.” In: Paris. Department for Education. 2020. “UK Revenue from Education Related Exports and Transnational Education Activity in 2018.” In edited by Department for Education. Online. Erfurth, Marvin. 2019. “International Education Hubs as Competitive Advantage: Investigating the Role of the State as Power Connector in the Global Education Industry.” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 181–202. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Guion Akdağ, Emma, and Dalene M. Swanson. 2018. “Ethics, Power, Internationalisation and the Postcolonial: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Policy Documents in Two Scottish Universities.” European Journal of Higher Education 8 (1):67–82. Hartong, Sigrid. 2019. “The Transformation of State Monitoring Systems in Germany and the US: Relating the Datafication and Digitalization of Education to the Global Education Industry.” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 157–80. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Hayes, Aneta. 2019. ““We Loved It Because We Felt That We Existed There in the Classroom!”: International Students as Epistemic Equals Versus Double-Country Oppression.” Journal of Studies in International Education 23 (5):554–71. doi: 10.1177/1028315319826304. Hayes, Aneta, and Jie Cheng. 2020. “Datafication of Epistemic Equality: Advancing Understandings of Teaching Excellence Beyond Benchmarked Performativity.” Teaching in Higher Education 25 (4):493–509. HM Government. 2019. “International Education Strategy: Global Potential, Global Growth.” Policy Paper.    . 2021. “International Education Strategy: 2021 Update: Supporting Recovery, Driving Growth.” In edited by Department for International Trade Department for Education. United Kingdom. Johnstone, Marjorie, and Eunjung Lee. 2017. “Canada and the Global Rush for International Students: Reifying a Neo-Imperial Order of Western Dominance in the Knowledge Economy Era.” Critical Sociology 43 (7–8):1063–78. Khan, Themrise, Seye Abimbola, Catherine Kyobutungi, and Madhukar Pai. 2022. “How We Classify Countries and People-and Why It Matters.” BMJ Glob Health 7 (6):e009704. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2022-009704. Kostrykina, Svetlana, Kerry Lee, and John Hope. 2018. “The west, the Rest and the Knowledge Economy: A Game Worth Playing?” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 22 (2):58–67. Lester, Jessica Nina, Chad R Lochmiller, and Rachael Gabriel. 2017. “Exploring the Intersection of Education Policy and Discourse Analysis: An Introduction.” Education Policy Analysis Archives 25 (25):n25. Lingard, Bob. 2019. “The Global Education Industry, Data Infrastructures, and the Restructuring of Government School Systems.” In Researching the Global Education ­

The global education industry 55 Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 135–55. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Marginson, Simon. 2006. “Dynamics of National and Global Competition in Higher Education.” Higher Education 52 (1):1–39. doi: 10.1007/s10734-004-7649-x. North London Collegiate School International Ltd. 2022. “About Canons Park.” A ­ ccessed 13th September. https://www.nlcsinternational.co.uk/consultancy/our-vision-aboutcanons-park. Parreira do Amaral, Marcelo, and Christiane Thompson. 2019. “Conclusion: Changing Education in the GEI—Rationales, Logics, and Modes of Operation.” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 273–90. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Ploner, Josef, and Cosmin Nada. 2020. “International Student Migration and the Postcolonial Heritage of European Higher Education: Perspectives from Portugal and the UK.” Higher Education 80 (2):373–89. Ridge, Natasha, and Susan Kippels. 2019. “UNESCO, Education, and the Private Sector: A Relationship on Whose Terms?” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita SteinerKhamsi and Christiane Thompson, 87–113. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Robertson, Susan. 2003. “WTO/GATS and the Global Education Services Industry.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 1 (3):259–66. Simmie, Geraldine Mooney. 2021. “The Pied Piper of Neo Liberalism Continues to Call the Tune in the Republic of Ireland: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Education Policy Texts from 2012 to 2021.” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies ( JCEPS) 19 (2):485–514. Slaughter, Sheila A., and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Nelson Cary and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Steiner-Khamsi, Gita. 2018. “Businesses Seeing Like a State, Governments Calculating Like a Business.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31 (5):382–92. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2018.1449980. Tannock, Stuart. 2018. Educational Equality and International Students: Justice across Borders? 39–67. Cham: Springer. Temple, Paul. 2012. Universities in the Knowledge Economy, Higher Education Organisation and Global Change. London: Routledge. Thier, Michael, Charles R. Martinez, Fahad Alresheed, Sloan Storie, Amanda Sasaki, McKenzie Meline, Jonathan Rochelle, Lauren Witherspoon, and Huna Yim-Dockery. 2020. “Cultural Adaptation of Promising, Evidence-Based, and Best Practices: a Scoping Literature Review.” Prevention Science 21 (1):53–64. doi: 10.1007/s11121-019-01042-0. Thompson, Christiane. 2019. “The Globalized Expert: On the Dissemination and Authorization of Evidence-Based Education.” In Researching the Global Education ­ ­Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 203–24. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Thompson, Christiane, and Marcelo Parreira do Amaral. 2019. “Introduction: Researching the Global Education Industry.” In Researching the Global Education Industry:

56  The global education industry Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do ­A maral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 1–21. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Tooley, James. 1999. “The Global Education Industry: Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries.” In edited by Institute of Economic Affairs. London.    . 2005. “The Global Education Industry: 2nd Edition.” In edited by Institute of Economic Affairs. London. Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. 2022. The Knowledge Economy. London: Verso Books. Verger, Antoni, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, and Christopher Lubienski. 2017. “The Emerging Global Education Industry: Analysing Market-Making in Education Through Market Sociology.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 15 (3):325–40. Williamson, Ben. 2021. “Education Technology Seizes a Pandemic Opening.” Current History 120 (822):15–20. doi: 10.1525/curh.2021.120.822.15. World Bank. 2013. “The Four Pillars of the Knowledge Economy.” Accessed 13th ­October. https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01503/external.html?link=http://go. worldbank.org/5WOSIRFA70.

4

Policy borrowing in international contexts West knows best

Introduction This chapter focuses on the shifting role of the state resulting from the expansion of the Global Education Industry (GEI), and how the global gaze delimits what we see as government rights and responsibilities. It explores key changes associated with the GEI that have impacted directly on national governments. First, it explores the rise of policy borrowing in education (Steiner-Khamsi 2016). It argues that policy borrowing serves the economic interests that were the focus of Chapter 3, but also constitutes a form of neo-colonialism by constructing standards that are de facto imposition of Western norms onto diverse systems of education (Romanowski 2022). The globalisation of higher education, for example, has only been driven partly by economic concerns, but also by state attempts to widen their socio-political influence (Naidoo 2011). Second, it identifies other means by which GEI activity indirectly impacts on national sovereignty. For example, one topic explored in this chapter is the concept of international accreditation, while a second example is the establishment of educational partnerships to develop ­national systems of education. I also consider how edutech has an increasing role in determining aspects of state education. This chapter contrasts the superficial equality of the global gaze, in which ­ostensibly any country can learn from the best wherever it is situated, with the ­implicit assumptions that dominate international education about who is the teacher and who the learner in international partnerships for policy borrowing. However, it does not position non-Western nations as passive victims of this process. Rather, the chapter analyses the story of nationhood that a country may seek to tell through positioning its education as ‘international’.

Policy Borrowing: Defined and Critiqued There is no inherent connection between policy borrowing – the transfer of policy ideas between different national contexts – and the GEI. Similarly, there is no necessary connection between policy development and the pursuit of profit. Nevertheless, one of the most lucrative areas of operation for the GEI has been the development and implementation of ideas drawing heavily from other countries. DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-4

58  Policy borrowing in international contexts Policy borrowing is the sourcing of policy by identifying ‘best practice’ overseas and then transferring it back home (Raffe and Semple 2011). Policy borrowing may be adopted for various reasons. In some contexts, there may be a lack of faith in the possibility of successful home-grown reform. In other contexts, there may be borrowing to help build policy consensus (Steiner-Khamsi 2016). The most prominent example of external pressure to borrow policies comes from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which has compared the performance of education systems to create rankings of countries achievement on, for example, reading, maths and science – and, more recently, global competence and other skills. These rankings are then used to create recommendations of ‘best practice’ for other countries to follow; key players in the GEI then offer to sell their skills in implementing these best practices. The idea that policies can be borrowed in this way, in order to move up the rankings, deserves critical examination. Phillips and Ochs (2003) identify four stages of policy borrowing: cross-­ national attraction, decision to implement a foreign policy, implementation and then indigenisation of the policy to the new context. Policy borrowing perhaps peaked in the UK with the exchange of policy ideas between the US and the UK in the Thatcher/Reagan years (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow 2012), each country seeking to reduce the role of the state and replace it with quasi-markets, an approach which permeated out to other countries and regions of the world. Other parts of the world have followed different policy borrowing trajectories. Looking at more recent policy development, Ball (2012) identifies the UK, the US, Australia, Chile, India, New Zealand and China as the key sites for policy development, from which policies are exported for experimentation around the world; the key sources in which policy discourses and rhetorics are developed; and the geographical locations for many of the largest globalised edu-businesses. The term ‘policy borrowing’ is employed here, as it has been widely used in the literature, although the expression is arguably misleading. The notion of ‘policy borrowing’ suggests a rather straightforward transfer of ideas between contexts. There are a number of issues with this concept, including its silence about the commodification of policy and the economic relationships that result; the ­human processes involved in the generation of policy by networks; the adaptation of policy as it is implemented in a new cultural context; and the power inequalities that may exist between the different nations involved. In many instances, for example, policy borrowing involves millions of dollars, and in fact constitutes the commodification of education policy (Ball 2012); international consultancies are brought into a country to develop policies and oversee their implementation. The term policy borrowing sounds anodyne, with equal agency on both sides, and an impermanence to the arrangement, as if an unsuccessful policy can be ‘returned to sender;’ certainly, individual policies can be abandoned, but the longterm impact of such ‘borrowing’ is thereby overlooked. Although a simple transfer may be how policies are presented to relevant stakeholders, policy actually emerges from global connections in a more complex manner, involving subtle shifts in power. Fontdevila and Verger (2019) identify five strategies that the private sector

Policy borrowing in international contexts 59 uses to influence educational policy-making: ‘lobbying, networking and brokerage, knowledge mobilization, grassroots mobilization, and sponsorship of pilot experiences’ (Fontdevila and Verger 2019, 50). An elite network of edupreneurs meet at conferences, present to seminars together, belong to the same networking organisations. However, we should avoid inferring that this ­international move is driven by individuals, even one as prominent as the ubiquitous Andreas Schleicher – the Director of the Education and Skills Directorate at the OECD – who spends considerable time addressing events where representatives from the edutech industry are gathered. It is therefore over-simplistic to see the economic relationships of markets as alone explaining the policy changes that are occurring. Instead, we are seeing an increased salience of networks – collaborations, partnerships and networking – in the GEI, with a consequent blurring of the boundaries between state and society (Ball 2012). For Ball, understanding these networks is key to understanding the GEI and how policy is exported in part through the activity of multinational education companies. With colleagues from Australia and the US (an example of the internationalisation of education in its own right), I have similarly argued that analysis of policy networks is critical to understanding global education policy (Ledger et al. 2019). Some of these networks are commercial in nature, but a second means of policy export is through transnational advocacy networks (TANs), which involve cross-border exchange of ideas between people who have a values commitment to changing education. TANs are able to influence governments through their use of information (access to relevant facts), symbols (stories and symbols that appeal to key audiences), leverage (connections to key players) and accountability (ability to bring political pressure on key stakeholders). One TAN investigated by Ball (2012) is the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a neoliberal organisation based in the US that aims to spread neoliberal ideas globally. Ball charts how key figures in this TAN have promoted private schools for the poor in India, but equally have sought to resist attempts to regulate these schools. Dissatisfaction with the terminology of ‘policy borrowing’ has led some theorists to suggest alternative nomenclature that captures how processes of policy implementation may lead to adaptation and unexpected consequences – and that this is a desirable part of the process. Raffe and Semple (2011) propose the replacement of ‘policy borrowing’ with a ‘policy-learning’ approach, whereby policy-makers tailor policy to their own context. Policy learning doesn’t look for an off-the-peg solution, but instead uses evidence on the implementation of policies elsewhere to reflect on one’s own system, identify a range of options, analyse the process of change and anticipate problems that might occur with implementation. In other words, it is a more dynamic and reflective process. The concept of policy learning aims to address critique of policy borrowing for having been predominantly unidirectional, with policies usually taken from Anglophone countries, such as the US, and implemented in cultures where there are very different understandings of the nature and transfer of knowledge (Tan and Chua 2015). The nomenclature of ‘policy borrowing’ suggests a kindly sharing of ideas ­between equals, whereas the realities of policy exchanges have sometimes been

60  Policy borrowing in international contexts less benign. This is well illustrated by a study by Nguyen (2014) exploring French and American competing attempts to influence the Vietnamese education system during the Vietnam War. The French sought to maintain their elite cultural ­influence, while the Americans aimed to fight an ideological battle against Communism. Vietnam was in essence the sight of a neo-colonial struggle, and Nguyen charts how both nations enjoyed limited success in controlling Vietnamese education. More recently, adoption of specific education policies has been set as conditions for funding by international organisations (Auld and Morris 2014); my own work in Malaysia involved leading a strand of a multi-million training consortium between the World Bank and the Bangladesh government to upskill college teachers in the country. The World Bank funded the project, but set conditions concerning how, and by whom, the teacher training would take place (Bailey 2022a). Policy borrowing, then, is not necessarily benign or voluntary. To exemplify how policy borrowing should be understood as a complex and nuanced process whereby the meaning of policy is constructed in context, and may have unexpected or limited effects, I shall briefly discuss one region where it has been extensively employed. Case Study: Policy Borrowing in the Countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council The use of policy borrowing through the GEI in the countries of the Global Cooperation Council (GCC) is perhaps the most extensive in the world (Mohamed and Morris 2021), and I have written elsewhere about policy borrowing in the GCC generally and Bahrain specifically (Bailey 2022b). Here, elements in the GEI have developed a business model whereby nation-states enter into commercial arrangements for policy prescription and implementation, based on ‘global best practice’ as identified by international measurements. Commentators have noted that policy borrowing in this region has been rooted in historical post-colonial inequalities (Mohamed and Morris 2021; Romanowski, Alkhateeb, and Nasser 2018); however, it is important not to oversimplify the situation. It is true that, for example, the Quality Assurance Authority for schools in Bahrain (the BQA) is modelled upon the UK’s Ofsted, and a system of national examinations was developed in consultations with Cambridge Examinations in the UK. However, policies and institutional frameworks have not invariably come from Western contexts; Singapore’s National Institute of Education, for example, served as the model for the Bahrain Teachers College, and provided the initial programmes used in the college. Employing international consultancy is undertaken voluntarily in this part of the world; while GCC education systems are still developing, the countries are affluent (Mohamed and Morris 2021) and independent of pressure from international agencies such as the World Bank, who may have their own policy agendas. Here, policy borrowing is in part a symbolic move; it demonstrates a commitment to develop ‘world-class’ schools for the purpose of legitimating domestic policies (Mohamed and Morris 2021). To use the concept central to the current book, the global gaze is being deployed to legitimate domestic politics. Developing the

Policy borrowing in international contexts 61 metaphor of the gaze, by focusing attention on the internationalised long distance, attention is distracted from objects closer to hand. Considerable resources have been invested in addressing perceived educational shortcomings, for example with McKinsey and RAND shaping extensive reforms in Qatar and Bahrain, and overseeing the employment of further sub-­ contractors. Nevertheless, these policies have not fully achieved their stated objectives ­(Mohamed and Morris 2021). Part of the failure may be intrinsic to reliance on commercial organisations. Put simply, the GEI has a financial incentive to pedal successive policy reforms to countries, so that their work is never done and their income continues to flow. Consequently, one round of policy implementation may lead to transitional issues, and the sale of further reforms to solve these, rather than a longer-term and reflective implementation approach. It is therefore unsurprising that short-term cycles of ineffectual policy implementation have characterised the interventions of GEI players in the GCC (Abou-El-Kheir and MacLeod 2019). Additionally, limited success in importing policy moves may be a consequence of the cultural scripts that underpin education in the GCC – the taken for granted assumptions about what constitutes good education – which differ markedly from those of the West and therefore have impeded successful policy borrowing ­(Romanowski, Alkhateeb, and Nasser 2018). For example, Romanowski, Alkhateeb, and Nasser (2018) suggest that Arab students tend to believe that the acquisition of knowledge is a central element in education; that authorities are a source of knowledge and rules and traditions should be valued; and that good teachers transmit knowledge in a structured classroom environment. These cultural scripts mean that the implementation of Western teaching and learning ­approaches, rooted in constructivism, may create discomfort for Arab students and consequently be unsuccessful unless they are adapted for the cultural context. International Accreditation: Replacing Governmental Oversight? The preceding section discussed the direct importation of policies from other countries. However, a second way in which borrowing may occur is with the importation of the standards by which policy success is judged; here, I refer to the processes and standards for accreditation and qualification. The importation of policy borrowing offers an overt example of overseas influence on state educational activity; by contrast, the rise of systems of international accreditation is an indirect way by which nation sovereignty may be eroded as a result of the activities of the GEI. The export of standards may be done either by governments or by private organisations. For example, the UK government has affirmed its commitment to create an International Qualified Teacher Status (iQTS) which can be used by both state and private systems overseas (HM Government 2021). In addition, there is a range of non-governmental organisations offering accreditation of international schools. International accreditation is subject to the same questions about cultural ­applicability that I discussed above in relation to policy borrowing. For example, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) is a US

62  Policy borrowing in international contexts organisation that offers international accreditation of teacher preparation programmes, thereby influencing criteria for judging teacher training worldwide. Yet, teachers working in different settings – for instance, a highly-centralised school system with large classes; a system preparing students for an agrarian economy; or schools based in an oil-rich nation with guaranteed jobs in a public-sector-­ dominated economy – require different skills to those needed by teachers in the US, so there needs to be appropriate national contextualisation of CAEP standards. This issue will be discussed further in Chapter 9. Partnerships and Policies A further example of indirect international influence over national systems of education has been the establishment of educational partnerships. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been presented as the ‘silver bullet’ (Gericke 2022, 838) that can solve educational problems. This is a heterogeneous field, including ­publicly-funded private provision, private service contracts and joint collaborations, and the private element may involve either for-profit or non-profit organisations. Ball (2012) argues that ‘new philanthropy’ has come to dominate non-profit international education initiatives. New philanthropy differs from traditional philanthropy in its use of the language, norms and practices of commercial ­enterprises to organise philanthropic organisations, such as the setting of outcome targets. This is educational practice à la mode of a multinational, and key players ­include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. ­Operating within the same space, ‘social capitalists’ offer for-profit goods and services with a philanthropic mission, aiming to transform access to education. Ball’s analysis captures a complex and rapidly changing array of organisations and individuals operating in the neoliberal landscape of global educational activity. There is a blurring of profit/non-profit and other organisational distinctions. Individuals may have a portfolio of activities where they are simultaneously government consultants, edupreneurs and philanthropists in different locations, so that they are simultaneously both governmental and non-governmental players. Edutech It is not only those aspects of the GEI that are directly concerned with policy which have impacted on the role of the state in education. The edutech industry now has considerable influence over pedagogy, assessment and roles in national systems of education, a trend that has been rapidly accelerated by the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2017, the New York Times ran an article entitled ‘How Google took over the classroom’, describing how Google software and hardware was transforming American public schools (Singer 2017). It referred to the widespread use of Google classroom, Google docs and Chromebooks in schools, suggesting that this was driving a ‘philosophical change’ in public education from an emphasis on the knowledge needed to be effective citizens to the nurturing of teamwork and

Policy borrowing in international contexts 63 problem-solving skills needed by skilled workers, with children being concomitantly prepared to be future Google consumers. Google classroom changes pedagogic practices by introducing automation and new forms of surveillance of student activity, and encouraging new forms of student participation. It alters forms of assessment and feedback by facilitating certain question structures and means of releasing results to students. It organises the division of labour and forms of communication between administrators, teachers, students and their guardians. Many of these changes are discussed by Perrotta et al. (2021), who argue that while the platform logics of Google are not deterministic, they have the potential to shape participation by key stakeholders in education. Implications for the State In the first half of this chapter, I have outlined some of the ways in which the evolving GEI is impinging on national education policy and state educational practices. In the remainder of this chapter, I will consider the consequences of these changes for the role of the nation-state in education. There are two main arguments that have been put forward: some theorists have suggested that we are seeing a diminished role for the state in education policy-making, as it is replaced by commercial interests; others have suggested that the role of the state in education is evolving rather than reducing. There is some evidence that the adoption of a global gaze may in some respects reduce the power of the state over educational policy-making. Significant players in the GEI present themselves as drawing upon evidence-based educational research, and through this every educational consumer is implicitly exhorted to become involved in a global project of educational innovation based on the recommendations of global experts such as Pearson and Andreas Schleicher (Thompson 2019). Thompson (2019) critically analyses pronouncements by Schleicher, showing how they construct global experts as superior to national experts, as if the latter were somehow more blinkered in their mind-set; the global view is presented as better, with national views and traditions implicitly diminished as a form of bias. Key players in the GEI view public education as currently inefficient or misguided, they have a distrust in government, and they want to disrupt current public education so that it becomes better suited to their imagined future (Parreira do Amaral and Thompson 2019). The term ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ (GERM) – an acronym coined by Sahlberg (2011) – is a powerful metaphor which captures how an educational policy-making orthodoxy has spread across the world, infecting education systems like a virus. Sahlberg sees this orthodoxy as having three central tenets: first, an emphasis on constructivism alongside core competencies in literacy and numeracy; second, a concern with guaranteed learning outcomes for all; and third, an emphasis on accountability in education. Sahlberg argues that the GERM is disseminated by consultancy firms and development agencies. Standardisation, managerialism, competition and a focus on marketised accountability have thereby come to dominate global educational discourse as some of the symptoms of the GERM (Sahlberg 2012). In such ways,

64  Policy borrowing in international contexts national governments become subject to, rather than constructors of, prevailing educational orthodoxy. Other theorists have also identified global orthodoxies that are shaping ­national policy-making. Auld and Morris (2014) identify a ‘New Paradigm’ in policymaking, which uses international data to identify successful policies with the aim of achieving ‘world-class’ schools; their focus is on England, but they note that this paradigm has also been adopted in diverse contexts. They question whether the somewhat elusive aim of creating ‘world-class schools’ is meaningful and ­identify three implicit assumptions which underpin the paradigm: first, that education systems have commensurable aims and outcomes which can be captured by key assessment surveys; second, that performance in these assessments directly relates to future economic performance; and, third, that education policies have a universal causal impact. The underlying ideology is that education is seen in terms of its economic usefulness, rather than its role in promoting other values such as equity or social cohesion. High-performing systems are identified and their policies imported, on the assumption that educational policies and outcomes are causally related to outcomes, and factors exogenous to education can be ignored; this involves ignoring size differences in education systems and exceptions to perceived trends. Purveyors of this new paradigm acknowledge its methodological limitations, but then proceed with making recommendations regardless, using a crisis rhetoric to justify their cavalier attitude. Auld and Morris (2014) do not conclude that governments lose all discretionary power over policy – indeed, they argue that the paradigm is used in some less affluent countries to legitimate existing policy priorities – but argue this shared global framing of education policy may limit national variation. The GEI’s sale of edutech to education systems may erode the power of governments in other ways. Those holding the power of data generation are subtly shifting power away from state players; one of the consequences of the GEI is that education policy is no longer formed mainly on the basis of peer-reviewed, independent research, but instead there is reliance on knowledge, produced, funded, collected and disseminated by non-neutral players, either corporations seeking profits or advocates with a political agenda (Fontdevila and Verger 2019). Danaher (2016) has coined the term ‘algocracy’ to describe the use by government of algorithms to make decisions over education and other areas of public policy. While there may be advantages to the use of algorithms, they may undermine the perceived legitimacy of state decision-making, with people feeling that algorithms are hidden and that their use of data is opaque. Moreover, as algorithms are used to collect and organise data, as well as assist in its analysis and communication, they shape how decisions are made and hence erode government autonomy over public policy. There are, then, multiple ways in which the GEI can be seen as reducing state power; however, other theorists have argued that the role of the state is evolving rather than diminished (Ball 2012; Erfurth 2019). For Erfurth (2019), the contemporary state is a power connector rather than a power container. He sees this as exemplified in the International Education Hubs created in some nations in the Middle East and South-East Asia. To establish these, the states involved broker

Policy borrowing in international contexts 65 connections between financial, research and education stakeholders. The hub positions the country involved as a key player in international networks. For Erfurth, his case study of the United Arab Emirates demonstrates that the ideational work in establishing a hub is an important role played by the state, whereas traditional analysis of the role of the state has focused on its material contributions. Rather than directly delivering education in these hubs, the state creates a business-driven environment that enables private higher education to flourish. Similarly, Verger, Steiner-Khamsi, and Lubienski (2017) argue that markets do not just appear, but are influenced by three forces: networks (between political, social or economic actors, who have influence either formally or informally), cognitive frames (understandings of problems and conceptions of possible solutions that influence how policy is constructed) and institutions (the frameworks and procedures within which actors operate). What this suggests is that, within a marketised system, the role of the state may have changed from directly deciding policy to its role in establishing the networks, cognitive frames and institutional framework in which privatised players generate their own policy solutions. In this alternative understanding of the effects of the GEI, governments continue to have a role in conceptualising ‘promising practices’ (Thier et al. 2020) from other contexts, and overseeing the frameworks in which they might be ­i mplemented, rather than determining that certain ‘best practices’ from elsewhere are implemented as domestic solutions. Indeed, Steiner-Khamsi (2016) argues that terms such as ‘best practice’ and ‘international standards’ act as catalysts for change even when they have no agreed definition – through providing a terrifying ­v ision of falling behind in a global competition – and that these are a domestically rooted rhetoric, rather than one that is imposed from outside. For instance, she notes that policy analysts in the US, Korea, Japan and the US all provided different ­accounts as to why Finland performed so well in PISA assessments, in each case the e­ xplanation being rooted in justification of a particular domestic policy. Similarly, Maxwell et al. (2020) use the term ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ to understand the competing pressures on education systems to adopt a global gaze while simultaneously addressing national concerns. They contrast how the global is drawn on very differently in the contrasting national contexts of Israel, South Korea and the US; in other words, cosmopolitan aspects of education are instrumentalised to legitimate national education policies. This more nuanced understanding of the evolving role of the state in education and its relationship to the GEI moves us away from a simplistic understanding of power being wielded by a few powerful multinationals and individuals to seeing it as providing a global gaze that delimits but doesn’t determine, it is ‘a move from government to governance’ (Lingard and Rawolle 2010, 34). This helps us to understand why not all the important players in the GEI are Western, despite their dominance of big educational multinational corporations. For example, Singapore has capitalised on an international perception that it achieved economic transformation from being a small, underdeveloped colony to an international, independent power-house primarily through reform of its education system (Kirk 2014). It has sought to position itself as a ‘Global Schoolhouse’ (Sidhu 2005),

66  Policy borrowing in international contexts selling educational services to Abu Dhabi (in the United Arab Emirates), Bahrain and several less affluent nations (Low and Lee 2012). The global gaze, then, is part of the framing of policy, but government ­retains an active role in whether that framing is one of legitimation, glorification, sensationalism or caution (Greveling, Amsing, and Dekker 2014). It is part of the ‘eduscape’ (Breidenstein et al. 2018) of diverse educational contexts, in say London, Singapore or Berlin, the global backdrop to educational ideas and practices that does not preclude contextually-specific variation in how policies are selected, implemented and manifested. Conclusion In his book, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, Yong Zhao implicitly uses a global gaze (the wish that learners should be ‘world class’) to argue that educating entrepreneurs through teaching creativity is important because they are better able to solve complex problems than either governments or supranational organisations (Zhao 2012). In this chapter, I have examined how such a view of government has become possible, and the parameters established for educational policies within this. Let me be clear: Zhao is not supportive of the marketisation of education and, in fact, his argument for child-centred education to replace employment-­ oriented education is at odds with much of the GEI. Nevertheless, the GEI is infinitely flexible; it is as happy to sell its products to those who reject commodification as to those who do. The key point is that a progressive educationalist, promoting creativity, adopts a framing of education that supports this industry – that learners need to be ‘world class’ and that governments are weak, ineffectual or corrupt. Zhao ends his book by preparing a list of features of ‘a world class school ready to prepare their students to become global, creative, and entrepreneurial’ (Zhao 2012, 20). In this chapter, I have analysed the phenomenon of policy borrowing and some other key aspects of the GEI – international accreditations, PPPs and the rise of the edutech sector – which are challenging established roles for national governments in its oversight of national education. We have seen that this global gaze, manifested in part through the GEI, is transforming, and not simply diminishing, the role of the state in relation to education. We have charted inequalities in the consequences of this gaze, while noting the agency of state (and other) players to use its rhetoric to legitimate their choices. Most importantly, we have seen that the global gaze makes this exponential growth of the GEI and the consequent shift in public-private relations seem normal or inevitable, when in fact it is the product of social organisation and political choice. References Abou-El-Kheir, Amir, and Paul MacLeod. 2019. “The Struggle for Balance: Policy Borrowing and Continuous Reform in the Practice of English Language Teaching in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries.” In Second Handbook of English Language Teaching, edited by Xuesong Gao, 31–49. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Policy borrowing in international contexts 67 Auld, Euan, and Paul Morris. 2014. “Comparative Education, the ‘New Paradigm’ and Policy Borrowing: Constructing Knowledge for Educational Reform.” Comparative Education 50 (2):129–55. Bailey, Lucy. 2022a. “Masters of Change? Reflections on the Use of an MA Programme to Upskill the College Sector in Bangladesh.” In Global Perspectives on Teacher Performance Improvement, 73–90. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.    . 2022b. “Not Another Singapore: Processes and Principles for Revising Pre-­ Service Teaching Education in Bahrain.” In Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Pedagogical Innovations and Practices in the Middle East, edited by Myint Swe Khine, 445–57. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore. Ball, Stephen J. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. London: Routledge. Breidenstein, Georg, Martin Forsey, Fenna La Gro, Jens Oliver Krüger, and Anna Roch. 2018. “Choosing International: A Case Study of Globally Mobile Parents.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Kruger and Werner Helsper, 161–79. Cham: Springer. Danaher, John. 2016. “The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation.” Philosophy & Technology 29 (3):245–68. doi: 10.1007/s13347-015-0211-1. Erfurth, Marvin. 2019. “International Education Hubs as Competitive Advantage: ­Investigating the Role of the State as Power Connector in the Global Education Industry.” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business ­Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 181–202. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Fontdevila, Clara, and Antoni Verger. 2019. “The Political Turn of Corporate Influence in Education: A Synthesis of Main Policy Reform Strategies.” In Researching the Global ­Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 47–68. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Gericke, Christina. 2022. “The Global Education Industry in a Microcosm: Public­Private Networks in German Public Schooling.” Journal of Education Policy 37 (5):838–56. doi: 10.1080/02680939.2021.1915501. Greveling, Linda, Hilda T. A. Amsing, and Jeroen J. H. Dekker. 2014. “Crossing Borders in Educational Innovation: Framing Foreign Examples in Discussing Comprehensive Education in the Netherlands, 1969–1979.” Paedagogica Historica 50 (1–2):76–92. doi: 10.1080/ 00309230.2013.872684. HM Government. 2021. “International Education Strategy: 2021 Update: Supporting ­recovery, driving growth.” In edited by Department for International Trade Department for Education. United Kingdom. Kirk, Daniel John. 2014. “The “Singapore of the Middle East”: The Role and Attractiveness of the Singapore Model and TIMSS on Education Policy and Borrowing in the Kingdom of Bahrain.” In Education for a Knowledge Society in Arabian Gulf Countries, 127–49. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Ledger, Susan, Michael Thier, Lucy Bailey, and Christine Pitts. 2019. “OECD’s Approach to Measuring Global Competency: Powerful Voices Shaping Education.” Teachers College Record 121 (8):1–40. Lingard, Bob, and Shaun Rawolle. 2010. “Globalization and the Rescaling of Education Politics and Policy: Implications for Comparative Education.” In New Thinking in Comparative Education, edited by Marianne A. Larsen, 33–52. Rotterdam: Sense.

68  Policy borrowing in international contexts Low, Ee-Ling, and Sing-Kong Lee. 2012. “Bringing Singapore’s Teacher Education ­Beyond Its Shores.” Educational Research for Policy and Practice 11 (1):43–51. doi: 10.1007/ s10671-011-9116-7. Maxwell, Claire, Miri Yemini, Laura Engel, and Moosung Lee. 2020. “Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Cases of South Korea, Israel and the US.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 41 (6):845–58. Mohamed, Maryam, and Paul Morris. 2021. “Buying, Selling and Outsourcing Educational Reform: The Global Education Industry and ‘Policy Borrowing’ in the Gulf.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51 (2):181–201. doi: 10.1080/ 03057925.2019.1607255. Naidoo, Rajani. 2011. “Rethinking Development: Higher Education and the New ­Imperialism.” In Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, edited by Roger King, Simon Marginson and Rajani Naidoo, 40–58. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Nguyen, Thuy-Phuong. 2014. “The Rivalry of the French and American Educational Missions During the Vietnam War.” Paedagogica Historica 50 (1–2):27–41. doi: 10.1080/ 00309230.2013.872683. Parreira do Amaral, Marcelo, and Christiane Thompson. 2019. “Conclusion: Changing Education in the GEI—Rationales, Logics, and Modes of Operation.” In Researching the Global Education Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 273–90. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Perrotta, Carlo, Kalervo N. Gulson, Ben Williamson, and Kevin Witzenberger. 2021. “Automation, APIs and the Distributed Labour of Platform Pedagogies in Google Classroom.” Critical Studies in Education 62 (1):97–113. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2020. 1855597. Phillips, David, and Kimberly Ochs. 2003. “Processes of Policy Borrowing in Education: Some Explanatory and Analytical Devices.” Comparative Education 39 (4):451–61. doi: 10. 1080/0305006032000162020. Raffe, David, and Sheila Semple. 2011. Policy Borrowing or Policy Learning? How (not) to ­Improve Education Systems. Edinburgh: Centre for Educational Sociology. Romanowski, Michael H. 2022. “CAEP Accreditation: Educational Neocolonialism and non-US Teacher Education Programs.” Higher Education Policy 35:199–217. Romanowski, Michael H., Hadeel Alkhateeb, and Ramzi Nasser. 2018. “Policy Borrowing in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries: Cultural Scripts and Epistemological Conflicts.” International Journal of Educational Development 60:19–24. doi: 10.1016/j. ijedudev.2017.10.021. Sahlberg, Pasi. 2011. “The Fourth Way of Finland.” Journal of Educational Change 12 (2):173–85. doi: 10.1007/s10833-011-9157-y.    . 2012. “How GERM Is Infecting Schools Around the World.” In Washington Post. Sidhu, Ravinder. 2005. “Building a Global Schoolhouse: International Education in Singapore.” Australian Journal of Education 49 (1):46–65. doi: 10.1177/000494410504900103. Singer, Natasha. 2017. “How Google Took Over the Classroom.” In New York Times. Steiner-Khamsi, Gita. 2016. “New Directions in Policy Borrowing Research.” Asia Pacific Education Review 17 (3):381–90. Steiner-Khamsi, Gita, and Florian Waldow. 2012. World Yearbook of Education 2012: Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education. London: Routledge. Tan, Charlene, and Catherine SK Chua. 2015. “Education Policy Borrowing in China: Has the West Wind Overpowered the East Wind?” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 45 (5):686–704.

Policy borrowing in international contexts 69 Thier, Michael, Charles R. Martinez, Fahad Alresheed, Sloan Storie, Amanda Sasaki, McKenzie Meline, Jonathan Rochelle, Lauren Witherspoon, and Huna Yim-Dockery. 2020. “Cultural Adaptation of Promising, Evidence-Based, and Best Practices: A Scoping Literature Review.” Prevention Science 21 (1):53–64. doi: 10.1007/s11121-019-01042-0. Thompson, Christiane. 2019. “The Globalized Expert: On the Dissemination and Authorization of Evidence-Based Education.” In Researching the Global Education ­ ­Industry: Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 203–24. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Verger, Antoni, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, and Christopher Lubienski. 2017. “The Emerging Global Education Industry: Analysing Market-Making in Education Through Market Sociology.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 15 (3):325–40. Zhao, Yong. 2012. World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

5

Preparing students for a globalised world Global classroom

Introduction In 2013, a book about education hit the New York Times bestseller list, received plaudits as one of the most notable books of the year and was rapidly published in 15 countries. Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World: and how they got that way followed three American children as they spent one year of high school in Finland, South Korea and Poland. Ripley’s book was offered an analysis of how American education might change so that it, too, could produce the best. This was not an isolated phenomenon. In 2020, Spear’s launched its index of ‘the very best private schools in the world’. Spear’s, a lifestyle magazine, partnered with Carfax Education, an international education consultancy, to provide a list of the top schools, providing useful details such as the distance between each school and the closest international airport, the school’s reputation, the typical clientele and its curriculum. My discourse analysis of this index suggested six assumptions underpinning it: that the best schools can be judged independent of context; that education is a global competition to become the best; that the best schools are supranational rather than embedded in their national context; that private and western schools are typically better; that parental choice of schools should be made globally and that schooling is an investment in a child (Bailey 2022). What these two instances have in common is the conceptualisation of education as a global competition, with the purpose of educational institutions being to assist children to get ahead in that competition. In both cases, the global gaze is being used to determine a competitive purpose for education, with consequences for both the student subjectivities being constructed through education and the skills these students are expected to acquire. The first four chapters of this book have introduced readers to the macro forces determining the shape of the global market for education; the remainder of this book interrogates the nature of internationalised education further. In this and the following chapters, the discussion problematises who are studying internationally, where they are studying, what they are learning and who they are learning it from, and looks at how each of these is represented and restricted through the global gaze. This chapter focuses on the experiences of students in internationalised classrooms, both in schooling and higher education, although it reserves DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-5

Preparing students for a globalised world 71 discussion of international schooling – a very particular phenomenon – for the following chapter. The chapter argues that being international has transformed domestic educational institutions as well as those which explicitly purport to be international, by affecting how they conceptualise their institutional purpose, curriculum content and institutional identity. It looks both at international students (those who cross a national boundary to study) and internationalised students (those who are ­expecting to behave globally, whether they cross a national boundary or not). The pressure to be international or global has impacted the subjectivities that are ­being shaped through education, with elite institutions now focusing on fostering cosmopolitan identities (Maxwell et al. 2018), and non-elite institutions judged for whether their students are globally competent. It has impacted the curriculum studied by these students, which is now conceptualised as preparing students for mobile futures in a global marketplace rather than for the local economy. It has created imperatives upon institutions to recruit students and market themselves internationally, with expansion an assumed aim, so that imagined institutional identities and priorities are also impacted by the international turn. This chapter examines the role of the English language in this transformation. Particular attention will be paid to the inequalities which are reinforced by this internationalising transformation, with consideration of whether the global gaze is, in its essence, neo-colonial. The chapter will provide overall analysis and theorising of the changes for educational experiences implicit in the global gaze and will include d­ iscussion of both state schooling and universities. Consideration of specific aspects of this will be reserved for later chapters. International schools – institutions that are dedicated to serving international communities offering non-national programmes – will be examined separately in Chapter 6. The experiences of disadvantaged ­m igrant students, specifically refugees and asylum seekers, will be focused on in ­Chapter 7. The consequences of these changes for teacher subjectivities will be considered separately in Chapter 8. Certification and the assessment of what constitutes ­excellence will be the focus of Chapter 9. The current chapter introduces key ideas related to inequalities within internationalisation that will recur in the subsequent chapters. Internationalised Curriculum and Assessment The idea that what happens in a classroom is in some way linked to the forces of internationalisation or globalisation is comparatively new. Until the 1990s, the focus of education was on preparing a child to fit into their national community. In addition, what happened within that classroom was the province of the nationstate. The idea that what happened in a Finnish classroom could have any bearing on what happened in an Emirati one has involved a transformation in how we conceptualise the purpose and purview of education, yet it is now taken for granted. This, I suggest, has involved a transformation of how we conceptualise education itself.

72  Preparing students for a globalised world The learning experiences of students and the way they are assessed have been transformed by the global gaze. The international turn imagines a global future for students, which impacts the knowledge, skills and attitudes they are assumed to need from their education. In this way, visualising futures internationally ­impacts the student subjectivities created by education. The connection between education and employability needs to be unravelled if we are to understand the wider shifting connections between education and neoliberal capitalism, but under the international gaze, the connection is held to be firm and unquestionable. While at university level, one of the primary foci has been on student mobility for global futures and successful careers, at school level instead futures have been conceptualised as national economic success achieved through national performance on internationally standardised tests. It is comparatively recently that national systems have become open to forms of internationalising their curriculum, either formally through the written curriculum or through other aspects of the student experience; prior to this, nationstates maintained a focus on their sovereign interests in government schools (Tarc 2022), as well as maintaining restrictions on their nationals receiving international schooling within their national borders (Bailey 2015). However, in recent years, there has been a focus on bringing internationalised elements into national classrooms. At school level, this has been achieved through curriculum and ethos change; at higher education level, the interest has been primarily (though not exclusively) student mobility, along with some elements of curricular adaptation. Researchers have identified that elite schools increasingly may be ‘globally i­magining’ their schools and the opportunities that they offer to their students. Kenway and Fahey (2014) point to extracurricular activities with a global twist – these might be the Model United Nations or international service education trips – and the worldwide university aspirations communicated to students as being elements of the global ethos in elite schools. However, for most students, studying in government schools, curriculum change has been incremental. An exception to this has been the encroachment of the International Baccalaureate (IB) into national systems of education. The IB, a qualification originally developed to provide credentials to the children of globally mobile professionals attending international schools, has been adopted within some national systems of education, either at national level or by individual schools. Initial evidence suggested that it was first adopted by a few schools, both public and private, in order to confer advantage within neoliberal, marketised systems of education and primarily served the socioeconomically privileged (Dickson, Perry, and Ledger 2017). In more recent years, the expansion of the IB into inner city schools in the US and the UK and into government schools in Ecuador provides evidence that it is no longer solely serving elite communities (Tarc 2022). However, although IB marketing materials boast of its scope, delivering programmes in over 5000 schools in more than 150 countries (International Baccalaureate 2022), in fact many of these schools enter few students into the IB programmes and the reach of the IB into state schools in many of these countries is minimal (Bunnell 2019); for example, there is not a single IB student in any government school in Africa.

Preparing students for a globalised world 73 The number of schools adopting the IB therefore remains low when compared to the impact of curricular initiatives to assess the international performance of national systems of education. Although a number of such testing regimes exist and have been widely used, I shall focus here on discussion of PISA (OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment). For the last two decades, PISA has sought to measure students’ numeracy, reading and science skills, claiming to have identified the core competencies in these areas that young people will ­require for a globalised future. The performance of national systems of e­ ducation is then  compared in international league tables. PISA has used these results to advise countries and, more recently, schools on the measures they can adopt to guarantee the future successes of their students. In addition, since 2018, PISA has added an additional measure, of students’ global competence, to its portfolio of assessments. In the remainder of this section, I shall explore how PISA has shaped student subjectivities broadly, and then turn to examination of its measure of students’ global competence in the section which follows. It is worth noting that although the OECD was founded to be a grouping of affluent countries, its influence has extended over less affluent countries when it claims that use of PISA results can be a means to measure progress on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). PISA reinforces the competition paradigm of education (Münch 2018) with considerable fanfare. In a democratic age, inequality requires legitimation, and the illusion of a meritocratic competition between countries participating in PISA is, Münch argues, a distraction from the reality that a small number of elite US and UK HE institutions continue quietly with their task of educating the elite of the next generation. Nor does PISA achieve its stated aim of raising educational standards, since it is unclear how that can be done through competition (Münch 2018). On the contrary, there is an inherent tension in PISA’s notion of global competence, which establishes an international competition to promote a concept ostensibly focused on international cooperation (Bailey et al. 2022). The competition paradigm in education rests on the assumption that weaker performers will be motivated by the example of more successful performers, thereby raising standards for all as they aspire to move up the league table. At the school level, some countries have introduced policies to strengthen the incentive mechanisms involved, by funding following each pupil, and the removal of ­barriers to enrolment. In this view, students (and their parents) will switch to more successful institutions. Weaker schools (and the teachers within them) will be motivated to work harder to protect their jobs. Of course, this model does not even work well at the level of the individual school. Students and parents have poor information for judging the success of a school – with exam results, they are looking at data that is the product of educational experiences that took place many years ago, and may have little relation to what the school is doing now. There is also scant evidence that schools which fail do so simply for want of trying; the causes of school under-performance are considerably more complex, and include various socio-economic factors. There is, however, evidence that schools will respond to this kind of competitive situation

74  Preparing students for a globalised world by manipulating the data that determine their position in the league table (Münch 2018). At the level of a nation, the model seems even more flawed. Dissatisfied students cannot move to a more highly performing educational system. There is therefore little to motivate higher performance other than national pride – and it is unclear why this would be a more effective motivator than, say, helping the students in front of you in your classroom. PISA claims that nations can adopt the ­approaches of the highest-performing nations, but again the complex sociocultural factors that determine educational outcomes make it even harder to countenance that it is possible to race up a league table by teaching like Finland or like Singapore, when countries are so diverse. However, international comparisons – whether between PISA nations or ­between universities in tertiary level league tables – are a way of framing what counts. They are not a way of measuring the world as it is, but a means of rendering the world measurable. They demarcate a ‘governable space of comparison and commensurability’ (Grek 2009, 25) and can be used to legitimate educational policy change (Sjøberg 2018). The focus on international comparisons has been used on the one hand to push educational policy homogeneity across the globe; it is leveraged by those seeking to promote neoliberal marketisation and commodification of education, as we have discussed earlier in this book. On the other hand, it has been used to assert hierarchies and difference. For example, discussion of the PISA successes of East Asian nations has othered their educational and broader cultures, suggesting that league-table success has come at the expense of children’s welfare. Takayama (2018) describes how Australian media have stereotyped these countries as exemplifying a homogeneous ‘Asian’ otherness, characterised by conformity, rote learning and cramming in the classroom, with tiger parenting in the home; the Australian student, on the other hand, is supposedly nurtured to be a creative problem-solver. Attributes such as hard work, perseverance, aspirations and high academic achievement, which would normally be seen positively, are portrayed as negative results of ‘Asian’ parenting styles (Takayama 2018). These stereotypes are also used to ‘other’ those in Australia who heritage is from countries which are successful in international tests – such othering being based on a portrayal of their cultural as fixed and unchanging, rather than acknowledging the cultural transformation and adaptation that is negotiated by immigrants. Ironically, this stereotyping of exam-focused ‘Asians’ (through the homogenising of diverse cultures) has happened as Australia’s education system itself is reformed to have more focus on high-stakes, competitive assessments and economic need; it seems to be a projection of Australian anxieties about its own education system. In other words, PISA test success is used to perpetuate negative stereotypes, both of various Asian countries and of Australian students of Asian heritage, and to project national ‘self-loath onto racialised Asian others’ (Takayama 2018, 619). Hence, the international gaze is not a leveller, but is functioning to continue the othering of historically oppressed groups. Lewis’s work on PISA comparisons suggests that they create a new educational topology, reaching into local contexts and creating a new form of ‘governing through time, difference and potential’ (Lewis 2020, 97). He argues that while at

Preparing students for a globalised world 75 first PISA’s data just provided information for national level decision-makers, its ‘PISA for Schools’ rescaled its work by offering advice to local decision-­m akers. PISA for Schools enables individual schools to sign up to use a PISA assessment in order to judge their own academic performance. This is voluntary, so that schools and their leaders are ‘willing participants in their own subjection to PISA performance measures and international comparisons’ (Lewis 2020, 106). Lewis argues that this is positioned by PISA as the defining measure by which schools can judge their performance, thereby obscuring other ways of evaluating schools’ success. This means that PISA decides what counts in judging schools, and ­consequently in how good schooling is conceptualised and teacher identities and pedagogies are constructed. Lewis uses the concept of the ‘global eye’ (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2014) to understand how the schools leaders come to look at their institutions through the lens of PISA – as internationally failing (even if they had previously seen them as nationally successful). Educators now have to look around internationally to see whether they are ‘good’ schools; Lewis suggests that this is indeed a ‘global gaze’ (Lewis 2020, 112). The global gaze, as we saw in Chapter 2, is a quantifying gaze. It focuses its attention on what can be measured and compared across national contexts. An ­international system such as PISA renders education systems commensurable (Lewis 2020), thereby diverting attention away from the incommensurable. Yet, not only is the quality of schooling rarely quantifiable, the future is surely ­immeasurable. The claims that PISA makes about what a global classroom should look like are built upon shifting sands. The Globally Competent Student The previous section has examined the philosophical foundations of the PISA project and its contribution to the competitive view of education exemplified in the opening to this chapter. In addition to its broad aim of measuring key student skills in core subjects, PISA has more recently sought to measure their global competence specifically. The concept of ‘global competence’ remains contested. Global competence is one of a family of related terms, such as global citizenship and global awareness, that have struggled to find clear definition. Auld and Morris (2019) see the term ‘global citizenship’ as a ‘floating signifier’ (Auld and Morris 2019, 681), noting that the term is used instrumentally, in different ways in different contexts – for some countries, it is promoted as a means to maintain international status, whereas in others, it is a tool for addressing the challenges of being a multicultural society. This lack of clarity is reflected in the way that OECD discusses its measure of global competence in terms of a humanitarian mission to promote international understanding, although the skills measured seem more aligned with an economic mindset and concern with students’ employability (Auld and Morris 2019). There has been extensive critique of the OECD’s operationalisation of the concept of global competence, and commentators have pointed to the presuppositions in its work. For PISA, global competence is the knowledge, skills, attitudes

76  Preparing students for a globalised world and values required to be successful in a globalised world, and their assessment tool seeks to measure these four aspects of the concept. It operationalises global competence by asking students to report their level of confidence in undertaking a range of tasks, varying from hosting a foreign exchange student in their home to sampling other cultures’ cuisines. However, the examples it gives seem more redolent of the culture of the affluent middle class – who have a spare room to host an exchange student and eat out regularly in international restaurants – than any genuine insight and understanding into other cultures (Ledger et al. 2019). Indeed, Grotlüschen (2018) has critiqued the OECD’s discussion of global competence to show that it ignores perspectives from the Global South. Ironically, the conceptualisation of global competence itself marginalises Southern understandings such as ‘Ubuntu’ to supplementary text boxes. The network of people involved in writing OECD’s work on global competency is primarily Western, and when non-Western countries are included it is primarily those with strong English language familiarity. This conclusion is reinforced by research I completed with colleagues, undertaking Social Network Analysis of the sources used to inform PISA’s global competence measure, and looking at how they each cited one another. We identified only five ‘communities’ (based on density of connections) and a handful of influential writers, demonstrating that the OECD drew on a very limited range of perspectives and backgrounds, again ironically at odds with its own conception of global competence (Ledger et al. 2019). Grotlüschen (2018) further notes that the construction of global competence ignores religious perspectives, bodies and emotions – in other words, it is rooted in a Northern/Western rationalist conception of cognition. There is an additional irony to trying to establish a homogeneous, universal conceptualisation of global competence, when it is ostensibly a skill about celebrating diversity and celebrating difference; there is no a priori reason to assume that the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values required to be globally competent in one part of the world are the same as in another. In summary, the philosophical foundations of global competence itself seem to crumble as easily as those of the PISA project more generally. Nevertheless, one of the fascinating aspects of global competence is that, by its inclusion of attitudes and values, it is attempting to render aspects of students’ characters measurable. In the following section, I will critique the notion of character education that has been highlighted by the global gaze. I will consider how an ideal internationalised student is being constructed by PISA and other aspects of the gaze and identify the main features of such a student. The Ideal Internationalised Student The international turn in education has occurred simultaneously with an ­increased focus on character education; there is increased attention not only to knowledge and skills but also to the values and attitudes that should be inculcated through education. We shall see in this section that this has not been a coincidence but rather that students’ characters are being shaped to fit the needs

Preparing students for a globalised world 77 of global neoliberal capitalism. ‘Holistic’ schooling, paying heed to the child’s emotional, social, creative and other aspects of development as well as their cognitive growth, became popular with social shifts from the 1960s onward, and attention to demarcating idealised learner characteristics is now seen as de ­r igueur in schooling – such as calls for students to develop perseverance or ‘grit’ (Duckworth et al. 2007). The International Baccalaureate’s Learner Profile, for instance, identifies the ten characteristics of an ideal learner, including being a risk taker and being reflective. In this section, I examine the ways in which the idealised learner is matched to the needs of global capitalism and critically ­examine character education for a globalised world. I shall begin by examining the idealised international student in higher education who possesses cosmopolitan capital and a willingness to travel, as well as the globally competent student who is being nurtured at school level in a more static manner. Throughout, it is argued that emphasis on personal characteristics (such as grit or growth mindset), which are ostensibly essential for success in a globalised world, distracts attention away from structural barriers to success and places responsibility for success on individual students. It is not only through explicit attention to the global that children are prepared for the expectations of global capitalism. Choice and freedom are socially constructed, and there is a burgeoning literature examining how they delineate representations of the ideal student, suggesting that neoliberal identities can be fashioned through educational discourse. For example, Bradbury (2019) explores how although UK primary school children are free to choose their play activities in the classroom, in practice, some choices are as seen as better than others by their teachers – so, for example, writing or mathematics choices are seen as better than riding a tricycle. Yet, children’s assumed ‘choices’ are often a reflection of their class backgrounds, which may influence their familiarity and confidence with undertaking certain activities. Similarly, Bradbury (2019) has analysed the preoccupation with growth mindset, character education and choice over play activities in UK primary schools to suggest that the ideal learner is represented as self-improving and self-regulating; hence, children are self-responsibilised and shaped into neoliberal subjects. The individual child is held responsible for their own improvement, with no acknowledgement of the role played by structural forces. In the work of Houlden and Veletsianos (2021), which examines the notion of ‘flexible learning’, certain freedoms – such as to take responsibility for oneself – are delimited, so that flexibility operates as a form of governmentality. Students are selfresponsibilised, and the admonition that they should be flexible prepares them to be the flexible labour force of the future. It is in addition to this that explicitly internationalised aspects of education are also constructing student subjectivities. Being an international university student is presented as a choice, a freedom, an opportunity. Adapting these arguments to see the ideal global learner of the global gaze, students are self-responsibilised to travel, and the ideal global student chooses travel over remaining in their home country. The ideal global student speaks fluent English. The ideal global student

78  Preparing students for a globalised world seeks to learn from other cultures, from ‘the best’. In such ways, the international student is prepared to be the globally mobile worker needed by neoliberal capitalism. Several writers have drawn attention to the cosmopolitan sensibilities that are fostered through the experiences of being an international student, arguing that young people develop cosmopolitan capital – a bank of skills that enable them to work with diverse colleagues – that are also helpful for the mobile worker that global capitalism needs. For Courtois (2020), who analyses policy texts and interviews with Irish student participants in European Erasmus exchange programme, the normalisation of study abroad is a form of governmentality; it aims to produce self-governing, self-responsibilised individuals, with affective detachment from their homes and skills for cosmopolitan sociability; this is the kind of hypermobile, entrepreneurial subject that is willing to be geographically mobile to meet the needs of global capitalism. International mobility is presented as the way for students to develop the employability skills and the lifestyle of the globally mobile professional elite is glamorised. Courtois argues that neoliberal global imaginaries frame individual mobility as career development or as a lifestyle choice, and study abroad programmes help construct subjectivities based on these imaginaries. Rizvi and Choo (2020) explores how international students’ identities shift as a result of their learning experiences in Australian universities. Rejecting an simplistic binary between Asian students, who supposedly prefer rote learning, and Australian students, who supposedly do not, Rizvi shows how the students’ cultural affiliations are impacted by their experiences and asserts that they develop heightened cosmopolitan sensibilities which prepare them for global labour markets but may lead to difficulty in re-assimilation in their communities of origin. However, the authors acknowledge that these students engaged in a cosmopolitan imaginary prior to their studies – indeed, this often motivated their choice to become international student. There is some evidence that it is not only international students at higher education level who are shaped into cosmopolitan subjects, but that this self-­ responsibilised individual who embraces travel is increasingly being embraced at lower levels of education. For example, Kotzyba et al. (2018) ask what the claim to be international or global means for the ethos and curriculum of German secondary schools. They suggest that such schools are pervaded by a notion of the ideal student as cosmopolitan or a world citizen. Paradoxically, as we saw in Chapter 2, the global gaze is simultaneously ­holistic and numeric – it both unifies and divides into countable units. It is a gaze which is focused on the quantifiable – whether that is in terms of the fees paid by students or their scores on international tests. Being globally minded is portrayed on the one hand as an ineffable goal, an ideal, but operationalised on the other in terms of fees paid and test scores. We saw in Chapter 3 that British international education policy portrayed international students as passive vectors for British national interests abroad (Hayes and Cheng 2020, 248). Here, we can go further as we note that self-responsibilisation means that institutions and nations do not

Preparing students for a globalised world 79 need to be held accountable for the way that they treat international students; in many countries, international students are instrumentalised as ‘cash cows’ (Song and McCarthy 2018) by their universities. They lack the rights of citizenship and yet they pay higher fees – and it is their responsibility for choosing this in a neoliberal educational market. English and the Ideal Student One particular characteristic of the ideal internationalised student that merits separate attention is whether they need to be a fluent English teacher. The importance of this attribute seems to differ across contexts. Some writers have suggested that the use of English is simply a tool that enables other elements of internationalisation (Nguyen 2018); by contrast, other researchers have found that the use of English has become equated with internationalisation in contexts as diverse as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan and China (Evison et al. 2021; Galloway, Numajiri, and Rees 2020; Haidar and Fang 2019). In China, for example, some universities claim to be ‘international’ simply on the basis of using English as the medium of instruction and use this claim as a means to market their programmes (Haidar and Fang 2019). Granting this role to the English language is part of how the global gaze ­impacts on social inequalities. In diverse national contexts, such as Pakistan and China, learning English has become associated not simply with education and employment opportunities but also with elite status and personal identity (Haidar and Fang 2019). In Hong Kong, those who speak English are seen as more educated and given higher status, a continuation of colonial inequalities (Tam 2019). Similarly, Mdzanga and Moeng (2021) have written about how, in the South African context, the continued use of English (and Afrikaans) in higher education serves to perpetuate white privilege and accord lower market value and status to the i­ndigenous African languages students use in their daily lives. Galloway, Numajiri, and Rees (2020) provide an overview of the use of English medium of instruction across East Asia, noting that it is often equated with internationalisation. In some countries, however, such as Japan and Korea, it is also seen as Westernisation, with western styles of instruction being used in classes also using English as the medium of instruction. This characterising of an internationalised student as an English speaker, paired with the prestige that is accorded to internationalisation, serves as a major means by which social elites are reproduced in some contexts. It is not necessarily English alone that plays this role, but rather how it is interwoven with other linguistic uses. In my current country of Bahrain, for example, English confers distinction; it is the language in which many members of the royal family are educated. Arabic serves an equally important role in affirming national belonging and Arab identity. The highest status, then, is accorded to those who are bilingual, using both English and classic Arabic. This is achieved by sending a child to private Englishmedium schools combined with Arabic tutoring at the weekends, an expensive education that is achievable only by the elite.

80  Preparing students for a globalised world The relationship between internationalisation in the classroom, the ideal i­nternationalised student and social inequalities is explored further in the following section. Neo-Colonial Classrooms? The idea of being international is a discourse which suggests equality for all. In fact, there is evidence that aspects of international education systematically reinforce inequalities. Some of these inequalities are internal to countries engaging in international education, while others reinforce inequalities between nations. I have discussed already how international qualifications such as the IB may be used by families seeking to secure educational advantage (Dickson, Perry, and Ledger 2017); this is just one example of the ways in which internationalised aspects of education can be used to reinforce privilege and social inequalities, from early years to tertiary education. For the youngest learners, Mierendorff et al. argue that internationalisation is used to ‘fuel existing tendencies of structural segregation’ (Mierendorff, Ernst, and Mader 2018, 122) within German early years education. This is exemplified by their research in a commercial chain of early childhood centres serving an affluent elite, which offered bilingual German-English immersion education, with at least one native English speaker teaching in each centre. This is complemented by a comprehensive package of afternoon activities, such as music, which meet the requirements of globally mobile parents without familial carers nearby. At tertiary level, Doerr (2020) analyses the experiences of minority students’ undertaking study abroad. She argues that they are constructed as ­lacking global competence, although their multicultural backgrounds mean that they have relevant competencies they draw on in their study abroad. She attributes the failure to acknowledge their prior global competence to three factors: first, the elitist colonial legacy that infuses study abroad experiences; second, an ideology of global competence that views the mobility of different groups differently; and third, a racist devaluing of the knowledge of minority groups. Historical inequalities between nations may also be reproduced by the ­expectations of the global gaze; there are elements of both post-colonialism and neo-colonialism in the internationalised educational relationships. While postcolonialism examines the lasting impact of the colonial era on contemporary societies, neo-colonialism examines new forms of colonialism that are emerging. The work of Paolo Freire provides a theoretical framework for understanding how oppression can operate through pedagogical relationships. In 1971, Freire published his seminal ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. In this book, Freire (2020) argues that colonial education puts the coloniser in the position of knowledge holder, while the colonised are placed in a position of social inferiority, as those requiring education. In addition, the content of colonial education marginalises other perspectives. In consequence, Freire argues, colonial education causes people to internalise their oppression. In place of this, Freire calls for an education that is founded upon the oppressed engaging in critical dialogue which will facilitate wider political action.

Preparing students for a globalised world 81 For Freire, it is therefore critical to move away from the ‘banking model’ of education, whereby the teacher deposits knowledge in the students’ minds. This model of education renders the teacher active and the students passive, the teacher as knowledgeable and students ignorant, the teacher in charge while the students conform. In consequence, education becomes, even when the ­intentions of the teacher are to empower their students with this knowledge, ‘the exercise of domination’ (Freire 2020, 78). In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for ‘problem-posing education’ (Freire 2020, 83), which promotes empowering dialogue. Writing half a century ago, Freire’s interest was in education as a force for social change, which he saw as intrinsically connected to its role in personal ­empowerment. Building on his work in adult education amongst the Brazilian poor, Freire saw the critical pedagogy that he advocated as a form of political action per se, as it enabled the most impoverished to reclaim their humanity. Specifically, he saw ‘cultural invasion’ as ‘an act of violence against the persons of the invaded culture’ (Freire 2020, 152). He was sceptical about ‘professionals’ whom he saw as appointed from above by the culture of domination. Instead, he proposed a revolutionary ‘cultural synthesis’ (Freire 2020, 179) between the perspectives of leaders and their people. Although many countries are now liberated from their imperial invaders, ­international education can involve a similar ‘cultural invasion’ and may continue to lead to internalisation of oppression in the way that Freire described. The predominance of institutions from the Anglophone world offering degrees and school leaver qualifications to former colonies may be a form of neo-colonialism. Indeed, researchers have identified colonial legacies in patterns of international student mobilities (Waters 2018). There is also evidence that elite schools in former colonies emphasise Western knowledge and seek Anglophone higher education destinations for their alumni (Iyer 2016). The global gaze encourages students to migrate for the ‘best’ learning experiences at ‘world-class’ universities. However, the judgements implicit in these claims reinforce neo-colonial relationships. International rankings of universities ostensibly focus on providing incentives for improvement and information for stakeholders; in fact, they normalise competition and inequalities between institutions (Naidoo 2018), are Eurocentric (Shahjahan, Blanco Ramirez, and Andreotti 2017) and are used to legitimise Western dominance of higher education. Non-Western international students coming to, say, Australian universities are promised ‘critical thinking’, supposedly an essential employment skill: this ‘critical thinking is both a totem pole of Western superior thinking and a yardstick to measure international students’ deficiency’ (Song and McCarthy 2018, 354). Song and McCarthy chart how Asian international students in Australia are othered by the way that critical thinking is represented in public discourse as a key feature of Australian education, with Asian students supposedly lacking this skill and resorting to devious tactics instead to gain Australian qualifications. International students are portrayed as lowering standards, despite no evidence to support this. Western-style critical thinking, which is rooted in the

82  Preparing students for a globalised world traditions of the Enlightenment, is portrayed as the pinnacle of thought, and international students, especially Chinese students, portrayed as deficient in this respect. It is presented as a universal need and ‘part of a civilising mission to save them from their backward political and social systems’ (Song and McCarthy 2018, 361). Through analysis of international branch campuses of Western universities in China, Xu (2022) concludes that Western knowledge and experiences are represented as being ‘international’ and the imagined future is of ‘whiteness’. Being ‘world-class’ is equated in publicity materials with whiteness, for example through employment of (predominantly white) western academics, the use of English as a medium of instruction, an emphasis on research published in English, the introduction of Western pedagogies, and opportunities to study and volunteer outside China. For Xu, whiteness as a futurity has three elements – whiteness as an investment, whiteness as an aspiration and whiteness as malleability. This valorisation of Western education as somehow more ‘international’ or ‘world-class’ than non-Western education has resulted in Western institutions being able to sell millions of dollars of education to non-Western countries ­ ­because whiteness is seen as an investment that will bring career returns. The form of education adopted by Western universities is presented as superior, so that they are a suitable aspiration. Finally, according to the ideology, anyone can attain these advantages – that is, non-white individuals can, through adopting what are presented as suitable behaviours and aspirations, attain the privileges of whiteness. Being international at these branch campuses, then, means engaging in a type of mimicry (Xu 2021) that is neo-colonial, in that the institutions and ­i ndividuals that are implicated in it are being subjected by expectations and imperatives that originate from outside of their own nation. This is, Xu argues, in some respects a failed mimicry, as the political and social context mean that classroom discussions will be quite different on different campuses. In addition, there may be explicit curricular differences – Xu notes that students at the University of Nottingham’s China campus need an additional year to complete their studies because English for Academic Purposes courses are a required additions to their programmes. Being international differs from colonial education of previous eras. The privileged students who attend international branch campuses in China do so out of choice, voluntarily selecting to reside on a beautiful campus, rather than being forcibly removed from their homes and abused in residential schools as happened under colonial rule in other parts of the world (Xu 2022). This is an important difference, but the glossy façade of the neo-colonial brings its own dangers, by ­devaluing Chinese epistemologies and traditions, with longer-term risks for Chinese intellectual endeavours (Xu 2022). Reproduction of colonial relationships through internationalisation may be challenged by more recent trends, whereby former colonial nations are challenging the dominance of the Anglophone nations in international education provision. Singapore has now established as a sphere of educational excellence and as we saw in the previous chapter has marketed its educational consultancy

Preparing students for a globalised world 83 work in the Arabian Gulf (Mohamed and Morris 2021). India is now emerging as a major provider of transnational education. Malaysia is positioning itself as an i­nternational education hub. The complex relationship between privilege and international ­education is highlighted by the emergence of Manila as an ­international higher education hub. The Philippines have leveraged their colonial heritage and their history of Filipino migrant workers to market the country as a venue where students can train for professional work anywhere in the world (Ortiga 2018). Less affluent students, unable to access the most prestigious universities internationally – predominantly those from Korea, Nigeria and India – have flocked to Filipino higher educational institutions instead. In summary, the imperative to internationalise education has reinforced ­inequalities, both intra-national and international, but there are some initial indications suggesting that this trend may be subverted. The international turn has hitherto privileged Western, former colonial powers, but this is not inherent to its gaze. Conclusion This chapter has drilled down into the impact of internationalisation of education on the experiences of students, from early years to university education. It has identified the kinds of knowledge, skills and attitudes that are being valued, and the implications of this for student subjectivities, curricular experiences, and experiences of inequality. It has connected this global gaze to a focus on the quantifiable and, paradoxically, to measures of students’ characters. For Waldow (2018), being international serves as a legitimisation mechanism, and as such is increasingly drawn on by various individuals, groups and institutions to justify their decisions; however, the consensus that it is ‘ubiquitously ­attractive’ (Waldow 2018, 248) is reliant upon its definition, processes and effects remaining vague. Throughout this chapter, I have dissected the impact of b­ eing international on students at schools and universities, both domestically and as international students, to understand the silences and positionings inherent in various notions of being international. The conclusion from this analysis is not that we should reject the idea that being international is ‘a good thing’; it is to demonstrate that it is not ‘a thing’ – a singular, homogeneous entity – at all. It is a set of contradictory impulses that are marching under an indeterminate banner. For Maxwell (2018), being international has become entwined with the notion of elite or excellent education. In agreeing with this basic premise, this chapter has still identified some unanswered questions about what is happening. Perhaps the opportunities and advantages of being international, through the subjectivities it creates and the knowledge it offers, mean that it is inherently in danger of being appropriated by elites – in other words, the strongest are grabbing the best toys on the playground. Or perhaps it is because elites are currently using this as a legitimation strategy for their advantages that we feel so sure that being international is better – in effect, it is because the bullies hold them that we have decided that these must be the best toys.

84  Preparing students for a globalised world In the next chapter, we continue this exploration of student subjectivities r­esulting from internationalised education by examining what has, for some, ­become the shiniest educational toy of all – the international school. References Auld, Euan, and Paul Morris. 2019. “Science by Streetlight and the OECD’s Measure of Global Competence: A New Yardstick for Internationalisation?” Policy Futures in Education 17 (6):677–98. doi: 10.1177/1478210318819246. Bailey, Lucy. 2015. “The Experiences of Host Country Nationals in International Schools: A Case-Study from Malaysia.” Journal of Research in International Education 14 (2):85–97.    . 2022. “‘The Very Best Private Schools in the World’: Critical Discourse Analysis of the Spear’s Schools Index.” Globalisation, Societies and Education: 1–13. doi: 10.1080/ 14767724.2022.2143329. Bailey, Lucy, Susan Ledger, Michael Thier, and Christine MT Pitts. 2022. “Global Competence in PISA 2018: Deconstruction of the Measure.” Globalisation, Societies and Education: 1–10. Bradbury, Alice. 2019. “Making Little Neo-Liberals: The Production of Ideal Child/ Learner Subjectivities in Primary School Through Choice, Self-Improvement and ‘Growth Mindsets’.” Power and Education 11 (3):309–26. doi: 10.1177/1757743818816336. Bunnell, Tristan. 2019. “The ‘Internationalisation of Public Schooling’ in Practice: A ‘Skeptical Reality’ Approach.” In The Machinery of School Internationalisation in ­Action, edited by Laura C Engel, Claire Maxwell and Miri Yemini, 56–69. New York: ­ Routledge. Courtois, Aline. 2020. “Study Abroad as Governmentality: The Construction of Hypermobile Subjectivities in Higher Education.” Journal of Education Policy 35 (2):237–57. doi: 10.1080/02680939.2018.1543809. Dickson, Anisah, Laura B. Perry, and Susan Ledger. 2017. “How Accessible Is IB Schooling? Evidence from Australia.” Journal of Research in International Education 16 (1):65–79. Doerr, Neriko Musha. 2020. “‘Global competence’ of Minority Immigrant Students: ­Hierarchy of Experience and Ideology of Global Competence in Study Abroad.” Discourse: ­Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 41 (1):83–97. doi: 10.1080/01596306.2018.1462147. Duckworth, Angela L, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly. 2007. “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (6):1087. Evison, Jane, Lucy Bailey, Pimsiri Taylor, and Tida Tubpun. 2021. “Professional Identities of Lecturers in Three International Universities in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia: Multilingual Professionals at Work.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51 (2):202–20. Freire, Paulo. 2020. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” In Toward a Sociology of Education, 374–86. London: Routledge. Galloway, Nicola, Takuya Numajiri, and Nerys Rees. 2020. “The ‘Internationalisation’, or ‘Englishisation’, of Higher Education in East Asia.” Higher Education 80 (3):395–414. Grek, Sotiria. 2009. “Governing by Numbers: The PISA ‘Effect’ in Europe.” Journal of Education Policy 24 (1):23–37. Grotlüschen, Anke. 2018. “Global Competence – Does the New OECD Competence Domain Ignore the Global South?” Studies in the Education of Adults 50 (2):185–202. doi: 10.1080/02660830.2018.1523100.

Preparing students for a globalised world 85 Haidar, Sham, and Fan Fang. 2019. “English Language in Education and Globalization: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of English in Pakistan and China.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 39 (2):165–76. doi: 10.1080/02188791.2019.1569892. Hayes, Aneta, and Jie Cheng. 2020. “Datafication of Epistemic Equality: Advancing ­Understandings of Teaching Excellence Beyond Benchmarked Performativity.” Teaching in Higher Education 25 (4):493–509. Houlden, Shandell, and George Veletsianos. 2021. “The Problem with Flexible Learning: Neoliberalism, Freedom, and Learner Subjectivities.” Learning, Media and Technology 46 (2):144–55. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2020.1833920. International Baccalaureate. 2022. “About the IB.” Accessed 12th September. https:// www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/. Iyer, Radha. 2016. “Exclusive Consumers: The Discourse of Privilege in Elite Indian School Websites.” In Elite Schools: Multiple Geographies of Privilege [Education in Global Context], edited by Aaron Koh and Jane Kenway, 122–38. London: Routledge. Kenway, Jane, and Johannah Fahey. 2014. “Staying Ahead of the Game: The Globalising Practices of Elite Schools.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 12 (2):177–95. Kotzyba, Katrin, Lena Dreier, Mareke Niemann, and Werner Helsper. 2018. “Processes of Internationalisation in Germany’s Secondary Education System: A Case Study on Internationality in the Gymnasium.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 191–208. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Ledger, Susan, Michael Thier, Lucy Bailey, and Christine Pitts. 2019. “OECD’s Approach to Measuring Global Competency: Powerful Voices Shaping Education.” Teachers College Record 121 (8):1–40. Lewis, Steven. 2020. PISA, Policy and the OECD, Respatialising Global Education Governance Through PISA for Schools. Singapore: Springer. Maxwell, Claire. 2018. “Changing Spaces—The Reshaping of (Elite) Education Through Internationalisation.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 347–67. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Maxwell, Claire, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger, and Werner Helsper, (eds.). 2018. Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education. Cham: Springer. Mdzanga, Nokhanyo, and Muki Moeng. 2021. “Critical Perspectives on Language as a Social-Justice Issue in Post-Colonial Higher-Education Institutions.” In Embedding ­Social Justice in Teacher Education and Development in Africa, edited by Carmel McNaught and Sarah Gravett, 181–94. London: Routledge. Mierendorff, Johanna, Thilo Ernst, and Marius Mader. 2018. “Embedded Internationalisation and Privilege in German Early Years Provision.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 121–37. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Mohamed, Maryam, and Paul Morris. 2021. “Buying, Selling and Outsourcing Educational Reform: The Global Education Industry and ‘Policy Borrowing’ in the Gulf.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51 (2):181–201. doi: 10.1080/ 03057925.2019.1607255. Münch, Richard. 2018. “Elite Formation in the Educational System: Between Meritocracy and Cumulative Advantage.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation, edited by

86  Preparing students for a globalised world Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 41–55. Cham: Springer. Naidoo, Rajani. 2018. “The Competition Fetish in Higher Education: Shamans, Mind Snares and Consequences.” European Educational Research Journal 17 (5):605–20. Nguyen, Huong Thu. 2018. “English-Medium-Instruction Management: The Missing Piece in the Internationalisation Puzzle of Vietnamese Higher Education.” In Internationalisation in Vietnamese Higher Education, edited by Ly Thi Tran and Simon Marginson, 119–37. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Nóvoa, António, and Tali Yariv-Mashal. 2014. “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?” In Changing Educational Contexts, Issues and Identities, edited by Michael Crossley, Patricia Broadfoot and Michele Schweisfurth, 13–30. London: Routledge. Ortiga, Yasmin Y. 2018. “Constructing a Global Education Hub: The Unlikely Case of Manila.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39 (5):767–81. doi: 10.1080/ 01596306.2018.1448703. Rizvi, Fazal, and Suzanne S. Choo. 2020. “Education and Cosmopolitanism in Asia: An Introduction.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 40 (1):1–9. Shahjahan, Riyad A, Gerardo Blanco Ramirez, and Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti. 2017. “Attempting to Imagine the Unimaginable: A Decolonial Reading of Global University Rankings.” Comparative Education Review 61 (S1):S51–S73. Sjøberg, Svein. 2018. “The Power and Paradoxes of PISA: Should Inquiry-Based Science Education Be Sacrificed to Climb on the Rankings?” Nordic Studies in Science Education 14 (2):186–202. Song, Xianlin, and Greg McCarthy. 2018. “Governing Asian International Students: The Policy and Practice of Essentialising ‘Critical Thinking’.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 16 (3):353–65. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2017.1413978. Takayama, Keita. 2018. “The Constitution of East Asia as a Counter Reference Society Through PISA: A Postcolonial/de-Colonial Intervention.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 16 (5):609–23. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2018.1532282. Tam, Kwok-kan. 2019. “Englishization of Education and (Post/)Colonial Identity in Hong Kong.” In The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, edited by Kwok-kan Tam, 41–53. Singapore: Springer Singapore. Tarc, Paul. 2022. “International Baccalaureate: Meanings, Uses and Tensions in a Globalizing World.” Elsevier International Encyclopedia of Education. Waldow, Florian. 2018. “Commentary to Part III: Why Is “Being International” So ­Attractive? “Being International” as a Source of Legitimacy and Distinction.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 247–53. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Waters, Johanna L. 2018. “International Education Is Political! Exploring the Politics of International Student Mobilities.” Journal of International Students 8 (3):1459–78. Xu, Zhenyang. 2021. “Examining Neocolonialism in International Branch Campuses in China: A Case Study of Mimicry.” Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education 13 (5):72–85.    . 2022. “Whiteness as World-Class Education? Internationalization as Depicted by Western International Branch Campuses in China.” Higher Education: 1–18. doi: 10.1007/ s10734-022-00872-2.

6

Travel and the construction of excellence International schools

Introduction Research and consultancy work has taken me to international schools all over the world. When I step inside an international school in Dubai, Copenhagen, Jakarta, Singapore or Beijing, I know there will be differences – one school may have Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling while another celebrates Fastelavn by bashing sweets out of a barrel – but the similarities are more striking. International schools are typically festooned with the flags of many nations, the classroom walls celebrate their learners’ demonstration of initiative and leadership, the students themselves may talk in various languages but typically share a characteristic mid-Atlantic drawl for speaking English, and the teachers are usually predominantly Anglophone educators with cosmopolitan ideals. International schools are stratified – in the United Arab Emirates, the schools that serve expatriates from the Indian subcontinent may be staffed by Filipino nationals, while those that serve American expatriates are staffed predominantly by white British or American educators. They follow different curricula – though, again, there are commonalities, with the programmes of the International Baccalaureate, British qualifications and Advanced Placement courses from the US being amongst the most popular credentials. In what follows below, I do not seek to pretend this is a homogeneous sector, but to point to common concerns that hold for large numbers of international schools. The previous chapter identified implications of the international turn for the experiences of students in schools and universities. In this chapter, I consider a particular example of this student experience, in institutions that are avowedly international by name – international schools. I will explore the extent to which international schools exemplify the changes discussed in the previous chapter, as well as considering specific aspects of international schooling that offer a distinct instantiation of the global gaze. The chapter begins by defining international schooling and exploring the rise in, and changes to, the international school sector. It is suggested that the concept of a school which is, by its very title, focused on being international provides a fascinating insight into further aspects of the global gaze. Specifically, the chapter looks at the relationship between being international and specific aspects of DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-6

88  Travel and the construction of excellence international schooling – its association with travel, the international-mindedness that is the avowed purpose of many international schools, and the ambivalent relationship with national aspects of education. This analysis then compares constructions of ‘the best’ in international schooling to the constructions of the ideal student and ideal schooling in national institutions which we explored in the preceding chapter. It draws on original data from a study of online reviews of international schools to support the claims made. In this chapter – and at other points in this book – I use the term ‘expatriates’ to refer to the mobile populations that were the original community served by international schools. I use this term with some reluctance, aware that in some contexts, expatriate is a word that connotes privilege, whereas migrant connotes disadvantage, and that the expatriate/migrant distinction in other contexts is used as a euphemism for issues of race and racism. However, in the Middle East where I am currently based, all non-nationals are termed ‘expatriates’ because none has the right to long-term residence in the country. The key distinction between the terms is impermanence. An expatriate glances off a culture, touching it only fleetingly, whereas a migrant is expected to bury themselves in it. I use the term ‘expatriate’ here to refer to those who alight temporarily in a country, sometimes flitting between several over a short period, so that their children attend schools in several countries. There is no presupposition about who is a ‘typical’ expatriate, although we shall see that the expatriates of some international schools may be associated with certain ethnicities and with privilege. International Schools: A Growing Phenomenon Various criteria for assigning the title of ‘international school’ to an institution have been suggested. International schools are defined by the Malaysian government simply as those that follow a non-Malaysian curriculum. However, commentators have drawn attention to other features of a school that may render it non-national, such as the medium of instruction employed, the composition of the student and staffing bodies or the school’s avowed commitment to internationalism (which in itself would require further definition). These criteria share a common concern – to differentiate between schools which are ‘really’ international and those which are merely imposters. Indeed, some commentators have gone so far as to create typologies of international schools, with the idea that some schools are ‘ideal’ international schools – those with international student bodies and an international orientation. In other words, a hierarchy of being international is being established, which typically marginalises the local, host-country national student (Meyer 2021) as somehow constituting an impurity within true international schooling. When we note that most host-country nationals in international schools are attending international schools in Asia and the Middle East, we can see not all nationalities are affected equally within such a hierarchy. Bunnell (2019) has proposed using the term Globalised English Medium of Instruction Schools to emphasise his interest in schools that are global in their orientation and not merely located globally. In doing this, he seeks to exclude many

Travel and the construction of excellence 89 schools that self-identify as ‘international schools’, on the basis of employing an overseas curriculum, instead arguing that an international mission must ­involve ‘the delivery of an international curriculum which facilitates international-­ mindedness, and ultimately aims to deliver global responsibility, ethical action and peace’ (Bunnell 2019, 4). This is a curious definition, as it is fair to assume that there are few schools that advocate global irresponsibility, unethical action or war. So, Bunnell’s definition boils down to a concern with instilling ‘internationalmindedness’ in students. This is a subject to which I return below. The concern in this book, however, is with exploring how a global gaze has come to permeate education. For this purpose, I am more interested in exploring why and how some schools seek to describe themselves as ‘international’ than in policing whether they merit such a title. Employing this definition, the key thing to note is that there has been rapid growth in the number of schools making this claim over the past two decades. Fifty years ago, there were a handful of such schools worldwide and the International Baccalaureate Organisation was in its infancy, developing a credential that could be used by the children of mobile professionals to facilitate their entry to university after an international childhood. Nowadays, international schools have multiplied. Schools offering British, American or Australian education overseas have proliferated, as have schools mixing their own national curriculum with an international programme such as the ­International Baccalaureate (Bunnell 2019). They are typically fee-paying schools, and although fees vary, many international schools charge fees that exceed those of other private schools in the country in which they are located. Two significant changes have taken place to explain this rapid growth in the international schools market, affecting both supply and demand for international schooling. First, on the demand side, whereas international schools were originally founded to serve the needs of mobile expatriate families, in recent years they have come to be used predominantly by host-country nationals (Bunnell 2019) – that is, those attending an international school in their passport country rather than as part of a globally mobile childhood. The binary between host-country nationals and other students is simplistic (Tanu 2017), as international school students have often followed diverse national trajectories; however, in many contexts, it is a legal division referring to a student’s passport. Most of this growth in hostcountry nationals has been in the Middle East and other parts of Asia; this is partly a consequence of the growth of an affluent middle class in places such as Malaysia and China, who are dissatisfied with public systems of education and can afford to purchase alternatives for their child. Alongside this, growth has been stimulated by a deregulation of international schooling in some countries, so that citizens are permitted to attend international schools where it was previously not allowed. For example, in Malaysia, for example, prior to 2006, a Malaysian citizen could only attend an international school with the permission of the Ministry of Education, which employed strict criteria by giving its approval – either the child needed to have one non-Malaysian parent or they needed to evidence that they had previously studied overseas for three consecutive years. From 2006, these restrictions were removed, but instead restrictions were placed on school admissions;

90  Travel and the construction of excellence Malaysians could not exceed 40% of an international school’s enrolment. From 2012, however, this restriction was also removed (Bailey 2015a). Second, on the supply side – in response to this explosion in demand – there has been a substantial shift in the ownership patterns of international schools from a preponderance of not-for-profit schools to a majority of for-profit institutions, including those operating chains of schools (Bailey 2021b). This has included a number of prestigious schools, often with historical roots and long traditions, opening overseas overshoots so that, for example, children can now attend Dulwich College in China as well as in South-West London, or enrol in Epsom in Malaysia as well as in Surrey. In summary, the international school sector has experienced substantial growth – and further growth is predicted. This growth has involved changes in both demand and supply of international schooling – in who seeks such an education and in the kinds of institutions that provide it. Alongside this increase in the number of such schools has been the gradual emergence of international schooling as an area of scholarly enquiry. Much work on international schools has used Bourdieu’s theory of habitus – in other words, it is focused on the individuals in those institutions to understand the economically advantageous dispositions that are fostered through international schooling. Some of this work has involved implicitly blaming middle-class parents, typically mothers, for the consequences of their school choices on social inequality (Davey 2012). A few writers have used other approaches, such as Bourdieu’s concept of doxa – what goes without saying – to explore the international school as an institution. I will draw on a range of such literature in the discussion below, although my interest is different from most of these commentators. Here, my priority is in understanding how the global gaze is manifested in the arena of international schooling, and to ascertain whether it is different from – or a consolidation of – its manifestation in other aspects of education. The Imagined Community of the International School In understanding how international schools typically differ from other schools, researchers have proposed various terms to capture distinctive elements of their ethos, students or teachers. One of the most powerful of these is Meyer’s ‘global imaginary’ (Meyer 2021), which attempts to capture how the German case study international school she studies sees itself and the world for which it is preparing its students. Bittencourt and Willetts (2018) do not share Meyer’s view that there is a single imaginary that dominates the international schools they study. Rather, in analysing the mission statements of 46 international schools in South America, they identify two competing discourses, which they describe as ideological internationalism versus market-driven multinationalism – similar to my hypothesis of the two sides of Janus-faced internationalism which I discussed in the i­ntroduction. Market-driven internationalism focuses on lifelong learning for continuous ­human capital development, linked to the rapid circulation of knowledge in the

Travel and the construction of excellence 91 knowledge economy. This form of internationalism communicates to students that the changing world is driven by unchallengeable global economic trends over which they have no agency. By contrast, ideological internationalism is rooted in aspirations for multicultural understanding. However, they note that some schools fused both discourses within the same mission statement. By contrast, other researchers do not seek to capture the overall ethos and imaginary of the school, but instead focus on understanding what students (and their parents) hope to get from their international schooling. This is typically seen in terms of the cultural and economic advantages that are gained by international schooling and its accompanying credentials, and the terms employed to capture this are various, such as cosmopolitan capital (Reid and Ibrahim 2017) or ‘cosmopolitan start-up capital’ (Beech et al. 2021). The shared element in these proposed concepts is that they link the skills and dispositions gained from international schooling with access to future economic or educational opportunities. One evocative term to capture this is Wright and Mulvey (2022)’s propose concept of ‘promised capitals’. Based on study of international schools in China, they argue that different international qualifications are associated with different promised capitals, each positioning the student differently within the global higher education arena. Some of these implicit promises are: first, that the qualifications will be accepted internationally; second, that students will be familiarised with the Western culture they needed for future HE study overseas and third, that the schools have networks which can offer advice on applying overseas. Another strand of research has focused on analysing the identities that are constructed by international schooling. We saw in previous chapters that the global gaze in part is about constructing an ideal student; in this body of research, it is posited that international schools are creating specific ways of being in the world. The best-known term to capture this is that of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) (Useem and Downie 1976; Van Reken, Pollock, and Pollock 2010), who neither belong fully to their passport country nor to their country of residence, but share a third culture. Being a TCK (or similar terms such as Global Nomad or TransCultural Kid) is part of the global imaginary that Meyer describes. However, it should be noted that it is problematic; it is rarely used to describe the children of less-privileged migrants, instead focusing largely on the experiences of privileged ‘expat’ children. The restriction of much discussion of TCKs to privileged childhoods is a ­reminder that being global is an idea that does not apply equally to all. Less privileged migrants are expected to fit into their local communities and castigated in the popular media if they are perceived to have failed to do so; privileged migrants are celebrated for their global orientation as they hold themselves aloft from their local communities. Privileged migrants have usually travelled through choice and have the resources to return to their country of origin at any time; underprivileged migrants have usually travelled through necessity and have limited, if any, opportunities to return. Being international, being global, is associated with choice – and thereby restricted to privilege. I return to this in the discussion of refugee education in Chapter 7.

92  Travel and the construction of excellence The ways in which international schooling may be linked to the reproduction of privilege and inequalities are considered further below. First, however, it is important to consider other salient features of international schooling in addition to the global imaginary – international-mindedness, the valorisation of travel and its uneasy relationship between the national and the international. International-Mindedness Many international schools claim to develop international-mindedness in their students. ‘International-mindedness’ is a terminology associated with the International Baccalaureate programme, but parallel terminology is employed in other international schools and programmes. International-mindedness is celebrated as a major positive outcome of international schooling, as part of the cosmopolitan identity it fosters. However, there is evidence that international-mindedness may reinforce patterns of privilege. First, international-mindedness appears to function as preparation for economic privilege. The IB’s character education, with its exhortation to become ‘internationally minded’, conflates the character of the ideal global citizen with the skills and dispositions of the ideal global worker (Resnik 2008). For example, the service learning that take place in international schools sometimes echoes the standards and norms of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Schubiger, Rey, and Bolay 2019). In the Swiss international school studied by Schubiger, Rey and Bolay, IB service was oriented internationally rather than locally and service activities were chosen for the planning/managerial experience they offered to students rather than for their intrinsic worth. Students were not expected to reflect on, or engage in combatting, underlying inequalities, but simply to do an activity that they planned, implemented and managed. Second, international-mindedness serves as a preparation for, and legitimation of, social privilege. I have written in my previous work about the culture of noblesse oblige that is inadvertently cultivated in some international schools. The International Baccalaureate programmes place a value on students developing a ‘Caring’ attitude, as part of their international-mindedness, and engaging in activities that positively affect others. My colleagues from the University of Nottingham and I visited a number of IB schools to see how this was implemented in practice (Stevenson et al. 2016). Some of the teachers we interviewed were concerned that their schools promoted a somewhat patrician notion of Caring, whereby privileged students distributed largesse to populations they perceived with pity, whether these were less privileged people in their locality or people they encountered on service trips to less economically privileged parts of the world (Bailey and Cooker 2018). Third, international-mindedness may reinforce a sense of belonging for the elite. It has been suggested that international-mindedness may function as a source of shared class solidarity of the global middle class or the transnational capitalist class (Bunnell et al. 2022), something that binds together an international school student from Peru with one attending international school in South Korea – part

Travel and the construction of excellence 93 of that ineffable shared quality of international schools that I alluded to at the start of this chapter. For example, in the international school studied by Keßler and Krüger (2018), ‘being international’ is represented by the school as a set of attitudes, such as openness to debate and difference, which enables students to be self-improving learners, and the international community of the school is seen as facilitating such growth. In these multiple ways, then, international-mindedness – on the surface a progressive and desirable quality – may be creating characters that collude with inequality. Valorisation of Travel My five-year-old daughter came home from her first day of international school feeling confused. During break, she had listened to a discussion amongst her classmates. My daughter loved to discuss; she had views (admittedly often echoing my views) on everything from George Bush to breastfeeding. Today, though, she had been rendered silent when she encountered an issue she knew nothing about, while her classmates had strong views on the topic: their favourite airline. The world of international schools valorises travel, both for vacations in exotic locations and for the repeated relocations of expatriate families. Within some international school, residential mobility is particularly valued, with people who have lived in the same country all their lives being seen as less international (Meyer 2021), and an implicit assumption that international mobility makes a person more global. This is not a novel feature of modern international schools; certain forms of travel have always been associated with elites and specifically with elite education. The novels of Henry James capture the transcontinental travel, the Grand Tour, that was formative for the American elite of the late nineteenth century. In previous generations, travel was also key to the formation of national European elites, in part related to willingness to work in the colonies (Bunnell et al. 2022). What we are seeing within international schools, however, is an increased focus, especially amongst affluent, mobile parents (Maxwell and Yemini 2019), on preparing their children for mobile careers in a globalised economy. For example, the Bahraini parents I interviewed, who use international schools in Bahrain, referred to specific career opportunities in the media and finance that they felt were opened up by attending international school (Bailey 2021a). Global capitalism requires mobile workers, who are willing and happy to move to wherever in the world they are needed by multinational corporations. It is not travel per se that offers this resource – if it was, then refugees and other stigmatised groups of migrants would be seen as international. Rather, it is certain forms of travel that are celebrated – Basaran and Olsson (2018) suggest that travel can be a euphemism for being white or western in a non-western context. It is certainly the case that travel and privilege are closely related; for example, the idea that being international comes with repeated relocation renders it inaccessible to most people. International relocation (unless, say, done under the desperate circumstances of asylum seekers) is extremely expensive, and consequently those

94  Travel and the construction of excellence who repeatedly relocate belong to a restricted professional class, whose moves are  funded by their employers. Connecting being international to travel also ­ignores the other ways in which someone may be exposed to other cultures, for example, by living in a multicultural community within their home country – experiences which are less closely tied to economic privilege. There are two changes that may change the symbiotic relationship between international schools and travel. First, the rising number of host-country nationals attending these schools has broken the association between international schooling and residential mobility. Second, climate awareness may cause some to question whether it is a good thing that five-year-olds can name their favourite airline. Indeed, when Yemini and Maxwell (2022) studied how two types of middle-class families describe their travels – those choosing not to use aeroplanes for environmental reasons and those choosing to take their children on an extended sojourn to Asia – in both cases parents framed their travel choices as global citizenship education. Nevertheless, at present, many international schools continue to celebrate identities based on travel and to foster comfort with international transitions (Meyer 2021), and their students are proud to accumulate multiple countries of residence and vacation, collecting model aeroplanes from their favourite airlines in the same way that other children collect stamps. The National vs the International? A further recurrent aspect of research into international schools has been to explore their sometimes fraught relationship with the national. Previous ­ ­researchers have demonstrated that many international schools are divorced from the communities that surround them (Meyer 2021; Tanu 2017) and may even feel that the local community dislikes their school (Bunnell 2005). International schools are often defensive about their relationship to their host community, and the accusation that they operate in an expatriate bubble (Meyer 2021). More broadly, the notion of an international school begs the question of the relationship between that school and the national, or more local, context in which it is located. It also raises the question of national identity formation of the children in these schools, and whether an international identity supplants or complements other forms of belonging. International schools typically follow a different academic calendar from ­national schools, and their school day does not follow the timings of their neighbouring schools. They often teach their children in a different language. All of these factors conspire (inadvertently) to keep their students segregated from the local community. Moreover, as Leek (2022) points out, the skills they develop may be in conflict with features of the national curriculum. For these many reasons, although international schools claim to develop the ability to communicate effectively with people from different cultures, ironically they give their students few opportunities to communicate with the culture that is geographically closest to the school and may segregate host-country nationals from their own community.

Travel and the construction of excellence 95 Despite this, in many international schools, nationality can become a defining part of a student’s identity (Meyer 2021). Schools market themselves by counting the number of nationalities represented on their student and staff bodies (Bailey and Gibson 2020). In this view of the international, every country is equal and being international is equated to belonging to a school that can boast as many ­nationalities as possible. This account of being international involves no effort on the part of the student, it doesn’t necessitate any effort at understanding the cultures of these diverse nationalities. Moreover, it deliberately ignores the very real power differences between these different countries. It is silent about the inequalities that have determined our global landscape, including the drawing of boundaries that determine these nationalities. Alongside these silences, in practice in many international schools, while all cultures are equal, some are more equal than others. Priority admission is given to certain nationalities in some schools (Bailey and Gibson 2020). In addition, there is evidence from some multinationality schools that American culture may predominate; in Meyer (2021)’s study of an international school in Germany, the German students were regarded negatively by their peers. While noting these problematic elements in the relationship between the ­international and the national in some schools, research has shown that in other schools, however, being international is more salient to students’ identity (Tanu 2017). Some international schools actively seek to fuse together elements of the national and the international, and parents report wanting their children to gain cosmopolitan skills without losing their national identity (Reid and Ibrahim 2017). This fusion of the local and the global is seen in the work of Yemini et al. (2020) whose research suggests that at least some parents in international schools try to cultivate a ‘mobile nationalism’ in their children, so that although they are located overseas they retain cultural and linguistic connections to their passport country. Similarly, Suresh Babu and Mahajan (2021) demonstrate how an elite international school in India fuses elements from the national and international to appeal to a particular group of elite Indian parents; they explain how being ­Indian is equated with the practices of the elite Hindu caste (for example, enforcing vegetarianism at school and the celebration of Ganesha festivals). The ­branding of the school sought to appeal to highly mobile professional Indian parents by simultaneously offering both global mobility and socialisation into their caste. It is, then, over-simplistic to see the national and the international as operating in opposition (Kenway 2018). I would also caution that a binary divide between the international and the national does not capture the complexity of identity and belonging for many students attending international schools. In my own research with Bahraini parents, I found that parents who were in some way marginalised by Bahraini culture – for example, by belonging to the Sunni minority or having a non-­ Bahraini parent –particularly welcomed their children’s acceptance in international schools, where their national belonging was unquestioned (Bailey 2021a). Similarly, Gress-Wright (2022) argues that students do not passively accept the divide between the global and the local. Instead, the students she studied (who

96  Travel and the construction of excellence attended international schools in various countries in sub-Saharan African) fused the two; they engaged in an active creolization of the cosmopolitan aspects of their IB education with their prior experiences from home and community. She sees this as ‘a productive blending rather than tension between their global aspirations and local ties’ (Gress-Wright 2022, 75). Traditionally, international schools have been seen as offering a new identity to the cultural identity of host-country nationals, a threat to their cultural identity. But for the middle-class students I studied in Malaysia and Bahrain (Bailey 2015a, 2021a) and Gress-Wright (2022) studied in Cameroon, Mali and Cote d’Ivoire, their cultural identity has shifted, so that it actually fits well with the culture of the international school. We should avoid a reified view of, say, Malaysian ­identity as being in traditional villages to realise that for many host-country students, there is a continuity between international school culture and the culture of their home (in my Malaysian study, it was the Western educators who are wringing their hands about students losing their cultures, not the host-country families themselves). There are contested versions of national identity (as exemplified by political divisions in North America and Western Europe); some of these forms of national identity may be in conflict with the culture of the international school, but others are strengthened by it. So the ‘international’ speaks to a particular fragment of the global middle class across many different countries, compatible with their vision for national identity, but not to other parts of our fragmented societies. Having delineated some key elements of international schooling, in the ­remainder of this chapter, I shall consider the relationship between international schools and various forms of inequality, and their connection to a competitive model of education, before exemplifying these arguments by drawing on my current research. The International School Reality: The Normalisation of Inequality? There is a tension between the ostensible claims of international school educators and the ideological roots of the movement, based on efforts to promote peace and understanding, and the growing body of evidence concerning the normalisation of inequality in international schools today. In this section, I provide an overview of some of these inequalities, before dealing with the specific issue of Westernisation in the following section. New participants in international schooling are sometimes surprised to find that within a British or American school, inequalities are accepted that would not be legally permissible in the UK or the US. This is partly because schools must adhere to local rules and expectations regarding, for example, gender segregation in sports. However, it is also because they are not subject to the same level of scrutiny regarding, say, any pay differentials by gender or ethnicity, or the perpetuation of stereotypes through their programmes. For instance, one analysis of the Cambridge International literature syllabi – commonly used in British-style international schools – identified a preponderance in European and male authors (Golding and Kopsick 2019).

Travel and the construction of excellence 97 Another study looked at a high-status international school in Japan, originally founded to serve globally mobile expatriates but recently receiving increasing applications from Japanese citizens. The authors found that the school’s vision of what an ‘international community’ should look like was so powerful that it was protected at all costs, and in consequence, forms of discrimination were accepted as the justified price of its protection. They identified aspects of the  school’s language policy and admissions process that resulted in members of the ‘international community’ being preferred to locals. This ‘international community’ was defined so that admission was eased for children of Embassy staff and alumni, and those who could operate in English. The authors concluded that the school discriminated against local families, but that this discrimination was seen as necessary to its perceived legitimacy as an ‘international’ school (Bunnell and Hatch 2021). In various ways, then, international schools are caught between the pressures of the ideal and the economic – between their ideological commitment to equality and the realities of the educational marketplace (Gardner-McTaggart 2021). This is particularly evident when considering the post-colonial nature of these institutions. A Lesson in Westernisation? Gardner-McTaggart (2021) argues that international schools are ‘washing the world in whiteness’. He notes that the most prestigious international schools are predominantly staffed and led by white educators and that they replicate ‘­ whiteness’, ­indeed, that being international has come to signify Englishness and whiteness. His study of international school leaders suggests that while they are aware of racism and social injustice, they do not actively enact anti-racist education. When these schools recruit the ‘best’ teachers’, they define this by experience, qualifications and Englishness defined by whiteness (Gardner-McTaggart 2021). It has been claimed that the international schools sector ‘is, on the whole, Anglo-Saxon and white’ (Rey, Bolay, and Gez 2020, 363), with the suggestion that so-called white, native speakers of English are equated with a school being authentically ‘international’. There are large numbers of international schools following the Cambridge International programmes which are staffed by teachers of colour; however, the more prestigious schools are staffed predominantly by white educators and led by white leaders (Gardner-McTaggart 2021) The recruitment decisions of international schools are an indirect way in which they communicate their understanding of what it means to be international. Here, there is often a divide between ‘local’ staff and ‘international’ staff, with the former being on lower pay scales and not receiving the same benefits, such as housing and travel allowances (Tanu 2017). The term ‘international staff’ is used to refer to those who were recruited from overseas, whereas ‘local’ staff are those in country at the time of recruitment. As non-teaching staff, such as cleaners or janitorial staff, are not recruited from overseas, this creates an additional inequality. Ironically, in many parts of the world, such as the Middle East, this means that janitorial staff from African countries or the Indian subcontinent are

98  Travel and the construction of excellence not deemed to be ‘international’; it is teachers predominantly from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa who are given that label. In recruiting international staff, schools often express a preference for so-called ‘native speakers’ of English; in some cases, the preference may be more specifically for those of white/Caucasian ethnicity (Gibson and Bailey 2022). There is also evidence to suggest that international school leaders are predominantly white, English speakers (Gardner-McTaggart 2021), although systematic data are not available. In these multiple ways, international schooling is creating a hierarchy about who is deemed to be international. As a result of these recruitment decisions, it is unsurprising that researchers have identified ways in which the internationalism of these schools is heavily Westernised. For instance, Tanu (2017) argues that in the case study international school in Indonesia which she studied being international is ‘a Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism’ (Tanu 2017, 26). She argues that it is only the cosmopolitan practices that originate in Western ways of being that are recognised as being international in this setting. In international schools like the one studied by Tanu (2017), ‘international students’ are those who are Westernised (and usually white), who maintain a distance from local culture, but who interact with those who are racially different from them; those who are racially different are othered, accessorised, exoticised or seen as in need of assistance. While acknowledging these inequalities, I suggest that a more nuanced ­understanding of the impact of international schooling on students is required – that doesn’t position non-Westernised stakeholders as unsuspecting victims of Westernisation. In my research into an international school predominantly serving host-country nationals in Malaysia, there was a contrast between how the ­expatriate teachers and the host-country students discussed teaching and learning (Bailey 2015a, 2015b). The expatriate teachers felt that they brought new teaching approaches to the school, and were eager to share these with their Malaysian colleagues. They believed that the pedagogical practices of the Malaysian staff were outdated, teacher-centred and overall believed that they themselves were ‘ahead’ in their professional practice. For example, one teacher suggested that Malaysian teachers would benefit from receiving overseas training to improve their practice (Bailey 2015b). None of the expatriate teachers suggested that they had anything to learn from the Malaysian staff. By contrast, the host-country students saw contrasts between the teaching approaches of the two groups, but valued each in different ways (Bailey 2015a); they saw them as offering complementary strengths. Further contrast emerged in how the two groups discussed the idea of b­ eing ‘international’; for the expatriate teachers, the word ‘international’ was used to denote an ideal and they critically reflected on whether the school lived up to such a label. The host-country students, on the other hand, saw describing the school as ‘Malaysian’ as a compliment, and negatively associated being international with elitism. Secondly, the expatriate staff saw working in an international school as a temporary adventure, one that they had sometimes embarked on as a whim. For the students, however, international schooling was part of their life plan, a stepping stone to higher education overseas – an instrumental, serious

Travel and the construction of excellence 99 commitment. We have seen that some commentators have argued that the culture of international schools is disempowering to non-Western students. However, the participants in my study welcomed the culture shock that they experienced at the school (Bailey 2015a). They thought that this was useful preparation for university overseas, as it gave them a gentle way of acclimatising to this culture of teaching and learning. They felt empowered as they became accustomed to the ways of thinking and behaving of their Western educators. In a more recent study, I interviewed Bahraini parents who had chosen international schooling in Bahrain (Bailey 2021a), who offered a different perspective on this issue of Westernisation. The parents I spoke to were concerned about the loss of Arabic language, culture and identity that their children risked by attending international school. They all supplemented the education received at school (which included Arabic and Islamic education) with further Arabic and Islamic studies. They felt that some of the values expressed at school, such as the clothes worn by girls or attitudes towards homosexuality, were in conflict with their home values. On the other hand, there were at least three ways in which they felt that international schooling promoted social inclusion for their children. First, they believed that international schooling was the norm for the Bahraini elite, and that receiving that would help their children to fit into the educated milieu. Second, many of these parents came from either ethnically mixed families or from the Sunni Muslim minority, and they believed their children would be marginalised in government schools. Third, whereas all government schools in Bahrain are single-sex, international schools are predominantly co-educational, and they felt that this experience empowered their children to manage relationships with the opposite sex. Overall, then, it seems that there are strong elements of Westernisation in many international schools. Nevertheless, it is over-simplistic to see these institutions as no more than an exercise in white power. We saw earlier in the chapter that some schools fuse elements of the national into their programmes and ethos. Moreover, students and parents are agentic in their decisions to access international schooling. For some, the lesson in Westernisation is a form of empowerment; that does not mean that Western culture is internalised, but that students and parents are preparing themselves with the understanding needed to actively negotiate Western forms of higher education on their own terms. The Race to Be Best Halliday (2016) has coined the phrase the ‘educational arms race’ to describe how markets for education operate. He describes how markets for education lead to an increased tendency for the allocative role of education to take precedence over interest in its developmental functions. With parents consequently focused on the positional benefits of education, escalating expenditure on education takes place as each tries to outdo the others. The expansion of the international schooling market is a globalisation of this educational arms race. The expansion of ­international schooling has occurred in part because it is embedded

100  Travel and the construction of excellence in a competitive view of education, where the aim is to be the best and to gain advantage over others on a global scale. In other words, international schooling is a ‘transnational positional good’ (Wu and Koh 2022, 59). The underlying rationale of economic globalisation rests on the myth of a competition. The idea of ‘economic competitiveness’ suggests that the global ­a llocation of resources is related to some aspect of performance. Some economies are described as more ‘advanced’ than others, as if countries were each taking their turn to progress around a board game, with some doing so more successfully than others. The ideology of competition is not simply connected to neoliberalism – Hearn (2021) shows that it is embedded in other aspects of modernity, including democratic and legal institutions – but it is a social ideology connected to the erosion of traditional forms of religious and regal authority. We have seen in earlier chapters that a competitive view of education is ­inherent to the global gaze; international schooling is another way in which such competition is manifested. For example, Wu and Koh demonstrate how the international schools they study in China all market themselves in a positional way, stressing that their students will gain competitive advantage when applying to Western universities (Wu and Koh 2022). The authors note differences in the internationality offered by the schools: American-style schools see themselves as a route to top US universities; British-style international schools place emphasis on British culture and their elite status; Canadian-style international schools promote their hybridity, combining Chinese and Canadian elements. However, they all emphasise the advantages that their particular kind of education will bring. In the following section, I draw on my current research to exemplify this quest to be best through international schooling further. Case Study: International School Advisor The ways in which stakeholders construct excellence in international schooling is the focus of one of my current research projects, which examines reviews posted on the website ‘International School Advisor’. International School Advisor is a site that invites reviews of international schools from students, parents and teachers, as well as collating reviews from Google. The site has reviews on 2,300 ­international schools across 231 cities. Visitors can search by looking for the name of a school, by country or city or by using a searchable map. Through analysis of the text accompanying reviews giving five stars (the top rating), I have analysed how the idea of an outstanding international school is constructed by these stakeholders. My data analysis has identified key themes that dominate the portrayal of excellent international schooling in the reviews: first, aspects of the student ­experience (learning, student well-being and happiness); second, the resources that students will enjoy at the school (facilities, extracurriculars and value for money); third, the community that students become a part of (their peer group, the parent community, or the kinds of teachers who work there) and fourth, reference to English or European features of the school.

Travel and the construction of excellence 101 It is interesting to note that being international is rarely mentioned explicitly in the reviews as a feature of excellent international schooling. Nevertheless, in several ways, the way that stakeholders view these schools echoes the elements of the international gaze we have identified in this and previous chapters. First, excellence is equated with alignment with Western (British or English) standards. The reviews refer to British or English elements in the education offered, which typically is understood as enhancing the ethos of the school. For example, one pupil review for a school in Malaysia commented that ‘Some teachers have masters degrees from Cambridge and Oxford’. A school in Spain was praised by a parent for offering ‘a very British-style education’. By contrast, the few references to international aspects of the school focus on specific skills, such as language proficiency or ensuring that students can transition back to schools in their home country. However, some reviews also praise the kind of international community that students would get to belong to through attending the school. For some parents, a noted advantage of a particular school is that students are exposed to ‘amazing teachers and mentors from all over the world’ (parent in Poland). These comments are reminiscent of the emphasis on development of cosmopolitan capital that has been mentioned by other researchers into international schooling. A number of the reviews reflect the competitive ethos that we have seen ­a lready is integral to the international gaze. Most comments related to the learning ­opportunities at these schools are not focused on the learning experiences just of the students in the school, but on how they compare to other schools – and the comparisons are sometimes global in their reach. For example, two reviews of the same school in Singapore described it as ‘the best school in the world’, a school in Malaysia was described as ‘one of the best international schools in Asia’, while a review from Spain made a more limited claim that the international school they were reviewing was the best in their city. Other descriptions of learning refer to the school’s exam results, and how these compare to other schools. Despite this, non-competitive aspects of the student experience also feature in the reviews, specifically when considering students’ well-being. These kinds of comments tended to focus on how their individual child has thrived at the school reviewed, with just one review bringing in a global gaze by referring to caring aspects of the school as being ‘world-class’. Several reviews mention their child’s happiness at the school, in contrast to much literature on international schooling, which implies parents solely seek future competitive advantage in the global labour market. An emphasis is placed on wanting personalised education for their children – attention to the individual is seen as a prerequisite for both the child’s happiness and good academic results. One parent in Spain was explicit about seeking this balance: ‘Very few schools can pull off the trick of warm and caring yet still get top notch academic results’. There is considerable emphasis on the facilities offered by the schools being reviewed, and the range of extracurricular activities that enable their children to take advantage of these facilities. Parents listed such things as swimming pools, sports tracks and performing arts provision. However, one parent at a school in

102  Travel and the construction of excellence Germany did not feel that the school lived up to their expectations, commenting ‘The musical offer is a bit thin – at a school of this standing, I’d expect a (very good) school orchestra for both strings and wind plus possibly some bands (rock/jazz)’. Discussion of money features when assessing the facilities, with these schools being rated highly because – in the words of one parent in the United Arab E ­ mirates – they offer ‘value for money’. In summary, while a competitive and marketised view of education is evident in these reviews and in addition the Westernisation critiqued by other commentators also featured, it would be simplistic to assume that these are the only – or even the most salient – aspects of international schooling that matter to parents. The global gaze, then, was not the only way in which stakeholders looked at, and assessed, these schools. Conclusion Over the last two chapters, I have charted various ways in which all schools and students are compared against the global best. All teachers are expected to be aware of new ways to support mental health from Australia, new use of educational technology from Singapore or new ways to teach maths from Shanghai. Teachers and schools, and national systems of education, are encouraged to rank their performance through the use of data. These rankings range from an index of the world’s ‘best’ private schools, to online reviews of international schools to decide the best in the world (or merely the best on their continent), to international comparisons of school and national performance on international examinations. I have argued in previous chapters that the international datafication of education (Hayes and Cheng 2020) is a form of governmentality, compelling parents, educators and students to comply through attention to international comparisons, which are presented as enabling them to become better versions of themselves. In this chapter, I have examined elite international schools, noting that they too are expected to engage in a global competition, one that is inherently unequal. Hence, it might be concluded, despite their compliance, parents, educators and students are condemned to global failure – for who can succeed when the criterion for success is to be the best in the world? This, then, operates as a form of control, committing students and teachers to an intensification of their work and obscuring other purposes or forms of education. Yet, I have also sounded caution in reaching this conclusion. I have shown that key participants in international schools do maintain other ways of looking at education, and that they are agentic in their approach to Westernised elements of these schools. There is evidence that some schools fuse elements of the ­n ational and the international; there are changes in the way that travel is conceptualised by some parents; there remains a commitment to non-competitive of international schooling amongst key stakeholders. In summary, if international schooling has become a global competition, it is not clear that everyone is playing the same game or following the same rules – or is even stepping out onto the pitch at all.

Travel and the construction of excellence 103 References Bailey, Lucy. 2015a. “The Experiences of Host Country Nationals in International Schools: A Case-Study from Malaysia.” Journal of Research in International Education 14 (2):85–97.    . 2015b. “Reskilled and ‘Running Ahead’: Teachers in an International School Talk About Their Work.” Journal of Research in International Education 14 (1):3–15. doi: 10.1177/1475240915572949.    . 2021a. “Host-Country Parent Perspectives on International Schooling: A Study from Bahrain.” Journal of Research in International Education 20 (1):3–18.    . 2021b. International Schooling: Privilege and Power in Globalized Societies. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bailey, Lucy, and Lucy Cooker. 2018. “Who Cares? Pro-Social Education within the Programmes of the International Baccalaureate.” Journal of Research in International Education 17 (3):228–39. Bailey, Lucy, and Mark T Gibson. 2020. “International School Principals: Routes to Headship and Key Challenges of Their Role.” Educational Management Administration & Leadership 48 (6):1007–25. Basaran, Tugba, and Christian Olsson. 2018. “Becoming International: On Symbolic Capital, Conversion and Privilege.” Millennium 46 (2):96–118. doi: 10.1177/030582981 7739636. Beech, Jason, Aaron Koh, Claire Maxwell, Miri Yemini, Khen Tucker, and Ignacio Barrenechea. 2021. “‘Cosmopolitan Start-Up’ Capital: Mobility and School Choices of Global Middle Class Parents.” Cambridge Journal of Education 51 (4):527–541. Bittencourt, Tiago, and Alexandra Willetts. 2018. “Negotiating the Tensions: A Critical Study of International Schools’ Mission Statements.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 16 (4):515–25. Bunnell, Tristan. 2005. “Perspectives on International Schools and the Nature and Extent of Local Community Contact.” Journal of Research in International Education 4 (1):43–63.    . 2019. International Schooling and Education in the ‘New Era’: Emerging Issues. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Bunnell, Tristan, Michael Donnelly, Hugh Lauder, and Samuel Whewall. 2022. “International Mindedness as a Platform for Class Solidarity.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 52 (5):712–28. doi: 10.1080/03057925.2020.1811639. Bunnell, Tristan, and James Hatch. 2021. “‘Guarding the Gate’: The Hidden Practices Behind Admission to an Elite Traditional International School in Japan.” International Studies in Sociology of Education: 1–23. doi: 10.1080/09620214.2021.1981771. Davey, Gayna. 2012. “Using Bourdieu’s Concept of Doxa to Illuminate Classed Practices in an English Fee-Paying School.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 33 (4):507–25. Gardner-McTaggart, Alexander Charles. 2021. “Washing the World in Whiteness; ­International Schools’ Policy.” Journal of Educational Administration and History 53 (1):1–20. Gibson, Mark T, and Lucy Bailey. 2022. “Constructing International Schools as Postcolonial Sites.” Globalisation, Societies and Education: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/147677 24.2022.2045909 Golding, David, and Kyle Kopsick. 2019. “The Colonial Legacy in Cambridge Assessment Literature Syllabi.” Curriculum Perspectives 39 (1):7–17. Gress-Wright, Catharina. 2022. “Creole Cosmopolitans: The Impact of the IB Diploma Programme on Enko Education Students in Three African Contexts.” UCL Institute of Education.

104  Travel and the construction of excellence Halliday, Daniel. 2016. “Private Education, Positional Goods, and the Arms Race Problem.” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 15 (2):150–69. doi: 10.1177/1470594x15603717. Hayes, Aneta, and Jie Cheng. 2020. “Datafication of Epistemic Equality: Advancing ­Understandings of Teaching Excellence Beyond Benchmarked Performativity.” Teaching in Higher Education 25 (4):493–509. Hearn, Jonathan. 2021. “Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism, Meritocracy, Modernity.” Journal of Historical Sociology 34 (2):375–92. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1111/johs.12324. Kenway, Jane. 2018. “The Work of Desire: Elite Schools’ Multi-Scalar Markets.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 93–110. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Keßler, Catharina I, and Heinz-Hermann Krüger. 2018. ““Being International”: Institutional Claims and Student Perspectives at an Exclusive International School.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 209–28. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Leek, Joanna. 2022. “International Baccalaureate Schools as Islands of Educational Resistance. A Case Study of Poland.” Globalisation, Societies and Education: 1–13. https://doi. org/10.1080/14767724.2022.2089976. Maxwell, Claire, and Miri Yemini. 2019. “Modalities of Cosmopolitanism and Mobility: Parental Education Strategies of Global, Immigrant and Local Middle-Class Israelis.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 40 (5):616–32. Meyer, Heather A. 2021. The Global Imaginary of International School Communities. Cham: Springer. Reid, Carol, and Mohammed Kamel Ibrahim. 2017. “Imagining the Cosmopolitan Global Citizen? Parents’ Choice of International Schools in Kuwait.” In Educating for the 21st Century, 265–79. Cham: Springer. Resnik, Julia. 2008. “The Construction of the Global Worker Through International ­Education.” In The Production of Educational Knowledge in the Global Era, edited by J. Resnik, 145–67. Rotterdam: Sense. Rey, Jeanne, Matthieu Bolay, and Yonatan N Gez. 2020. “Precarious Privilege: Personal Debt, Lifestyle Aspirations and Mobility Among International School Teachers.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 18 (4):361–73. Schubiger, Elisabeth, Jeanne Rey, and Matthieu Bolay. 2019. “Fostering the Next Generation of “responsible World Leaders”: The Learning of Corporate Social Responsibility in Swiss International Schools.” Tsantsa: Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association 24:121–6. Stevenson, Howard, Stephen Joseph, Lucy Bailey, Lucy Cooker, Stuart Fox, and Alicia Bowman. 2016. “‘Caring’ Across the International Baccalaureate Continuum.” In International Baccalaureate Organization. Suresh Babu, Savitha, and Anupama Mahajan. 2021. “Branding an ‘Inter’national School: Fusing ‘Indian Values’ with a Global Diploma.” International Studies in Sociology of Education 30 (3):287–305. doi: 10.1080/09620214.2020.1853589. Tanu, Danau. 2017. Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School. New York: Berghahn Books. Useem, Ruth Hill, and Richard D Downie. 1976. “Third-Culture Kids.” Today’s Education 65 (3):103–5.

Travel and the construction of excellence 105 Van Reken, Ruth E, David C Pollock, and Michael V Pollock. 2010. Third Culture Kids. Boston, MA: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Wright, Ewan, and Benjamin Mulvey. 2022. “The Promised Capitals of International High School Programmes and the Global Field of Higher Education: The Case of Shenzhen, China.” Journal of Research in International Education 21 (2):87–104. doi: 10.1177/14752409221122070. Wu, Wenxi, and Aaron Koh. 2022. “Being “International” Differently: A Comparative Study of Transnational Approaches to International Schooling in China.” Educational Review 74 (1):57–75. doi: 10.1080/00131911.2021.1887819. Yemini, Miri, and Claire Maxwell. 2022. “Alternative Modes of Family Travel: MiddleClass Parental ‘Exit’ Strategies as a Different Orientation Towards Global Citizenship Education.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 20 (3):337–48. Yemini, Miri, Claire Maxwell, Aaron Koh, Khen Tucker, Ignacio Barrenechea, and Jason Beech. 2020. “Mobile Nationalism: Parenting and Articulations of Belonging Among Globally Mobile Professionals.” Sociology 54 (6):1212–29.

7

Refugee education Permanently excluded

Introduction The international turn in education has brought a discourse of common problems with common solutions, as well as a notion that somehow all institutions, teachers and students are part of a single global market for education. It has come with a rhetorical focus on equality, both from the neoliberal right who expound the potential advantages that all can gain in a competitive market and from the progressive left who are attracted by the democratising notion of education everywhere being held accountable to attaining a global level. Yet, the global gaze has overlooked certain disadvantaged groups entirely. In the previous chapter, I looked at some of the most elitist institutions in ­international education – international schools – which typically serve highly privileged students whose parents can afford to pay high fees. In this chapter, I consider how disadvantaged students may be impacted by, and yet remain part of, the internationalisation of education. Specifically, the chapter considers how the global gaze excludes refugee education from the promises of ­g lobalisation (Dryden-Peterson 2016; Mangan and Winter 2017). Refugee students are not considered to be ‘international’ students, despite their travel across national boundaries. They are not considered to be the example par excellence of ­international education, despite their forced acclimatisation to new educational norms. Rather, the difficulties faced by refugee students expose cracks in the claim to be ‘international’. The chapter begins by defining the term ‘refugee’, charting the emergence of concern amongst nations with refugees and their education, and explaining the contexts and challenges for refugee education in different parts of the world. It then connects refugee education to issues of internationalisation, identifying similarities and differences between refugee education and the situation faced by other international students. This is used to reflect on the connection between internationalised education and processes of social exclusion more generally. The concern in this chapter is with the limits to diversity in talk of the international. It will explore who is othered and what ‘we’ see as the functions of ‘our’ schools in ‘our country’. This is used to expose a hierarchy of differences. This analysis serves to emphasise that being international is not a descriptive label of DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-7

Refugee education 107 educational activities, but an evaluation used to benefit certain groups of students and educational activities. Understanding Refugee Education A refugee is defined as a person who is forcibly displaced from their own country because of a reasonable fear of persecution. Refugees are a heterogeneous group, varying in their country and culture of origin, the mental and physical challenges they may have encountered in escaping from their passport country and the ­degree of acceptance they have found in a new temporary or permanent place of residence. They include children who have travelled alone to escape a war, families who have travelled together to escape a genocide, the affluent and the poor, the educated and the uneducated – what unites these disparate peoples is their shared fear and displacement. Refugees often flee from their home country to a neighbouring country where  they may live for many years while awaiting official allocation to typically  more distant and affluent resettlement countries. Resettlement countries typically have more resources to support the education and integration of refugees and accord permanent rights to those (few) who are officially resettled. Nevertheless, refugee students in these countries may still face issues as a result of the trauma and dislocation they have suffered. By contrast, the neighbouring temporary host countries often have fewer resources and their education systems are already stretched. An additional challenge is that some countries playing host to large numbers of seeking asylum, such as Malaysia and Lebanon, are not signatories to international agreements on refugee rights. There is evidence from a range of contexts, including countries of resettlement and refugee camps, that refugees place a high value on education. In some cases, parents will sell their own food rations in order to get education for their children (Dryden-Peterson 2010). Education is important for refugees and refugee communities in order either to facilitate their integration into their receiving country or to aid national reconstruction in the event of it being safe for them to return to their homes (Streitwieser and Miller-Idriss 2017). However, refugees often face considerable barriers in accessing education in temporary host countries, where they may be excluded from government schools. Refugees continue to have lower rates of participation in higher education in resettlement countries, owing to a number of linguistic and economic barriers (Anderson 2020a). Women continue to be under-represented amongst refugee students in higher education, demonstrating the still greater barriers that they face (Anderson 2020a). Dryden-Peterson (2016) argues that refugees are caught in ‘the tug-of-war ­between globalization processes and persistently national institutions, especially in the domain of education’ (Dryden-Peterson 2016, 473). Given the intrinsically global nature of refugee education, Dryden-Peterson suggests that one might ­expect it at the forefront of the globalisation of education; however, it is not. C ­ entral to the failure to adequately address refugees’ educational needs is their ambivalent positioning as both internal and external to the nation-state – physically internal

108  Refugee education but politically external as non-citizens. There are global organisations, such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and global rights enshrined in global agreements, to protect refugees – but everyday practices do not reflect the promises of globalisation. The relationship between the global and the national in the UNHCR’s ­approach to refugee education has evolved; Dryden-Peterson (2016) has identified its three phases to date. Firstly, in the years after the Second World War, international organisations arose to deal with the unprecedented displacement of people, but their educational initiatives were small-scale and sporadic. Next, from around 1985 until 2011, key stakeholders were focused on establishing global governance of refugee education; policies regarding refugee education were developed, but the UNHCR was rarely directly involved in delivery of education. This picture has changed again since 2011, with a move away from emphasis on global governance towards a focus on the national. Since then, the emphasis at the UNHCR has moved away from segregated education for refugees to seeking integration within national systems of education. Where previously there had been hope for a speedy return of refugees to their country of origin, there is now recognition that protracted refugee situations often render this unlikely. I have conducted various research studies of refugee education in Malaysia, looking at both secondary age students and those in higher education. Refugee education in Malaysia provides an example of the challenges faced by refugees in accessing education in a temporary host country. Malaysia is not a signatory to international agreements regarding the rights of refugees, which means that refugees are equated with illegal immigrants. In consequence, refugees and asylum seekers (those seeking refugee status) of school age are not permitted to attend government schools. Instead, refugee communities and nongovernmental organisations have set up low-resource ‘learning centres’, staffed by v­ olunteers and operating out of unsuitable buildings, such as apartments or shop-lots. These learning centres try to offer basic primary (and occasionally secondary) education to refugee students. In 2022 (the time of writing), there were 23,823 refugee children of school-going age in Malaysia; approximately 44% of refugee children aged 6–13 in Malaysia were enrolled in primary education, while only 16% of refugee children aged 14–17 were enrolled in secondary education (UNHCR 2022). Because refugees are seen as illegal immigrants in Malaysia, until 2014, no refugee students were able to attend university. From that date, a few universities cautiously opened up their programmes to refugee students, although many were still unable to attend because of their lack of documentation, as many asylum-seekers enter the country by boat or through the jungle without official documentation. Higher educational institutions were wary of breaking Malaysian law regarding the documentation required for international student visas. Offering fee reductions or waivers without full documentation was in a grey space legally speaking, but nevertheless some universities negotiated Memoranda of Understanding with the UNHCR to support refugees in this way. In 2022, only 48  refugees were engaged in higher education.

Refugee education 109 If the promise of internationalisation of education is of global access to education, these statistics from Malaysia demonstrate that it is a broken promise. I explore the connection between refugee students and internationalisation of education further in the following section. Refugee Students and Internationalisation In earlier chapters, I have explored the relationship between the national and the international in internationalised education. For refugees, this relationship is doubly problematic. In common parlance, we refer to a person’s ‘roots’, a botanical metaphor implying a firm connection to territory, between both an individual and a wider culture. The consequence of this is to pathologise those, like refugees, who are displaced or ‘uprooted’ (Mallki 1997). For Mallki, it is not displacement per se that traumatises refugees – indeed, we have noted throughout this book how travel and movement may denote privilege – rather, it is the socio-political context in which that displacement occurs. Refugees experience involuntary internationalisation because of their forced migration. Nevertheless, it might be thought that there are similarities between their experiences and those of international students. Indeed, previous writers have suggested that the refugee student in higher education is a ‘home international student’ ( Jones and Caruana 2009) or have described refugees as ‘home students with international needs’ (Stevenson and Willott 2009, 219). One similarity between refugee education and other aspects of internationalised education is that refugees often see education as a route to social mobility (Stevenson and Willott 2007; Zhou and Bankston III 2001). The challenges associated with being in a new pedagogical and communicative environment are further commonalities b­ etween international and refugee students. Dumenden and English (2013) compare the experiences of refugee and international students in postcompulsory secondary schooling in Australia. They argue that both experience a sense of being ‘a fish out of water’. They identify commonalities in their accounts: both seem to experience a disconnect between their expectations of support from their teachers and their teachers’ expectations of their independence; both have ­d ifficulties in ­understanding what is an appropriate communication between student and teacher in Australia. Because of such similarities, Streitwieser and MillerIdriss (2017) argue that universities typically already have structures in place to welcome and support international students, and extending this to refugees will ­require only creative adaptation, suggesting that the new challenge will be ‘likely more of scale and scope than of substance’ (Streitwieser and Miller-Idriss 2017, 31). However, despite some of the similarities in their experiences – with both ­international and refugee students having to acclimatise to a new education system and wider culture, experiencing dislocation and isolation and possibly sharing linguistic b­ arriers – more contrasts than similarities between these groups are evident from the research literature. International university students are a well-researched group; by contrast, the education of refugees is seen as a ‘new aspect of internationalisation’ (Berg 2018)

110  Refugee education and literature on refugee students in higher education is scarce (Mangan and ­Winter 2017). In their literature review, Mangan and Winter found some common themes in the scant literature available. This suggested that refugees typically feel that they are treated as inferior to other categories of students. Furthermore, they felt that instructors were insensitive to their needs, including their struggle to acclimatise to new pedagogical norms. Feeling that their refugee status would be stigmatised, many chose to keep it secret, but this in turn led to further feelings of isolation. Resource differences made it hard for them to integrate with either home or international students; a lack of money also made it hard for many refugee students to establish and maintain relationships with non-refugee students, and they sometimes lacked a suitable quiet study space in their homes. Similarly, Stevenson and Willott (2009) note many barriers that refugees may encounter in accessing higher education: requiring pastoral care after traumatic experiences; a lack of social networks to support their studies; unfamiliarity with academic practices in their new country, including insufficient language skills; inability to complete placements because of part-time jobs, caring responsibilities or lack of documentation for travel and fearing the stigma of being identified as refugees if they access support services available. The research I conducted with refugee students in higher education in Malaysia with my colleague Gul Inanç shows some of the further contrasts there may be between international and refugee students (Bailey and İnanç 2018). Whereas other international students are typically full-time students (indeed, they are ­unable to work in many contexts as one of the stipulations of their student visa), the refugee students I studied were balancing work and other family responsibilities with study. In contrast to the privileged world of many other international students, several faced mental health challenges – indeed, research has suggested that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder amongst young people in some refugee communities may exceed 50% (Betancourt et al. 2015). They were concerned that they were a burden on the university where they studied – which contrasts to the way in which international students and being international are seen as being assets to institutions. Through analysis of my interviews with these refugee students, I showed how they constructed their identity around education in order to maintain their motivation and commitment to study. They felt grateful to people who had helped them with their educational journeys, but angry that they had to feel grateful for something that others had as a right. Refugees are often excluded from accounts of the internationalisation of education because the prevailing narrative is to depict them as hungry and helpless (Zeus 2011); by contrast, my data showed my participants’ resourcefulness and initiative in accessing educational opportunities. The refugees that we studied, who were exceptional in managing to access higher education in Malaysia, often had chosen to keep their identity as refugee students concealed from their international student classmates. Those students who did choose to tell classmates about this received mixed responses. In addition to these material differences between refugee and international students, media and popular representations of refugee students also often e­ mphasise the contrasts rather than the commonalities between these groups. In popular

Refugee education 111 discourse, international students are positioned a future skilled labour – a resource for the receiving country (Cerna and Chou 2022). By contrast, forced migrants are ‘super-disadvantaged’ students (Cerna and Chou 2022, 6). Similarly, based on a review of literature into discursive representations of refugee students, Berg argues that refugee students are represented as deficient and in need of support, whereas international students are represented as assets, either as future highly skilled workers or as offering intercultural stimulation to domestic students (Berg 2022). Anderson (2020b) looks at news media representations of refugee and international postsecondary students in Canada and finds salient differences between the two groups. Recurrent themes about international students included the commodification of international students and internationalisation more generally; they were depicted as a source of current revenue to universities and future business partnerships for the economy, a solution to labour market shortages and a way of developing the global competences of domestic students. More negatively, they were also portrayed as potential threats who could squeeze out Canadian students, be spies or engage in criminal activity. The common theme here was concern with their impact, either positive or negative, on Canadian society. By contrast, refugee students were seen not in terms of their impact on Canada, but in terms of Canada’s impact on them; Canada was portrayed as benevolent and welcoming to refugee students. Yet, refugee students were not portrayed as offering any potential contribution to their new country – either by solving current labour market issues or as potential future entrepreneurs, nor by enriching Canadian classrooms. Berg (2022) charts how the socio-political context may impact on how, and to what extent, depiction of refugee students is contrasted with discursive representation of international students. The influx of refugees into Germany in 2015 and 2016 led to them becoming differentiated from international students in discourse about their needs, as new programmes were developed specifically targeted for them (Berg 2022). Over time, however, as these programmes drew to an end, refugees became framed as international students (Berg 2022). In an auto-­ ethnography about being a refugee student written by Student, Kendall, and Day (2017), the lead author recounts how one of the British universities he a­ ttended classified him as an international student, which meant he was liable to pay higher fees than domestic students, and his attempts to explain his situation were dismissed until he obtained a British passport. The authors argue that neoliberal processes are affecting universities to make them less supportive of refugees – and more eager to classify them as higher fee-paying international students. The division between refugees and other international students, then, is not a simple dichotomy, but is a political and socially constructed divide that differs discursively between different contexts. Additionally, the distinction between forced and voluntary migration is not always clear-cut (Kirkegaard and Nat-George 2016). For those with the financial resources or who are able to win a scholarship, ostensibly voluntary migration for education may simply be a faster and surer route away from a conflict than following the UNHCR procedures, through which resettlement as refugees can take years, and may be rejected. In consequence, Streitwieser (2019) has suggested a three-way categorisation of those who

112  Refugee education are internationally mobile for education between those who pursue international education for enlightenment, those who seek it for opportunities and those who pursue a mobile pathway for survival. He suggests that hitherto internationalisation of education has been focused on the first category. He calls for a more inclusive view of the internationalisation of education that pays particular attention to those in the second and third categories, economic migrants and refugees. The difficulties faced by refugee students are a salient reminder that, for some, the travel that is welcomed by the global gaze is an unattainable privilege. The forcible displacement of refugees places them in sharp contrast to other international students (whether in school or in higher education) who have travelled through their own volition. We saw in the previous chapter that travel is constructed in international schools as a desirable accoutrement, with some children nonchalantly gathering countries and airlines as markers of distinction. By contrast, the travel of the refugee is a forced one-way journey and is sometimes traumatic. The refugee students I interviewed had often risked their lives to travel in unseaworthy boats, or beaten their way through the jungle in the hands of people smugglers; even those who had arrived in Malaysia by car or airport did so with fear, terrified that they might be turned back at the border. Consideration of the experiences of refugee students suggests that the notion of global competence examined in previous chapters requires re-examination. Refugees students may have gaps in their academic education, experience a culture shock in encountering new cultures of teaching and learning and be experiencing mental challenges as a result of traumatic experiences (Bailey and İnanç 2018). For non-refugee students, understanding that classmates may have experienced war and be suffering post-traumatic stress disorder is more important than willingness to sample Syrian cuisine, but it is the latter that features in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)’s conceptualisation of global competence. When we teach students the skills they need for the global world of the future are being willing to host an exchange student, it is clear who is (and who is not) being interpellated in these documents. They envisage neither the skills some may need to flee their lives and establish an entirely new way of life in a new country, not of their choosing, nor the skills that others may need to welcome refugees and integrate them in a new country. In multiple ways, then, refugee students are othered or excluded from the normalised portrayal of an international student, in terms of their experiences, their media representation and general awareness of their needs. The idea that refugee education is a peripheral or unusual aspect of internationalisation is telling; it is a reminder that only certain forms of travel or being international are considered part of the global. I explore this further in the following section. Internationalisation and Social Exclusion In the previous section, I explored how refugee students may contrast to ‘real’ ­international students through their material circumstances, the socio-­political barriers they face, and their discursive depiction. This exploration of the

Refugee education 113 positioning of refugees in relation to discourses of internationalisation enables us to draw wider conclusions about the relationship between internationalised education and processes of social exclusion. Internationalisation of education may serve as a route to social exclusion for those individuals and institutions who do not have the knowledge, experience, linguistic skills and access to resources to enable them to participate in internationalised education (Ramírez Iñiguez 2011). International students themselves may experience forms of othering and discrimination within ostensibly globalised universities (Tavares 2021), as exemplified by the resentment over linguistic differences and trouble with correctly addressing international students expressed by domestic students in the Australian university studied by Doherty (2005). Those who are invisible or marginalised in this discourse are many and may include many different groups of migrants and diasporic communities. ­Indeed, it is possible that internationalisation may lead to increased social exclusion as it brings increased social diversity to university campuses (Hoang and Jordan 2019). Hoang and Jordan (2019) report on the experiences of international students at an internationalised university in Hong Kong, with various groups such as Mainland Chinese and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students ­reporting experiencing discrimination. They argue that internationalisation ­results in it being less clear who is responsible for addressing issues of social exclusion in higher education. What we are seeing here is that only certain ways of being international are valued. Let me briefly discuss two further examples of a hierarchy of internationalisation. First, internationalisation is sometimes portrayed as offering a route to economic advantage for those from the Global South. The economic rationalisation behind some accounts of internationalisation implies an underlying logic of student mobility where students from the Global South travel to the Global North, in search of the economic return on Western/Northern credentials. However, examination of actual patterns of mobility shows that there are many other trajectories of mobility, and there is increasing awareness that a more nuanced approach is needed to explain the impetus to mobility. Bamberger (2022) shows that international student mobility takes place along diasporic trajectories, suggesting that accounts of internationalisation need to take account of selfformation and multiple, interwoven identities, rather than assuming economic motivations predominate and that it is access to education in the Global North that counts. Second, there are only certain students who are considered as desirable examples of being international; a number of writers have pointed out that migrant children from families of low socioeconomic status are seen as negatively impacting on a school’s reputation despite being international (Kotzyba et al. 2018; Waldow 2018). Waldow (2018) sees ‘being international’ as a concept that is reliant upon its vagueness in order to ensure that it is attractive to everyone – in order, that is, to be seen as a global good. Being international is drawn on by diverse groups as a legitimation mechanism for various educational processes and institutions, but the consensus that this is desirable rests on its vagueness. Certain forms of being

114  Refugee education international are excluded from this presumption of desirability, as large numbers of students coming from international backgrounds with low socio-economic status reduce the status of a school rather than raising it. Waldow concludes that ­being international is seen as attractive only when it is a form of distinction. Peter (2018) is less pessimistic, identifying two opposing tendencies in discussion of internationalisation of education in Germany, exclusivity and inclusion. In the former view, being or becoming international is a form of distinction that can be achieved through certain forms of elite schooling; the foreigner or ‘stranger’ is marvelled at as offering a different, enriching view of reality – a resource to be used in the competitive pursuit of excellence. On the other hand, inclusive diversity sees the stranger or foreigner as potentially marginalised from society. It focuses on raising the performance of children from different i­mmigrant backgrounds, does not blame them for ‘failing’ in a competitive endeavour, instead emphasising how inclusive pedagogies are needed for success. Here, the emphasis is on access and equality for diverse groups, rather than excellence. There are commonalities between these two approaches; however; both see Otherness as a potential economic and social resource; the stranger is no longer expected to leave tomorrow, but to stay and render themselves productive to society (Peter 2018). I would agree that there is liberating potential in othering, but it is hard to share Peter’s optimism based on the research I have conducted with refugee students and the wider literature that is available. Nevertheless, I shall return to such positive possibilities in the concluding chapter to this book. Conclusion This chapter has explored exclusion and marginalisation within discourses of ­internationalisation of education by consideration of the example of refugee education, using this to reflect on the way in which other groups may be disadvantaged by, or excluded from, the global gaze. It has shown that, although a rhetoric of global citizenship and global competence pervades the international education scene today, refugees – despite their experience of cross-border living and fusing multiple cultures – continue to be marginalised, and refugee students continue to feel stigmatised. The educational experiences of refugees suggest that the global gaze is blinkered, failing to see the global potential of those at its peripheries. It is an example of the way in which some individuals and groups are othered and excluded from the benefits of internationalised education. International education purports to be a global good – something that can be of benefit to all students across the world. It has discursive power because of our instinctive attraction to the notion of being international. Yet, the analysis in this chapter should give educational practitioners pause for thought in their embrace of the international, for how good can something really be if it is so arbitrary in distributing its benefits? There has been growing awareness of the position of excluded groups in internationalisation, and for some commentators the conclusion is to advocate for adaptation rather than abandonment of the mission to

Refugee education 115 be international. For example, Jones and de Wit (2021) have argued for a more ­humanistic view of internationalisation, which acknowledges the role that higher education can play in the social inclusion of refugees and other migrants. I would suggest that a more inclusive version of internationalisation serves the self-interest of advantaged nations, as well as being an act of basic humanity. The solutions that impoverished refugee communities have developed to meet the educational challenges they face – negotiating unfamiliar contexts, managing uncertainty, challenging inequalities and adapting to change (Dryden-Peterson 2022) – are remarkably similar to the notions of global competence and global citizenship that supranational organisations and high-fee consultancies have promised to national systems of education. They provide inspiring examples of how we can rise to the challenges inherent in a globalised world. References Anderson, Tim. 2020a. “International and Refugee University Students in Canada: Trends, Barriers, and the Future.” Comparative and International Education 48 (2):1–16.    . 2020b. “News Media Representations of International and Refugee Postsecondary Students.” The Journal of Higher Education 91 (1):58–83. doi: 10.1080/00221546. 2019.1587977. Bailey, Lucy, and Gül İnanç. 2018. Access to Higher Education: Refugees’ Stories from Malaysia. London: Routledge. Bamberger, Annette. 2022. “From Human Capital to Marginalized Other: A Systematic Review of Diaspora and Internationalization in Higher Education.” British Journal of Educational Studies 70 (3):363–85. doi: 10.1080/00071005.2021.1925084. Berg, Jana. 2018. “A New Aspect of Internationalisation? Specific Challenges and Support Structures for Refugees on Their Way to German Higher Education.” In European Higher Education Area: The Impact of Past and Future Policies, edited by Adrian Curaj, Ligia Deca and Remus Pricopie, 219–35. Cham: Springer.    . 2022. “International or Refugee Students? Shifting Organisational Discourses on Refugee Students at German Higher Education Organisations.” International Studies in Sociology of Education: 1–20. doi: 10.1080/09620214.2022.2048264. Betancourt, Theresa S., Rochelle Frounfelker, Tej Mishra, Aweis Hussein, and Rita Falzarano. 2015. “Addressing Health Disparities in the Mental Health of Refugee Children and Adolescents Through Community-Based Participatory Research: A Study in 2 Communities.” American Journal of Public Health 105 (S3):S475–S82. doi: 10.2105/ ajph.2014.302504. Cerna, Lucie, and Meng-Hsuan Chou. 2022. “Politics of Internationalisation and the Migration-Higher Education Nexus.” Globalisation, Societies and Education:1–14. doi: 10. 1080/14767724.2022.2073975. Doherty, Catherine. 2005. Managing potentials: Cultural differencing in a site of global/ local education. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the AARE 2004 International Education Research Conference: Doing the Public Good. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Dryden-Peterson, Sarah. 2010. “The Politics of Higher Education for Refugees in a Global Movement for Primary Education.” Refuge 27:10.    . 2016. “Refugee Education: The Crossroads of Globalization.” Educational ­Researcher 45 (9):473–82.

116  Refugee education    . 2022. Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Dumenden, Iris E., and Rebecca English. 2013. “Fish Out of Water: Refugee and International Students in Mainstream Australian Schools.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 17 (10):1078–88. doi: 10.1080/13603116.2012.732120. Hoang, Andrew Pau, and Lucy P. Jordan. 2019. “Internationalisation and Intersectionality in Hong Kong University Student Life: An Exploratory Study of Social Exclusion.” Multicultural Education Review 11 (2):114–34. doi: 10.1080/2005615X.2019.1615247. Jones, Elspeth, and V. Caruana. 2009. “Nurturing the Global Graduate for the TwentyFirst Century: Learning from the Student Voice on Internationalisation.” Edited by: Jones E. Jones, Elspeth, and Hans de Wit. 2021. “A Global View of Internationalisation: What Next?” In The Promise of Higher Education, edited by H Van’t Land, A Corcoran and D-C Iancu, 83–8. Cham: Springer. Kirkegaard, Ane Marie Ørbø, and Sisse Mari-Louise Wulff Nat-George. 2016. “Fleeing Through the Globalised Education System: The Role of Violence and Conflict in International Student Migration.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 14 (3):390–402. doi: 10. 1080/14767724.2016.1151769. Kotzyba, Katrin, Lena Dreier, Mareke Niemann, and Werner Helspe. 2018. “Processes of Internationalisation in Germany’s Secondary Education System: A Case Study on Internationality in the Gymnasium.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 191–208. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Mallki, Lisa. 1997. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees”. In Culture, Power, Place: ­Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. Durham: Duke University Press. Mangan, Doireann, and Laura Anne Winter. 2017. “(In) Validation and (mis) Recognition in Higher Education: The Experiences of Students from Refugee Backgrounds.” International Journal of Lifelong Education 36 (4):486–502. Peter, Tobias. 2018. “Exclusive Globality, Inclusive Diversity: Internationalisation as a Strategy of Inclusion and Exclusion.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 57–73. Cham: Springer. Ramírez Iñiguez, Alma Arcelia. 2011. “Conditions for the Internationalisation of Higher Education: Between Inclusion and Exclusion in a Globalised World.” International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 8 (2):313–25. doi: 10.7238/rusc.v8i2.1072. Stevenson, Jacqueline, and John Willott. 2007. “The Aspiration and Access to Higher Education of Teenage Refugees in the UK.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 37 (5):671–87. doi: 10.1080/03057920701582624.    . 2009. “Refugees: Home Students With International Needs.” In Internationalisation and the Student Voice, edited by Elspeth Jones, 219–28. New York: Routledge. Streitwieser, Bernhard. 2019. “International Education for Enlightenment, for Opportunity and for Survival: Where Students, Migrants and Refugees Diverge.” Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education 11 (Fall):4–9. Streitwieser, Bernhard, and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 2017. “Higher education’s Response to the European Refugee Crisis: Challenges, Strategies and Opportunities.” In The Globalization of Internationalization, edited by Hans de Wit, Jocelyne Gacel-Avila, Elspeth Jones and Nico Jooste, 53–63. London: Routledge.

Refugee education 117 Student, R, Kathleen Kendall, and Lawrence Day. 2017. “Being a Refugee University Student: A Collaborative Auto-Ethnography.” Journal of Refugee Studies 30 (4):580–604. doi: 10.1093/jrs/few045. Tavares, Vander. 2021. “Feeling Excluded: International Students Experience Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” International Journal of Inclusive Education: 1–18. doi: 10.1080/ 13603116.2021.2008536. UNHCR. 2022. “Education in Malaysia.” Accessed 10th November. https://www.unhcr. org/education-in-malaysia.html. Waldow, Florian. 2018. “Commentary to Part III: Why Is “Being International” So Attractive? “Being International” as a Source of Legitimacy and Distinction.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 247–53. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Zeus, Barbara. 2011. “Exploring Barriers to Higher Education in Protracted Refugee Situations: The Case of Burmese Refugees in Thailand.” Journal of Refugee Studies 24 (2):256–76. doi: 10.1093/jrs/fer011. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III. 2001. “Family Pressure and the Educational Experience of the Daughters of Vietnamese Refugees.” International Migration 39 (4):133–51. doi: 10.1111/1468-2435.00165.

8

Imperial professors and academic tourists Paid to be white

Introduction At the Malaysian English Language Teachers Association Annual Conference, I was listening to a government minister extol the official language education policy. I was not a Malaysian English Language Teacher, but I had been arm-twisted into attending by my Head of Department, as I taught linguistics in our TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) MA programme. It was fun to meet former and current students as professionals and hear them talk about their work. However, this plenary session was about the government’s commitment to bringing in teaching assistants from overseas to help in the English language classroom. The best way to motivate students, the government minister explained, was by employing teaching assistants with ‘blonde hair and blue eyes’. I suddenly became uncomfortably aware that I was one of the few white educators at the conference. I was surrounded by highly experienced teachers, many of whom held Masters and doctoral qualifications as well as their teaching certifications, yet – we now all knew – my unqualified teenage children would be considered more motivated by the Malaysian government. And the calm in the hall told me, equally, clearly that I was the only person for whom this was a revelation. My ‘whiteness’ – for this is how I was described by many Malaysians – meant that I had been hitherto happily oblivious of my own privilege in a way that none of my students or colleagues were. Prior to the pandemic, Western academics like myself prowled the world. It was part of the job of many Western professors to travel to various parts of the world to teach, collect data or simply present at conferences with their colleagues. Western universities opened up campuses overseas, staffed in part by locals and in part by fly-in professors, or they partnered with local institutions and simply visited for due diligence. This travel was not predicated on a mutual exchange; in return, other countries sent the West their students – and their fees. This chapter argues that through such economic exchanges, Western academics have become agents of power and domination, complicit in the colonisation of knowledge and learning ( Johnstone and Lee 2022). Study of the internationalisation of higher education often presupposes that structural forces are driving change, to which both institutions and individual faculty are forced to respond. By contrast, this DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-8

Imperial professors and academic tourists 119 chapter examines the agency enjoyed by privileged participants in the international market for higher education and denied to less privileged others. The title of this chapter alludes both to the ways in which white educators may receive financial and other benefits from their racialised positioning and to the ways in which educators of colour may be expected to conform to whiteness in order to be seen as professional or worthy of promotion, even in ostensibly internationalised institutions. To do this, the chapter considers the assumptions and inequalities that underpin international academic careers (Gerhards, Hans, and Drewski 2018). While there is a growing awareness of the discriminatory practices that in the past led to the research contributions of women and people of colour being overlooked or overshadowed by that of their white, male counterparts, there is less awareness of the marginalising forces that continue to diminish the work done by researchers in the global periphery. To address this, patterns of epistemic exclusion, othering and precarity are discussed (Morley et al. 2018). The chapter begins by outlining critical whiteness theory, which underpins its analysis. It explains how whiteness is connected to the internationalisation of education. With this foundation, whiteness in higher education and in international schooling is then considered separately. These are not the only two arenas in which whiteness plays an important part in relation to internationalisation, but  these two are illustrative of the complex processes at work. Particular attention is then given to the role of the English language in reproducing postcolonial relationships in  internationalised education, with my own research in international universities in South-East Asia providing a case study. The attention throughout this chapter is on the impact and agency of educators in internationalised education in reproducing or resisting institutional whiteness. Conceptualising Whiteness The concept of whiteness lies at the heart of this chapter, influencing and structuring the experiences of those working in international and internationalised ­education. Whiteness theory recognises that people defined as white – and who is seen this way can be context-dependent (Moosavi 2022) – may be seen as embodying superiority and may often experience preference and privilege compared to those who do not (Koh and Sin 2022). Whiteness also privileges white institutions, cultural norms and ways of life (Shahjahan and Edwards 2022). Critical whiteness theory recognises that whiteness (and perceptions of ‘race’ more generally) is a social construct; this social construct essentialises individuals and makes assumptions about them based on their phenotypes (such as hair colour, eye colour, skin colour and so on). Whiteness should not be seen as a universal homogeneous social construction, but it has different meanings in different geographical contexts (Bonnett 2002). Nevertheless, there are some key features of whiteness that have been noted by critical theorists (Moosavi 2022). First, and most centrally, the social construct of whiteness has positive associations and therefore confers social advantages. Whiteness in many forms may be preferred – implicitly or explicitly – by individuals and institutions. Second, critical whiteness theory

120  Imperial professors and academic tourists notes that white people may be unaware of how colour impacts their lives, as they are rarely confronted by it – this oblivion to the workings of racism is part of their privilege and rarely accorded to people of colour. Third, the theory recognises that  white people gain these advantages regardless of whether they seek them. Finally, while whiteness confers privilege, some white people have more privilege than others – for example, white, heterosexual men may have more privilege. Whiteness and Globalisation of Education Critical whiteness studies can be drawn on to understand racialised aspects of the globalisation of education, which presents ‘whiteness as futurity’ (Shahjahan and Edwards 2022) – as an aspiration, an investment and as malleable. We discussed this in Chapter 5, in relation to the impact on students in globalised classrooms. In this chapter, we consider the impact of whiteness on educators and their careers. Because of the privileges associated with whiteness, white educators may be thought to personify the values and approaches that are marketed as best teaching practice. In addition, the pedagogies and epistemologies, such as student-centred teaching and liberal education, which have been globally exported through internationalised education are rooted in Western traditions and may match the cultural experiences of white educators. In summary, those seen as the ‘best’ academics or international school teachers are defined by whiteness – by their English proficiency, qualifications, experience, pedagogical approaches and so on. In consequence, those from the Global South are seen as receivers of wisdom, whereas those from the Global North as imparters of expertise. The knowledge of the south is seen as exotic and particular; that of the north is universalised. However, ‘white’ credentials (those awarded by predominantly white institutions which are permeated by the cultural traditions of whiteness and which I discuss further in the following chapter) may enable non-white academics to access some of the privileges associated with whiteness, such as being able to compete for jobs in the global economy (Shahjahan and Edwards 2022). Yet, although individuals may benefit in this way, the fundamental inequalities in the system remain unchallenged, with academic migration often constituting a brain drain, bringing academic talent from the Global South to the Global North (Altbach 2004). There are constraints on the power of individuals to resist the inequalities associated with whiteness. As we have seen in the previous chapters, global rankings of universities are driving an evaluation culture; even when university leaders have doubts about the value of these rankings, they feel they have to engage with them and implement performance management systems in order to survive in competitive economic times (Morrissey 2013). These systems delineate what counts as a high performing academic and define means by which this can be demonstrated; they are a form of governmentality, whereby individuals internalise the logic of the system to manage themselves. Nevertheless, there are some who still retain agency within this because of their whiteness. Insights from border studies enable us to understand the subtle inequalities at work. Critical border studies has emerged from geopolitics, based on a recognition

Imperial professors and academic tourists 121 that borders do not simply exist, but are in a continual state of becoming (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). Critical border theorists argue that the border should be problematised as a site of investigation rather than taken for granted as a fixed entity. They argue instead for exploration of border practices, which refers to the intentional and unintentional ways in which various actors (state and non-state; institutions and individuals) carry out border work. As such, they suggest that the border can be thought of as a performance (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). These insights can be applied to the world of international education. It is telling that the University of Nottingham promised ‘Knowledge Without Borders’ in the slogan used at its China and Malaysian campuses (Leung and Waters 2017). Borders contain and demarcate, so the attraction of an education that is ‘beyond borders’ is a promise of skills or credentials that enable an individual to withstand such containment. Kim suggests that mobile academics ‘reflexively use their embodied positional knowledge in their geographical and institutional border-transcending and intellectual border-transgressing activities’ (Kim 2017, 987), using the term ‘transnational identity capital’ to refer to this. Transnational identity capital can be used by academics to professionalise strangerhood in both their research and their other institutional practices. Kim (2017) argues that whilst much migration has a primary economic motive, academic mobility is often tied to intellectual centre/periphery relationships. Individuals involved in such border crossing are capitalising on ‘the Anglo-American linguistic and epistemic hegemonies’ (Kim 2017, 982) which stratify global education. The ‘international’ person is someone who somehow transcends borders, which should be seen as a particular form of power and a form of agency; yet, the meaning of this breaching of the border differs according to the identity of the person who is doing the breaching because of the various ways that whiteness affects how such transgression is defined. Whereas skilled migrants (including academics) who move from the Global South to the Global North often experience deskilling and are placed in less prestigious jobs, western/white migrants (again, including academics) often add to their class resources through mobility (Leung 2017). Again, we should resist oversimplifying this into a binary dynamic. Leung also posits that what it means to be global or cosmopolitan varies between different contexts. Similarly, Kim notes that the position of migrant versus national varies a lot between contexts. For example, in South Korean, foreign nationals may be institutionally discriminated against, finding promotion hard. In Japan, national contribution is highly valued, and the international significance of research is less valued. In other words, whiteness is contextually mediated; however, noting that it does not invariably offer privilege should not blind us to the nuanced ways in which privilege and inequality persist. For Marginson (2011), the ability to engage in global action in higher education depends on both material factors and a global imaginary. Although he writes primarily from an institutional perspective, his arguments apply no less to mobile educators in internationalised education at all levels. The material factors impinging on capacity for global action are: wealth – the money needed for research, travel, communication and publications; language – the English language skills

122  Imperial professors and academic tourists needed to participate in global conversations and national stability – which facilitates long-term research and professional development. Alongside this, Marginson argues there are three key elements to a global imaginary in higher education: belief in a global capitalist order and a global market for higher education; belief in a global higher education sector within which rankings and other comparisons of performance can occur and belief in a global network of universities, connected by partnerships and other links. I would add that this global gaze, which applies beyond higher education to other aspects of internationalised education, and which sees current hierarchies as naturally arising from meritocracies, instead of as the legacies of historical exploitation, is a white gaze – it normalises and reifies whiteness, and the advantages given to white educators within this global imaginary. In the following sections, I examine empirical evidence demonstrating how these inequalities impact educators, first in higher education and second in international schools. Whiteness and Higher Education Academics Having outlined the theoretical connections between whiteness and internationalisation of education, I now turn to the empirical evidence concerning racial inequalities in globalised higher education careers. A range of studies have shown that the racialised assumptions underpinning academia begin when undergraduates are essentialised by their instructors, continue through their doctoral and early research careers and are compounded by patterns of mobility, citation and promotion that offer preference to whiteness. We can see how early these prejudices and preferences develop in an academic career by looking at studies of the treatment of students. For example, ethnographic study of Chinese students studying at an Australian college in China (Pullman 2015) has shown how the students were racialised by their instructors and the college leadership, treated as a single group defined by their ethnicity. They were compared (unfavourably) to an imagined typical Australian student; the supposed mind of a Chinese student was contrasted to that of a Western student, in an essentialising and diminishing manner. This discrimination continues to the point where doctoral degrees are awarded; Chacko (2021) identifies ‘emerging precarity’ amongst international students approaching graduation in Singapore, whereas Gilmartin, Coppari, and Phelan (2021) use the term ‘promising precarity’ to describe international students in Dublin. What both these terms have in common is an understanding that international students are not always welcomed by affluent countries; they are there on sufferance and belong to the periphery until they have proved their economic worth. The ‘precariat’ is a term that was coined by Standing (2011); (Standing 2014) to capture an emergent class whose shared positioning is employment insecurity consequent on neoliberal economics. The precariat is therefore a broad term that encompasses migrants, workers on zero-hour contracts, part-time workers and refugees. The migrations involved in various forms of international

Imperial professors and academic tourists 123 education have arguably led to new groups of precarious workers – there is an emerging literature on precarity amongst international school teachers – as educational migrants lose access to the employment rights they may possess in their passport country. This precarity may extend to both students and professors in higher education. Differences in treatment based on assumptions associated with whiteness continue as young researchers try to build their academic careers. Gerhards, Hans, and Drewski (2018) sent fake applications for a research visit from international students to German sociology professors. They found that those with a supposed provenance from a US university received more feedback and more positive encouragement than those supposedly sent from elsewhere. Discrimination is not always so overt, but may operate through more subtle processes of othering ­instead. For instance, Guerin and Green (2016) show how cultural differences are downplayed by doctoral supervisors in an Australian university, with a superficial cosmopolitanism being encouraged instead. The authors suggest that the i­ nternational academic community being imagined thereby deliberately overlooks cultural diversity, suggesting that students are being socialised into an academic culture that discourages them from drawing attention to their difference. They suggest that this culture may be underpinned by whiteness. Much of the research into cultural and ethnic inequalities in higher education careers has focused on patterns and consequences of geographic academic ­mobility – the physical relocation of academics as part of their research and teaching careers – although there is little on migrant academics compared to the burgeoning literature on migrant students or institutions (Sang 2014). The terminology used to capture the concept of international movement by academics varies, including ‘foreign academics’, ‘academic migrants’, ‘international academics’ and ‘expatriate academics’ (Trembath 2016), and there has been a lack of conceptual clarity, partly around whether temporary or permanent moves are the focus of inquiry (Trembath 2016). Additionally, operationalising the concept is equally fraught; Trembath (2016) notes that looking at whether a person has been born overseas, in a multi-cultural country such as Australia, may mistakenly categorise someone as an ‘expatriate’ when in fact they consider themselves Australian and have lived in the country since early childhood. In addition, the literature risks conflating movement for short-term visits, such as a conference, with academics who change their primary place of residence to a new country. There has been a long history of international sabbaticals being used to develop an academic career; however, this traditionally involved continuity of employment with the home institution and was short-lived (a semester or an academic year in length). Academic tourists enjoyed attending conferences in tourist destinations, interspersing their presentations with cultural tours. More recent international mobility of academics has involved more extended mobility. Despite these complexities in researching the topic, the emerging trends are clear. Although academic mobility is not new, it is becoming more important as a determinant of career success – and most of such mobility benefits the Global North – in other words, mobility has been increasingly positioned as an essential

124  Imperial professors and academic tourists part of academic habitus (Bilecen and Van Mol 2017). Nevertheless, it is worth emphasising that the benefits of mobility associated with whiteness do not accrue equally to all. There is insufficient data available to make firm claims about recent patterns of academic mobility (Morley et al. 2018), but we do know that, whilst women are over-represented in student mobility, they are under-­represented in professional academic mobility (Bilecen and Van Mol 2017). Women are less likely to be mobile later in their careers, probably as a result of traditional caring responsibilities (Morley et al. 2018). Female migrant academics are more likely to be ‘tied’ movers, making the move as a result of their partner’s career trajectory (Leung 2017). Although these other inequalities should be acknowledged, the impact of whiteness on academic mobility deserves most attention. This operates in both overt and covert ways. Overtly, visa restrictions make mobility particularly challenging for academics from certain countries. Covertly, the rhetoric of international education is of ‘brain circulation’, whereby scholars and nations from around the world can learn from each other, but the reality is a ‘brain drain’, whereby less affluent countries lose their best to the West ( Johnstone and Lee 2017), and whiteness offers privileges to academic migrants from the Global North. The ways in which whiteness operates for migrant academics is well illustrated by the autoethnography of Moosavi (2022), a mixed race academic working in a university in East Asia, who is positioned as white on some occasions and as a person of colour at other times. Based on his experiences, he concludes that whiteness offers privilege, although there are times when it confers disadvantage – an unusual conclusion, as other theorists have seen whiteness as only conferring privilege. Moosavi relates many occasions when he observed veneration of whiteness, for example, East Asian students saying they felt white lecturers were better, East Asian academics describing white students as preferable, and white academics receiving preferential promotion. Moosavi notes that white academics took advantage of their white privilege, and sometimes expressed neo-colonial views, suggesting that they were able to advance East Asian societies while at the same time denigrating their East Asian colleagues and students. However, he also notes occasions when white academics were dismissed as arrogant, opinionated or repugnant on the basis of their race. His conclusion is that the whiteness is complex and can sometimes be a liability, but retains its privilege most of the time. Other studies also suggest an interweaving of whiteness with academic mobility. In a small-scale study of migrant academics by Morley et al. (2018), participants reported ways in which they were othered within the academy, and marginalised as a result of their dislocation. Their paper captures the complex trajectories involved in academic migration, with some participants moving between Anglophone countries, others moving from the Global South to universities in the Arabian Gulf and others again moving from Europe to well-paid positions in South-East Asia. The researchers conclude that while bodies are physically moving within internationalised institutions, it is only knowledge and practices from certain locations that are equally on the move.

Imperial professors and academic tourists 125 Much of the literature focuses on the experiences of academics moving from less economically privileged to more affluent countries (Trembath 2016). For example, Pherali (2012) reports on the experiences of academics from non-English speaking countries working in UK universities, showing how they felt marginalised from collegial interactions because of their limited local cultural knowledge, such as understanding of English humour or forms of socialising. For example, they found it challenging to advise as ‘personal tutors’ when they did not understand students’ lifestyles and family cultures. Moreover, participants from Asia reported having to adapt quickly to less hierarchical and respectful relationships between lecturers and students. One striking feature of Pherali’s study is that the academics reported not seeking support with the process of adaptation, as they were concerned they would be perceived as deficient by their colleagues. There is a growing literature examining the experiences of academic migrants with the privileges of whiteness. For instance, in one study of academics who had moved to Australia and New Zealand, some white participants were conscious of the privilege conferred by their ethnicity (Sang 2014). Leung and Waters (2017) study British faculty flying in to deliver programmes in Hong Kong. In so doing, they interrogate the nature of borders – geographical, cultural, institutional, personal and economic – to understand their participants’ experiences in transnational education, arguing that borders are ‘sites of control, negotiation and production’. They conclude that the rhetoric of equality in the circulation of people, programmes and knowledge in academia is belied by the reality of borders, stratification and hierarchy. For example, they note how their participants expected their students to adapt to British approaches to teaching and learning. However, they note that in the changing transnational terrain, existing power geometries can shift; in Hong Kong, British qualifications are seen as less prestigious than Hong Kong equivalents. Patterns of transnational education are changing. Traditionally, the dominant players were the UK, Australia, the US and Canada, but in recent years previous host countries such as Hong Kong, China, Singapore and India have started to offer their own programmes overseas (Leung and Waters 2017). Although the internationalisation of higher education has often been portrayed as a Western phenomenon, in fact it extends to many other national institutions and players (Tight 2022), although Western-domiciled authors continue to dominate the literature on the subject. For instance, the Malaysian government has sought to establish its higher education sector as an international hub since 2007, and many of the moves in this direction have involved south–south cooperation rather than collaboration with Western systems (Wan and Sirat 2017). However, we have yet to see the impact of this on established patterns of white privilege. I am not suggesting that academic migration is invariably a positive experience for those from the Global North. Romanowski and Nasser (2015) study expatriate professors (of various ethnicities) working in Qatar. They note the dissonance many feel between their expectations of academia and the realities of working as an academic in one of the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). For example, they may struggle with what cannot be said in the classroom

126  Imperial professors and academic tourists or what cannot be researched. They suggest that their research participants experience these as identity threats. The participants also struggled with the difference in salary between Qatari and non-Qatari faculty, and the lack of rights for expatriates. They mention that one participant moved from using his Indian identity to using his American passport, but there is no detailed exploration of how ethnicity is perceived in this context; the authors simply note that the participants adopt the identity which they feel is more highly esteemed in the Qatari context. Alongside the whiteness privileges associated with being an internationally mobile academic, then, there are disadvantages, such as transience (including the loss of established relationships in the home country) and risk (such as, that the experience would not be valued in future and that their families would not settle) (Richardson and Zikic 2007). Richardson & Zikic note that some of their participants regretted that they would always be seen as outsiders to the societies where they had relocated. So, the experiences of white migrant academics may be ambivalent; nevertheless, what I am suggesting is that there are systematic, structural differences in how academic migration is experienced, and that whiteness plays an important part in that. Migration experiences are not the only way in which whiteness permeates careers in academia. Epistemological assumptions and the processes of building academic careers compound the situation. The international education policies of Anglo-American countries, such as Canada, serve an neo-imperial agenda ( Johnstone and Lee 2017); knowledge is conceptualised as a potential source of wealth within the globalised, neoliberal market for education. Yet, despite the AngloSaxon dominance in the knowledge systems of higher education (Bilecen and Van Mol 2017), there is insufficient research looking at the what is valued, by whom and where, and how this leads to systemic inequalities for academics. The scant evidence available charts global inequalities in how academic careers are built. Academic reputation rests on the citations that other academics make of your research, but evidence shows that the top-cited work is concentrated in a few elite institutions in Western Europe, Australasia and the US (Nielsen and Andersen 2021), thereby reflecting institutional whiteness. An emerging literature has charted racial inequalities in citation (Chakravartty et al. 2018), for example – and ironically – amongst scholars contributing to civil rights scholarship in the US (Delgado 1992). Moreover, there is evidence that women and people of colour gather citations at a slower rate than their white male colleagues, placing women of colour at a double disadvantage (Kwon 2022). This section has demonstrated multiple ways in which whiteness impacts on academic careers in an internationalised market for higher education, while stressing that further research is needed. In the following chapter, we explore whiteness in relation to another sector of international education – international schooling. Whiteness and International School Educators The systematic inequalities between white educators and educators of colour discussed in the previous section are replicated in evidence from many international schools, as well as the celebration of whiteness implicit in the schools’ culture and

Imperial professors and academic tourists 127 values, which I discussed in Chapter 6. My colleague Mark Gibson and I have explored racial inequalities in international schools expressed by participants in our study of international school leadership in Malaysia (Gibson and Bailey 2022). Eleven of our 12 participants were white, and the twelfth, an Indian national, had been asked by the school’s owner not to wear a sari to work, as it was seen as threatening her authority. Our study shows how representation of educational expertise at the schools was framed in terms of whiteness, with (usually white) expatriate educators paid more than Malaysians, pictured on marketing materials, and promoted to leadership positions. Many international schools systematically discriminate against non-white, non-Anglo educators in their practices, in what Gardner-McTaggart (2021) terms as acts of ‘symbolic violence’. He notes that the most prestigious international schools are predominantly staffed by white educators, who ignore their own historical privilege when portraying international schools as places where all equally access global citizenship or international-mindedness. The use of English, the norms of Anglo-education and the prestige attached to ‘white’ qualifications permeate these schools, and Gardner-McTaggart argues that the leaders he interviews are blind to how their practices affirm whiteness and Englishness and their attendant social injustices. Again, it is important not to over-simplify the situation. There are many international schools which are predominantly staffed by non-white educators, such as the Filipino international school studied by Diokno et al. (2020) – although in some contexts, there is a clear stratifying of the international school sector by the nationality (and indirectly ethnicity) of the teachers in a particular school. Additionally, whiteness is complex and nuanced in its effects; Camenisch (2022) has shown how the Chinese gaze simultaneously elevates and subjugates foreigners in international schools in China. As the international school sector becomes increasingly stratified (Kim 2019) and as it operates in diverse contexts, we must be wary of over-generalisation. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a hegemonic, reductive binary between white (Western) and non-white (non-Western) in internationalised educational settings (Koh and Sin 2022). Koh and Sin chart the experiences of both school teachers and academics of different ethnicities working in transnational institutions in Malaysia; a commonality to these groups was an othering as non-Malaysians, which marginalised them in institutional hierarchies, even while they gained privilege for their symbolic advantage. Their white participants noted that they were used to market their institutions and that assumptions of their professional superiority were commonplace; they were aware of the financial and symbolic advantage they gained from their whiteness, while feeling uncomfortable with it. The researchers note that the ethnic landscape is complex and contradictory, however; Filipino participants who could ‘pass’ as Malay were given status in some settings (e.g. not being stopped at police road blocks) while being diminished professionally. As a result, Koh and Sin (2022) argue, their participants became complicit in the racialised status quo in Malaysia, which their precarious position as expatriates on short-term contracts gave them little agency to resist. In addition, white

128  Imperial professors and academic tourists participants found themselves trying to live up to racialised assumptions about their expertise and authority. As with the research into migrant academics discussed above, I am not suggesting that there are no disadvantages associated with being a white international school teacher; indeed, a literature has emerged on the ‘precarity’ of international school teachers (Bunnell 2016; Poole 2019) that echoes the precarity of early career academics briefly mentioned above. This literature draws on the concept of the ‘global precariat’ (Standing 2014), an emerging stratum of the labour market lacking employment security and access to basic rights and suggests that international school teachers’ lack of a permanent contract renders them disadvantaged and subject to the whims of their school management. It notes that some international school educators may not be engaging in carefree travel, but working overseas in order to pay off debts or manage other challenging financial issues, rendering their lack of job security a challenge (Rey, Bolay, and Gez 2020). While acknowledging that some international school educators have been dismissed at short notice and that many lack employment rights within the country where they are living, my own research has pointed instead to the privileges that international school teachers gain from their whiteness. I have suggested that they enjoy ‘elective precarity’ (Bailey 2021),– in other words, that they continue to enjoy a sense of agency even when experiencing aspects of precarity – and that this places them in sharp contrast to other members of the global precariat. This accords with my previous study of international school teachers, for example, my work in a case study school in Malaysia where expatriate teachers reported enjoying more autonomy and less stress than they had experienced when teaching in their countries of origin (Bailey 2015). It also echoes the work of Tarc, Mishra Tarc, and Wu (2019), whose research participants reporting enjoying privileged status while working in international schools, able to mix with local elites, travel widely and access global elite higher education institutions for their children. The complicity of international school educators in their marketing of privilege is explored by Kenway (2018), who argues that the elite schools she studies in seven different countries enlist their teachers in the work of promoting the school; they do this by making the school feel desirable, so that they are happy to play their part in making the school feel desirable to others. Kenway studies how this desire can be unbalanced by whiteness. In her Indian case study institution, the school principal decided to introduce International General Certificates of Secondary Education (iGCSEs) – international qualifications which are adaptations of English certificates, and therefore which some staff associated with post-colonialism and saw as a threat to Indian aspects of the school which they loved. However, she does not evidence any systematic rejection of the school as a result of this. Similarly, when my colleagues and I visited International Baccalaureate (IB) schools and interviewed their teachers as part of various research projects, we saw an emotional affiliation to working in an IB school, which teachers saw as being a highly desirable programme, and to being an international school, which they saw as a moral enterprise. As a result, teachers who were committed to social justice continued to feel allegiance to

Imperial professors and academic tourists 129 the schools, which may explain why they turned a blind eye to their replication of privileges associated with whiteness. In the following section, I explore in more detail a particular aspect of whiteness in international education and the linguistic privileges accorded to AngloAmerican educators. English and Whiteness The increasing use of English as a medium of instruction across the globe is one of the most significant changes in higher education over recent years (Knight and de Wit 2018). The dominance of English language in international higher education implicitly establishes ‘white’ universities from Anglo-American countries as the ideal form, with white nations presented as having a form of education to which the rest of the world should aspire (Shahjahan and Edwards 2022). For Coleman (2006), this constitutes a form of neo-colonialism that he terms ‘Englishization’. Similarly, the predominant use of English in international schools creates an association between English and elites, both national and global. This use of English serves to marginalise academics and teachers speaking other languages and those using particular variants of English, as educational institutions privilege highstatus variants of English ( Jenkins 2013). Although English can no longer be seen simplistically as belonging to so-called ‘native’ speakers, this leads to unequal partnerships and the perceived superiority of so-called ‘native speaker’ academics over others (Le Ha 2013). Evidence suggests that the professional identity of individuals who are not-native speakers of English may be adversely impacted by the hierarchies created (Larrinaga and Amurrio 2015). Case Study: English and the Imagined Academic Community With my colleague Jane Evison from the University of Nottingham, I explored the construction of professional identities by faculty at three international universities in Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. We interviewed business and economics faculty at a public university in Malaysia, a public university in Thailand and a private university using franchised programmes from England in Vietnam. In these three very different contexts, being international was equated to operating and teaching in English (Evison et al. 2021), and using English was central to their professional identity. The participants saw their fluency in English not only as affording them membership of an imagined global community of academics, but they also felt that they were peripheral to this community because of the variants of English which they spoke. The concept of an imagined community was first developed by Anderson (1987) to understand nationalism and the idea of a nation-state. Guerin and Green (2016) adapted this to conceptualise the international academic community as an imagined community of academics building research understanding together. Other researchers have drawn on the idea of imagined community to understand the identities that underpin language acquisition and use (Kharchenko 2014; Peng

130  Imperial professors and academic tourists 2015). In our study, it was evident that these two insights needed to be drawn together, as the international community of academics imagined by our participants was in part a research community and in part a linguistic community. The faculty explained that being international was equated with operating in English for the programmes offered by their universities – and they equated this with being of higher quality, despite the fact that they also felt it impeded effective teaching because of their students’ language levels. They noted that faculty teaching on English-medium programmes had higher incomes than other academics, sometimes within the same institution. However, much of their talk about English concerned how it facilitated their membership of the international academic community; they emphasised that their PhDs were almost invariably conducted in English and that they used English to forge partnerships with other academics overseas. Within this imagined community, some academics, such as those we studied, remain at a disadvantage. Our participants spoke of a pressure to publish in English, despite the challenges this poses for them. The variants of English they spoke were, they articulated, considered to be less desirable than those of so-called native speakers. This echoes the assertion by Altbach (2004) that the use of English in internationalised higher education advantages those who have the most fluency in the language – and, indeed, in certain variants of the language. Again, it is important to avoid universalising the experiences of these research participants and to acknowledge that the impact of using English on academic faculty is context-dependent. In two of the three South-East Asian universities we studied, English was only used as the medium of instruction on courses that were denoted ‘international’; this contrasts to Nordic countries where English has been integrated into mainstream classes. Moreover, in other contexts, using English might not be associated with an income differential. Nevertheless, this case study evidences how linguistic whiteness is associated with academic privilege and preference in at least some contexts. Furthermore, even those faculty of colour benefiting in some ways from their language skills were marginalised by their language variants. They were, in essence, and despite being of various South-East Asian nationalities and ethnicities, ultimately being paid to be white. Conclusion In June 2022, I sat in a series of seminars that the University of Harvard offered to the Bahrain Teachers College. At each seminar, the facilitator stressed that everything we were discussing needed to be adapted to our context in Bahrain, which we knew better than they; yet, this knowledge of the context-dependent nature of educational skills had neither prevented my Bahraini university from paying for the workshops nor made Harvard hesitate over accepting the money. What, then, was the nature of the expertise that Harvard was selling, and why was it assumed that they had more of it than their Arab partners? And why is it hard to imagine Harvard hosting a seminar in which their faculty learn a skill from a University of Bahraini employee? When a Harvard member of faculty travels, they go to

Imperial professors and academic tourists 131 teach; if they think of their travel as an opportunity to learn, it is learning about the ‘other’. This is quite different from the mindset expected from a member of faculty in Bahrain; they learn from Harvard not by seeing it as an exoticised ‘other’, but as a centre of insight and truth. In the domain of scientific research, it is possible to believe that a high-status Western institution might indeed offer a concentration of expertise, skills or resources to a Global South institution; however, when this extends to a contextually dependent discipline such as education, it is harder to conceal the structural inequalities that lie behind such a financial exchange – when it is so rarely reciprocated. This chapter has demonstrated that the global gaze is a white gaze and has charted how whiteness impacts on the careers and job experiences of educators in internationalised educational institutions. It has suggested that the way that migrant educators are viewed is underpinned by whiteness, and that this is a reflection of the epistemic and linguistic hierarchies implicit in whiteness. I have acknowledged nuance and complexity in how this operates, including countertendencies and intersectionality, but suggested that whiteness remains inherent in post-colonial academic relationships. I have challenged the complicity of white educators, like myself, in these inequalities. The instinctive assumption that education is a global good – that it is not only a consumer product to be consumed on a global level, but is desirable – is challenged by this analysis. In contrast, this global product appears to be replicating historical inequalities under a new guise. We should remember that the original imperialists often justified their exploitation and atrocities with the presumption that they were bringing a ‘civilising’ influence (Schreuder 1976). The new language used suggests that the Global North is ‘educating’ others, or offering them ‘employability’ in a global marketplace; these words are equally slippery and can be used to mask the damage that may be done. I see possibilities for change. The Varkey Foundation’s annual Global Teacher Award gives a $1 million prize to the winner, and this is typically not a white or western educator. Although this reproduces the competitive hegemony of internationalised education critiqued in earlier chapters, this is offering a vision of a different way of viewing what constitutes an excellent teacher – who is not necessarily white, who does not need to have a qualification from a predominantly white country, who does not draw on western pedagogies or epistemologies, or use the linguistically privileged language of English. In summary, an imagined global community of educators is not intrinsically connected to whiteness, but may be resisted and reconstructed through a reimagination of the global gaze. References Altbach, Philip G. 2004. “Globalisation and the University: Myths and Realities in an Unequal World.” Tertiary Education and Management 10 (1):3–25. doi: 10.1080/13583883. 2004.9967114. Anderson, Benedict. 1987. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

132  Imperial professors and academic tourists Bailey, Lucy. 2015. “Reskilled and ‘Running Ahead’: Teachers in an International School Talk About Their Work.” Journal of Research in International Education 14 (1):3–15. doi: 10.1177/1475240915572949.    . 2021. “International School Teachers: Precarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journal of Global Mobility: The Home of Expatriate Management Research 9 (1):31–43. doi: 10.1108/JGM-06-2020-0039. Bilecen, Başak, and Christof Van Mol. 2017. Introduction: International Academic Mobility and Inequalities, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (8). Bonnett, Alastair. 2002. “A White World? Whiteness and the Meaning of Modernity in Latin America and Japan.” Working Through Whiteness: International Perspectives:69–106. Bunnell, Tristan. 2016. “Teachers in International Schools: A Global Educational ‘precariat’?” Globalisation, Societies and Education 14 (4):543–59. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2015.1068163. Camenisch, Aldina. 2022. “Middling Whiteness: The Shifting Positionalities of Europeans in China.” Ethnicities 22 (1):128–45. doi: 10.1177/14687968211058014. Chacko, Elizabeth. 2021. “Emerging Precarity Among International Students in Singapore: Experiences, Understandings and Responses.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47 (20):4741–57. Chakravartty, Paula, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain. 2018. “#CommunicationSoWhite.” Journal of Communication 68 (2):254–66. doi: 10.1093/joc/jqy003. Coleman, James A. 2006. “English-Medium Teaching in European Higher Education.” Language Teaching 39 (1):1–14. Delgado, Richard. 1992. “The Imperial Scholar Revisited: How to Marginalize Outsider Writing, Ten Years Later.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 140 (4):1349–72. doi: 10.2307/3312406. Diokno, Maria Donna Melissa L, Lloyd Hanz C Yap, Jana Elaine B Hermoso, and Mark Francis J Ison. 2020. “From Exposition to Adaptation: The Lived Experience of Filipino Educators Working in an International School Setting, A Phenomenology.” International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology 5 (12):143–166. Evison, Jane, Lucy Bailey, Pimsiri Taylor, and Tida Tubpun. 2021. “Professional Identities of Lecturers in Three International Universities in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia: Multilingual Professionals at Work.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51 (2):202–20. Gardner-McTaggart, Alexander Charles. 2021. “Washing the World in Whiteness: International Schools’ Policy.” Journal of Educational Administration and History 53 (1):1–20. Gerhards, Jürgen, Silke Hans, and Daniel Drewski. 2018. “Global Inequality in the Academic System: Effects of National and University Symbolic Capital on International Academic Mobility.” Higher Education 76 (4):669–85. Gibson, Mark T, and Lucy Bailey. 2022. “Constructing International Schools as Postcolonial Sites.” Globalisation, Societies and Education:1–12. Gilmartin, Mary, Pablo Rojas Coppari, and Dean Phelan. 2021. “Promising Precarity: the Lives of Dublin’s International Students.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47 (20):4723–40. Guerin, Cally, and Ian Green. 2016. “Cultural Diversity and the Imagined Community of the Global Academy.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 36 (1):1–12. doi: 10.1080/ 02188791.2014.922048. Jenkins, Jennifer. 2013. English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: The Politics of Academic English Language Policy. London: Routledge. Johnstone, Marjorie, and Eunjung Lee. 2017. “Canada and the Global Rush for International Students: Reifying a Neo-Imperial Order of Western Dominance in the Knowledge Economy Era.” Critical Sociology 43 (7–8):1063–78.

Imperial professors and academic tourists 133    . 2022. “Education as a Site for the Imperial Project to Preserve Whiteness Supremacy from the Colonial Era to the Present: A Critical Analysis of International Education Policy in Canada.” Whiteness and Education 7 (1):1–17. Kenway, Jane. 2018. “The Work of Desire: Elite Schools’ Multi-Scalar Markets.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 93–110. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Kharchenko, Nataliya. 2014. “Imagined Communities and Teaching English as a Second Language.” Journal of Foreign Languages, Cultures and Civilizations 2 (1):21–39. Kim, Hyejin. 2019. How Global Capital Is Remaking International Education: The Emergence of Transnational Education Corporations. Cham: Springer. Kim, Terri. 2017. “Academic Mobility, Transnational Identity Capital, and Stratification Under Conditions of Academic Capitalism.” Higher Education 73 (6):981–97. Knight, Jane, and Hans de Wit. 2018. “What Contribution Has Internationalisation Made to HE.” University World News 12. Accessed 28th March 2023. https://www.university worldnews.com/post.php?story=20181010093946721. Koh, Sin Yee, and I. Lin Sin. 2022. “Race, Whiteness and Internationality in Transnational Education: Academic and Teacher Expatriates in Malaysia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45 (4):656–76. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1977362. Kwon, Diana. 2022. “The Rise of Citational Justice: How Scholars Are Making References Fairer.” Nature 603 (7902):568–71. Larrinaga, Ane, and Mila Amurrio. 2015. “Internationalisation in Higher Education and Its Impact in Multilingual Contexts: Redefining Identities of Basque-Speaking Academics.” Language, Culture and Curriculum 28 (2):158–69. doi: 10.1080/07908318.2015.1027215. Le Ha, Phan. 2013. “Issues Surrounding English, the Internationalisation of Higher Education and National Cultural Identity in Asia: A Focus on Japan.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (2):160–75. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2013.781047. Leung, Maggi WH. 2017. “Social Mobility via Academic Mobility: Reconfigurations in Class and Gender Identities Among Asian Scholars in the Global North.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (16):2704–19. Leung, Maggi WH, and Johanna L Waters. 2017. “Educators Sans Frontières? Borders and Power Geometries in Transnational Education.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (8):1276–91. Marginson, Simon. 2011. “Imagining the Global.” In Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, edited by Roger King, Simon Marginson and Rajani Naidoo, 10–39. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Moosavi, Leon. 2022. “‘But You’re White’: An Autoethnography of Whiteness and White Privilege in East Asian Universities.” Research in Comparative and International Education 17 (1):107–23. doi: 10.1177/17454999211067123. Morley, Louise, Nafsika Alexiadou, Stela Garaz, José González-Monteagudo, and Marius Taba. 2018. “Internationalisation and Migrant Academics: The Hidden Narratives of Mobility.” Higher Education 76 (3):537–54. Morrissey, John. 2013. “Governing the Academic Subject: Foucault, Governmentality and the Performing University.” Oxford Review of Education 39 (6):797–810. doi: 10.1080/ 03054985.2013.860891. Nielsen, Mathias Wullum, and Jens Peter Andersen. 2021. “Global Citation Inequality Is on the Rise.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118 (7). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2012208118. Parker, Noel, and Nick Vaughan-Williams. 2012. “Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the SAND’AGENDA.” Geopolitics 17 (4):727–33.

134  Imperial professors and academic tourists Peng, Jian-E. 2015. “L2 Motivational Self System, Attitudes, and Affect as Predictors of L2 WTC: An Imagined Community Perspective.” The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher 24 (2):433–43. doi: 10.1007/s40299-014-0195-0. Pherali, Tejendra Jnawali. 2012. “Academic Mobility, Language, and Cultural Capital: The Experience of Transnational Academics in British Higher Education Institutions.” Journal of Studies in International Education 16 (4):313–33. Poole, Adam. 2019. “International Education Teachers’ Experiences as an Educational Precariat in China.” Journal of Research in International Education 18 (1):60–76. doi: 10.1177/1475240919836489. Pullman, Ashley. 2015. “Racialized Bodies, Pliable Minds: Ethnography on the Fringe of Transnational Education.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 35 (1):1–13. Rey, Jeanne, Matthieu Bolay, and Yonatan N. Gez. 2020. “Precarious Privilege: Personal Debt, Lifestyle Aspirations and Mobility Among International School Teachers.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 18 (4):361–73. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2020.1732193. Richardson, Julia, and Jelena Zikic. 2007. “The Darker Side of an International Academic Career.” Career Development International 12 (2): 164–86. Romanowski, Michael H, and Ramzi Nasser. 2015. “Identity Issues: Expatriate Professors Teaching and Researching in Qatar.” Higher Education 69 (4):653–71. Sang, Katherine. 2014. ‘I’m a migrant, but I’m the right sort of migrant’: migrant academics in Australia and New Zealand. Paper presented at the 28th Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand Conference. Schreuder, D. M. 1976. “The Cultural Factor in Victorian Imperialism: A Case-Study of the British ‘Civilising Mission’.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 4 (3):283–317. doi: 10.1080/03086537608582465. Shahjahan, Riyad A., and Kirsten T. Edwards. 2022. “Whiteness as Futurity and Globalization of Higher Education.” Higher Education 83 (4):747–64. doi: 10.1007/ s10734-021-00702-x. Standing, Guy. 2011. “Workfare and the Precariat.” Soundings 47 (47):35–43.    . 2014. “The Precariat.” Contexts 13 (4):10–2. doi: 10.1177/1536504214558209. Tarc, Paul, Aparna Mishra Tarc, and Xi Wu. 2019. “Anglo-Western International School Teachers as Global Middle Class: Portraits of Three Families.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 40 (5):666–81. doi: 10.1080/01596306.2019.1570635. Tight, Malcolm. 2022. “Internationalisation of Higher Education Beyond the West: Challenges and Opportunities–The Research Evidence.” Educational Research and Evaluation 27 (3–4):239–59. Trembath, Jodie-Lee. 2016. “The Professional Lives of Expatriate Academics: Construct Clarity and Implications for Expatriate Management in Higher Education.” Journal of Global Mobility 4 (2):112–30. Wan, Chang-Da, and Morshidi Sirat. 2017. “Internationalisation of the Malaysian Higher Education System through the Prism of South-South Cooperation.” International Journal of African Higher Education 4 (2):79–90.

9

Certification and curriculum in international contexts Colonialism by degrees

Introduction A school student in Kenya can study for a British school leavers’ certificate. A university student in Malaysia can study at a British or Australian university without leaving the country. Anyone, anywhere, can log onto EdX, a Massive Open Online Course Platform, and study the most popular undergraduate courses from Harvard. In the previous chapter, we saw that the global gaze is not just a belief that anyone is watching education with an international mindset, a kind of democratic surveillance, but, rather, privileges a particular gaze – a Western, white (and predominantly male) embodiment of being educated in a global world. I considered this from the perspective of those working in internationalised education, focusing for simplicity on two categories – higher education academics or as international school teachers. In this chapter, I consider how whiteness and its associated hierarchies infuse the credentials which are offered in internationalised education. I do this first by theorising credentials, and considering how globalisation has affected the relationship between credentials and their ostensible social functions. Second, I provide an overview of diverse examples of Western credentials being offered globally – this is necessarily illustrative not comprehensive, but provides insight into the totalising effect on childhood and young adulthood around the world. Third, I discuss some common themes that emerge from this analysis, and note that this is not deterministic, and there is regional, national, institutional and individual variation in its effects.

Conceptualising Credentials The expansion of credentials is such that some have argued that we live in a ‘credential society’, with credentials operating as a ‘currency of opportunity’ (Brown and Souto-Otero 2020). For Weberians, who build on the sociological insights of Max Weber and his interest in the stratification of society, credentials operate as a form of symbolic social closure, enabling opportunities to be restricted to those with membership of a certain group and denied to others (Tholen 2016). The role of credentials may, however, be changing, although there is a lack of consensus concerning whether they are increasing or decreasing in importance. Brown and DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-9

136  Certification and curriculum in international contexts Souto-Otero (2020) use large-scale data to suggest that credentials place only a minor role in differentiating potential employees, with more emphasis placed on job readiness. For Tholen (2016), however, current uncertainty in the labour market has made the symbolic closure afforded by credentials of greater importance. Globalisation is changing the social meaning of credentials and impacting the relationship between credentials and labour market opportunities. The internationalisation of credentials is arguably both part of globalisation and a precondition for globalisation; the buying and selling of credentials internationally is a natural extension of neoliberal exchange in goods and services, but equally international recognition of professional skills is necessary for the frictionless mobility of trans-national professionals. Professional and other credentials have historically been rooted in a national context. After all, the knowledge base required for a professional qualification may vary between different contexts (one example might be different disease prevalence influencing the focus of medical training), as may the role accorded to that professional in a particular society (an example here may be that not all legal systems differentiate barristers from solicitors). The organisation, institutionalisation and regulation of professional expertise have therefore traditionally been linked to the nation-state, despite an emphasis on professional autonomy, and in consequence, globalisation has had a significant impact on professions (Faulconbridge and Muzio 2011). Faulconbridge and Muzio draw attention to the emergence of supra-national measures to recognise professional qualifications, such as European Union directives requiring that professional qualifications gained in one-member state must be recognised in another. The expansion of transnational education means that universities are now conferring degrees outside of their national territory. The work of Pierre Bourdieu on the different forms of capital is useful in conceptualising how a Western qualification conferred overseas can be understood. For Bourdieu, there were multiple forms of ‘capital’ – in other words, noting that money is simply a means to store value, he examined other stores of value that were significant in contemporary society. He suggested that we could also have symbolic capital (the resources that confer honour, status or prestige, such as certificates, medals or titles), social capital (the connections, such as friendships that help gain access to a particular social echelon) and cultural capital (the personal resources that can be used in social action, such as language and ways of thinking and behaving, to enable maintenance or improvement of social position). Bourdieu saw qualifications as the most important form of institutionalised cultural capital (Bourdieu 2006) – in other words, they work as a formalised way of recognising all the social assets of a person, such as their manner of communication or their familiarity and confidence with high culture, which can then give access to economic benefits. Writing about the importance of exclusive educational qualifications within the French context, he argued that a qualification from one of the grandes écoles had become almost a prerequisite for an elite position in French society, but that entry to the grandes écoles was dependent on possessing the habitus of the ruling class. The confidence and smartness of students

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 137 from an elite background, along with the natural affinity felt between them and those overseeing their entry meant that the reproduction of privilege through education, Bourdieu felt, was just as reliable as its transfer through an inheritance (Bourdieu 1996). Bourdieu’s explanation of the function of elite education has proved attractive to many theorists of international schooling, who claim that in contemporary society, it is the international-mindedness and other Westernised traits fostered, and certified, by such schools that contribute to the reproduction of privilege (Gardner-McTaggart 2018). At the university level, his theory perhaps helps to explain the role of elite UK and US universities, and their appeal to affluent international students (Hartmann 2018). However, others have argued that the role of credentials differs in different national contexts (Brown et al. 2016), and that we should be wary of attributing a unified meaning to Western qualifications across diverse cultures. There is, of course, a tension between the social exclusivity offered by credentials, and the neoliberal expansionary pressure to sell more credentials, and globalisation has complicated this picture. In a national field for professions, limited players mean that incentives to expand are to some extent offset by fear of devaluing qualifications, and there may be national regulation of fees and content, as currently happens in England. In an internationalised field, a British university (say) has little to lose by swamping the market with cheaper qualifications, and oversight is more complex. A transnational qualification, then, rests on liminality, where its exclusivity and association with the west balances uneasily with its inclusion and delivery in transnational settings. In this chapter, I am focusing on internationalisation abroad, which Knight (2004) distinguishes from internationalisation at home in order to emphasise that it is not only cross-border education which falls under the auspices of internationalisation. However, the idea of ‘home’ remains unproblematised in Knight’s distinction, and we should note that this can be contested in transnational education. At an institutional level, the idea of a ‘home campus’ privileges certain places and perspectives on the form and function of a university. At a personal level, the ‘home’ of both faculty and students is not always clear. In this chapter, we shall see that transnational credentials may rest on internalisation of the norms and values of ‘home’. This theorising of the meaning of credentials underpins the remainder of the chapter, during which I delineate and discuss multiple examples of transnational credentials in internationalised education. I begin by considering transnational certification of aspects of global childhood – schooling, leisure and language. Transnational Certification of Schooling Although most national systems of schooling continue to focus primarily, or exclusively, on being credentialised through national qualifications, transnational qualifications dominate international schooling and have begun to infiltrate government schooling in some countries. In this chapter, I shall discuss two examples – the International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge International.

138  Certification and curriculum in international contexts The IB Diploma is considered a high-status qualification that is recognised by universities worldwide (IB 2022a). The IB was founded in 1968, in response to the need for the children of globally-mobile professionals to have a school-leaver qualification which could give them access to university in their home countries. These origins are important because the IB’s origins were primarily in the need to offer an assessment acceptable to Western universities and it was designed by Western educators, who were inspired by Western philosophers of education (Azzi 2018). The IB’s approach to learning is embedded in a Western philosophy of education (Stevenson et al. 2016). The compartmentalisation of knowledge into subjects which constitutes the IB Diploma contradicts the holistic approach to knowledge in many cultures, although by contrast, it matches the admissions criteria of Western universities (IB 2022b; Paris 2003). Its inquiry-driven approach, emphasis on reason and critical thinking are rooted in the ideals of the Enlightenment (Hill 2006). The IB is governed from its headquarters in Switzerland, with assessments managed from Wales. The IB claims that it ‘has offices around the world’ (IB 2022d), but the other centres are in the US, the Netherlands and Singapore, suggesting the preponderance of a Western and high-income economy mindset. Analysis of the IB’s penetration into the different regions of the world shows that it is rapidly growing in South America, has some penetration into the Arab League countries and has made little headway in the continent of Africa; by contrast, over one-third of all IB schools are in the US, and with heavy representation also in both Canada and Mexico, North America represents nearly half (47.7%) of IB schools (Bunnell 2017). In recent years, the IB has marketed its programmes heavily to government systems of education, and it now has government partnerships with Canada, Ecuador, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Armenia, Macedonia, Spain and the US (IB 2022c). Empirical study has shown that there is an infusion of Western assumptions into IB study. For example, using a post-colonial lens to analyse the IB’s educational model at a Lebanese school, Azzi (2018) makes two key assertions. First, the lens through which the IB conceptualises international education is that of the nation-state, thereby diminishing the importance of multiple or evolving identities; in this way, Azzi posits, the IB contributes to an understanding of the world that sees the nation-state as fixed, natural and unquestionable, thereby eliding other ways of seeing the world. Azzi gives examples of students being expected to state a singular nationality, or to describe their background as either rural or urban, which doesn’t correspond to the more fluid realities of Lebanese life. Second, within this way of seeing the world, some nations are given a greater emphasis than others. Azzi describes how American history and events dominate class discussions. Although the IB programmes allow autonomy to schools in implementing their programmes, teachers reported that the textbooks and assessments prevented them from spending more time on Lebanese perspectives. In a school that offered other programmes – the Lebanese Baccalaureate and an American high school diploma – alongside the IB, the display of the IB Learner Profile was resented by other students, many of whom were not permitted by their government to take the IB because they only had a Lebanese passport. So, although the

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 139 IB was ostensibly committed to universal values, its enactment in this case study school was exclusionary and divisive. For some schools, such as the international school in an Indian Ocean island nation studied by Poonoosamy (2018), the IB Diploma provides an alternative to the British High School Certificate or the French Baccalaureate, both of which were legacies of the country’s colonial history. However, the IB Diploma does not replace these qualifications with home-grown certification, appropriately contextualised and with concomitant national ownership, and non-Western participants in IB programmes may experience a dissonance between the school culture and expectations and those of their home lives (Poonoosamy 2018, 216). The IB is not the only organisation offering transnational certification of schooling. Another prominent example is Cambridge Assessment, which was founded in 1858 with the aim of raising educational standards by administering exams to people outside of the University of Cambridge. As early as 1864, it expanded its work to include administering exams outside of England, at the time this was specifically in the British colonies (Kopsick 2018). Thus, its origins are clearly entangled with British colonial history, specifically attempts to inculcate colonised peoples and to control knowledge. At the time of writing, it is the largest provider of international qualifications, and also offers programmes of study to children aged 5–19 years. Kopsick (2018) analyses the global distribution of Cambridge International schools, and compares this to the similar analysis of IB schools undertaken by Bunnell (2017). Kopsick shows that Cambridge International has a far stronger representation than the IB in the G77 nations (which represents 134 nations with on average less affluent populations), the countries of the Arab League, and in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). However, the IB has greater representation in Latin America and in the countries of the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents high-income nations). The IB is particularly strongly represented in the US, which accounts for 37.6% of all IB schools worldwide. Kopsick (2018) concludes that Cambridge International has more extensive activity than the IB in the Global South, and remonstrates with both organisations, urging them to reflect critically on their responsibility to avoid offering neo-colonial and Western-centric education. Kopsick’s conclusion is problematic; it suggests a ‘damned if they don’t, damned if they do’ impasse for Cambridge International and the IB. They are critiqued for offering Western-centric education to the Global South, but they are equally rebuked for any under-representation of the Global South amongst their schools as suggesting they are only interested in the wealthy west. Perhaps this points to the inherently problematic enterprise of offering transnational credentials to judge the world’s children. Transnational Certification of Childhood Leisure Although transnational academic school-leaver qualifications, such as the IB and Cambridge ‘A’ levels, have been extensively discussed in the literature, far less attention has been paid to other ways in which global childhoods are assessed by

140  Certification and curriculum in international contexts Western organisations. However, I suggest that Western notions of cultural activity have become the yardstick by which the world is judged, and this yardstick has generated significant income for Western organisations. In this section, I shall briefly demonstrate global credentialising of childhood activities such as music, dance and drama by Western organisations – essentially, a surge in Western certification of global childhood. London-based organisations judge how well the world’s children play their instruments (the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music – ABRSM); how well they can act and speak in public (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – LAMDA) and how well they can dance (the Royal Academy of Dance – RAD). Indeed, the RAD describes itself on its website as ‘teaching the world to dance for over 100 years’ (Royal Academy of Dance 2022), which may come as something of a surprise to the many other cultures that boast rich dance heritage and traditions. A brief overview of the global activities of the ABRSM exemplifies the colonial aspects of this certification. The ABRSM delivers music assessments in more than 90 countries, with 650,000 exams sat annually. It is rooted in the colonial history of Great Britain; its founding charter mandated its role as ‘the cultivation and dissemination of the art of Music in the UK and throughout the Dominions’ (ABRSM 2022). From 1892, ABRSM offered exams in the Cape Colony, by 1895, it offered exams in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. From there, it spread out across the British Empire, so that by 1948, ABRSM exams were offered in many British colonies. It is now more global in its spread, and permits the use of translators in its exams; the use of these is common in China (Zhang 2019). Incidentally, it is interesting to note that ABRSM initially expected low-quality musical candidates from the colonies, and were surprised when their pass rate exceeded those of British candidates back ‘home’ ( JohnsonWilliams 2020). We know little about the colonial impact of the ABRSM (Brightwell 2013), for example, on musical careers, but we do know that its syllabi focus on Western music and its examiners have a Western musical worldview, leading Zhang (2019) to see their examinations as a form of cultural colonialism. In offering certification of music competence, ABRSM has not restricted itself purely to classical music, which it could perhaps claim as its area of authority, being primarily European (though hardly exclusively British) in its origins. From 1999, the ABRSM has also offered jazz exams, an interesting diversification given jazz’s routes in AfricanAmerican history. Such certificates are, for many children, no more than a recreation; nevertheless, I posit that they are highly symbolic. The export of certification constitutes the export of value; it is intrinsically linked to ideas about what matters and it makes an implicit assertion as to who should judge what is important. The certification of what, for most children, are purely leisure activities of music and dance is not trivial; it is a form of cultural assessment. It operates as a form of subjectification, whereby individuals come to see themselves as talented (or not) in a particular art form, and gain a sense of self-worth.

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 141 Documentation of life is one of the instrumentalities of Empire. Historians have charted how the state, through these processes of codification and organisation, exercises control through the both individualising and totalising project of documenting and certifying its citizens (Cohn and Dirks 1988). The state extends its power through the seemingly neutral or natural acts of counting and assessing its citizens. In the post-colonial period, certification remains a technology of power, but no longer simply exercised by the nation-state; instead, it has become part of the way in colonial relationships of counting and assessing are continued by other means. Transnational Certification of Language A further way in which children and young people have been certified by Western organisations is through the transnational certification of their language skills. The most salient example of this is the British Council – an organisation that works both with children and adults, and organises both educational and cultural activities internationally. Originally founded in 1934 by British Foreign Office officials, to counter the rise of Fascism and promote English education, in recent times the British Council has been seen as a major tool of soft power (Rawnsley 2018) and operates under a Royal Charter, being officially connected to the Foreign Office (British Council 2022a). It is seen as representing British interests overseas; consequently, it has become embroiled in political controversy in Russia (2007-9) and British Council offices have been attacked by terrorists in Afghanistan (2011) and Libya (2013). Its current activities included offering English language classes and examinations overseas, as well as promoting opportunities to study in the UK. Although its role of cultural diplomacy may now be waning in favour of more overt economic and political pressure (Bell 2016), the scale of its educational operations demonstrate its ongoing significance. The British Council administered 1.6 million IELTS (English-language) tests in 2021–2022. It provided 645,000 professional exams and 842,000 school exams. In 2021-2022, its English-language learning website was accessed by 38 million users. It partnered with various governments to improve English language learning worldwide – for example, in Nepal, India and Turkey. Besides its language provision, it delivered training in leadership skills, deep listening and computer coding. It promoted opportunities for study in the UK. And it provided classroom resources, opportunities to find partner schools and teacher development in how to bring an international dimension to classrooms through its ‘Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning programme’, which operated in over 30 countries, training 65,000 educators and facilitating 8,000 school partnerships (British Council 2022b). Such a cultural institute is not purely a Western phenomenon. China’s Confucius Institute has a similar remit and organisational structure to the British Council, seeking to promote Chinese language and culture around the world. However, to date, it has not established the same abundance of teaching materials and unified language examinations system as those of the British Council (Cai 2019).

142  Certification and curriculum in international contexts The British Council’s work takes for granted the superiority of so-called ‘native speakers’ of English, especially those from the UK. For example, Phillipson (2016) critiques a British Council report into the use of native speakers in six Asian contexts, exposing how speakers of English from, say, the UK are sent into cultural, political and educational contexts which they cannot be expected to understand and yet are positioned as experts. He argues that British Council work often presupposes that a country’s development is linked to English language proficiency, despite a lack of evidence to support this claim. In summary, the British Council’s language education work rests on historical inequalities and is a form of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 2016). Transnational Certification of Higher Education Having considered some of the myriad ways in which global childhoods are certified by Western institutions, I shall now consider the implications of transnational certification of higher education for young adults. My focus in this section will be on transnational education – where institutions offer degrees offshore – rather than on international student mobility to Western countries, which I have discussed in earlier chapters. This may happen through branch campuses, franchise arrangements or various forms of online education. A university branch campus is an organisation that is owned at least in part by a foreign university, using that university’s name and programmes, delivering those programmes at least in part in the host country, leading to an award granted by the foreign university (Garrett 2018). The UK provides education to more students through transnational education overseas than it does to international students studying in the UK (Waters 2018). It is estimated that about 180,000 students were registered in branch campuses at the end of 2015, which although significant, represents less than 4% of international students worldwide. Transnational education is not evenly distributed across the world; in 2011, Miller-Idriss and Hanauer (2011) noted over one third of the then approximately 100 branch campuses (from various countries) operating internationally were in the Middle East. By 2015, although there were 33  home countries (providers of the branch campus), the top five were the US, the UK, Russia, France and Australia; of the 76 host countries (where the branch campuses were located), the top five were China, the UAE, Singapore, Malaysia and Qatar (Garrett 2017). Kleibert terms offshore campuses as ‘infrastructures of im/mobility’ (Kleibert 2022, 93). According to Kleibert, immobility is judged as inferior to mobility, although I would contest this assertion – W ­ estern immobility (a sheaf of degrees exclusively from the UK, for example) is not seen as inferior non-Western mobility (perhaps to seek post-graduate education outside their home nation). Research suggests that the quality of education at an offshore campus may not be suited to the new cultural context. Tensions can exist between the offshore and home campus, with the relationship seen as ‘parent–child’ rather than between equals (Smith 2009). Students studying at an offshore campus may find

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 143 that the textbooks and curriculum may relate to a world that seems very different from their own (Qian 2013). Moreover, the faculty at an offshore campus may be more transient than at a ‘home’ campus (Smith 2009). Alongside the franchising of programmes and use of offshore campuses, online education has also shifted higher education credentials away from the purview of the nation-state. For example, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been developed, which were initially presented as revolutionalising access to higher education. Based on courses from high-status universities, MOOCs initially offered online content to all those willing to enrol; as the MOOC did not involve any contact with faculty and was fully automated, there was no limit on attendance. Organisations offering a range of MOOCs included Udacity and Coursera, founded at Stanford University, and EdX, which was the brainchild of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. The educational model evolved over time, with access to some materials being offered for free, but any certificate of completion or academic credential only available for a fee. To date, MOOCs have not fulfilled their early promise, either at home or overseas, with course completion rates remaining low. Indeed, some countries have been far more cautious in approving online qualifications than in accepting other forms of transnational education, wary of their impact on learning quality. For example, China has not approved any online degrees as of the start of 2022, although enrolment in MOOCs is high (Ubell 2021). There are return flows of students and academics between transnational education and the ‘home’ campus of a university. However, within such exchanges, the question of which institution issues credentials is key, as this decides the arbiter of the worth of specific experiences. Within these transnational experiences, we are seeing an exoticisation of education, with ‘international experience’ seen as a broadening for those who come from Western contexts. By contrast, going to the West to study from non-Western contexts is seen as a deepening, accessing a richer deposit of knowledge and understanding. Moreover, issuance of higher education credentials does not only have symbolic importance over who get to judge knowledge and its worth; the issue also directly impacts labour markets and social, political and economic development. I shall illustrate these issues by consideration of two case studies of transnational higher education – first, the University of Nottingham, which I know intimately as I worked for six years at their Malaysia Campus, and second, Education City in Qatar. Case Study: University of Nottingham The University of Nottingham opened the first branch campus of a UK university in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) in the year 2000 (Hartley 2021). The University went into partnership with Malaysian companies, with the majority shareholder, the Boustead Group, being affiliated to the Malaysian military, and the university holding a 29.1% share. Since then, the campus has grown to over 5000 students and the university has now opened a second branch campus in Ningbo, China. The three campuses of the university have shared features; each features

144  Certification and curriculum in international contexts an administrative building topped by a clock tower and overlooking a lake, so that the non-Western institutions ‘mimic’ the Western campus (Xu 2021). The campus landscape performs the same function as the cathedral precinct of medieval times, evoking privilege and power (Dober 2000). The clock tower is a traditional form of building, evoking measure and tradition – the clock serves to connect the university to the universal measure of time. The lake evokes contemplation. The overseas campuses are reminiscent of the landscape gardening of Capability Brown, whose work shaped some of the grandest country estates in England. These features of the three campuses connect the new campuses in Ningbo and Malaysia to tradition and stability, and serve as powerful symbols of connection to the UK. The University of Nottingham has separate, but linked, websites for its different campuses. The UK section on student life focuses on social opportunities for students (University of Nottingham UK 2022). By contrast, the Malaysian campus description of student life focuses on facilities and then positions Malaysian culture as an ‘experience’ alongside such other resources as the sports facilities and the café (University of Nottingham Malaysia 2022); it is part of what is being consumed by students who select this campus. On the Chinese campus website, there is a similar emphasis on savouring Chinese culture. With videos featuring Chinese food, historical sites such as temples, and cultural celebrations, the information on university life feels like a tourist information site (University of Nottingham China 2022). When Study International ran a endorsed feature on studying at Nottingham’s China Campus – with the university’s logo endorsing the article – the campus was described as follows: UNNC’s high-quality British education is facilitated in East Asia and taught entirely in English, as it would be at the University of Nottingham. [Academics] are either seconded from Nottingham or appointed to the University of Nottingham’s standards. Research and learning materials are also imported from the UK and elsewhere. (Study International 2021) This summary requires critical examination for the assumptions implicit in the text. Standards, in this account, are guaranteed by being British. The quality of academic staff is apparently determined by either coming from Nottingham or being appointed to Nottingham ‘standards’. In other words, the teaching and learning experience is emphasised as being non-Chinese. However, by September 2021, the University was rebuked by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator in Higher Education (OIA) in the UK, which argued that it had misled students when it had suggested that the Chinese campus was a ‘full and integral part of the University of Nottingham’ (Grove 2021). The OIA noted that the Chinese campus was a separate legal entity and that only academic matters were overseen by the UK, with other aspects of the student experience, such as student wellbeing, being outside of the UK campus’s remit.

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 145 The Malaysian campus faced troubles of its own. There is a widespread perception in the South-East Asian region that degrees delivered in situ are not of the same calibre as those from their Western campus, and national governments have also wanted to reap maximum economic benefit from offshore education. For these two reasons, the Singaporean government refused to recognise Nottingham degrees studied for in Malaysia, although the Malaysian campus was able to forge partnerships to enable delivery of Nottingham programmes directly in Singapore. Also in 2021, the university decided to buy-out its private sector partner in Malaysia (Yusof 2021). In summary, the complex identity work involved in offering British credentials in Malaysia and China has necessitated the university drawing on neo-colonial assumptions about what constitutes quality in higher education. However, it has arguably posed a threat to the university’s brand image. Case Study: Education City in Qatar The internationalisation of higher education has not been an unqualified success for Western universities. Qatar’s Education City, offering free courses from elite US, French and UK universities to Qatari citizens, has suffered from low enrolment (Thier 2017). This is attributable to many factors, including poor standards of primary and secondary education and a social welfare system that disincentives Qataris from pursuing post-compulsory education, but Thier sees a cultural disconnect between Education City and Qatar culture as key to understanding its lack of appeal. There is little or no connection between education and life success in traditional Qatari culture, and during the colonial era, British colonialists preferred to import Indian workers rather than invest in Qatari human capital. Profits from oil from the 1950s onwards mean that, even as Qatar modernised, Qatari nationals have not needed education for affluence – this is especially true for males. Education City sits uncomfortably with Qatari social norms, offering co-education classes in a country where sex segregation is usual. Thier notes that Education City is female-­dominated, but that it is unclear how many of these students enter the workforce after graduation. In Western countries, education is seen as the route to social mobility, and since the 1960s, it has been touted as a means to social engineering. Those promoting internationalisation as a road to addressing global social problems would do well to avoid generalising from the social meaning and function of education in Western countries to assuming it holds this role elsewhere. In Qatar’s Education City, we therefore see a counter-example to the neo-colonial tendencies in Western credentialisation; here, the culture gap has been too large for Western institutions of higher education to profit from the promise of Western cultural capital. Transnational Accreditation of Institutions A further transnational element to the offering of qualifications and credentials has been the emergence of transnational accreditation. Accreditation of schools by organisations from outside the country where they are located is a growing

146  Certification and curriculum in international contexts global phenomenon (Coutet 2022). There are several organisations that offer international school accreditation, including the Council of International Schools and Cignia. In tertiary education, accreditation is offered by organisations such as the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), which accredits teacher preparation programmes worldwide. Some researchers suggest that transnational accreditation may lead to institutional ‘isomorphism’ (Coutet 2022, 118), so that innovation is stifled as schools and universities attempt to adhere to the implied ideal in the standards used by the accrediting body. In addition, it is asserted that their accreditation standards are rooted in Western pedagogical approaches and notions of good management, with scant attention paid to their applicability in the cultural contexts to which they are being exported (Coutet 2022). For example, Romanowski (2022) argues that American understandings of good teaching practices infuse the CAEP teacher education standards, for example, understandings of diversity that may not match cultural expectations in the Middle East. In consequence, even when programmes remain national, rather than franchised or offered on offshore campuses, accreditation may lead indirectly to transnational elements that can constitute a ‘neocolonialism of the willing’ (Romanowski 2022, 199). A more nuanced approach, however, would recognise that international accreditation may be sought by government universities in diverse locations as a lever for change, and note that the CAEP accreditation standards explicitly encourage teacher education providers to define best practice in their own context, and focus on continual improvement towards domestically-set standards, rather than imposing external demands. I suggest that a more agentic explanation is required, that avoids simplistically seeing non-Western institutions as passive adherents to Western standards. Discussion The above overview of transnational qualifications has shown the extent to which they are shaping childhood experiences and young adults’ completion of their education. While undoubtedly they remain restricted to a minority – and national credentials continue to be important – this is of interest for a number of reasons. First, their existence is significant because their impact has been greatest on elites. International schools nurture future leaders in many national contexts. Transnational universities are often attended predominantly by the affluent who can afford their fees. With the social functions of credentials being to ration access to labour market opportunities and to legitimise privilege, transnational education does not need to extend to the masses to have extensive social effects. Second, transnational education is significant because its discursive positioning as world-class leads to ripple effects on wider systems of education. We know that it is predominantly British and American universities which are denoted ‘world-class’ (Siltaoja, Juusola, and Kivijärvi 2019), and have led the offer of transnational educational qualifications. The universities and schools involved in international certification would doubtless argue that they are enabling students

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 147 worldwide to access ‘the best’. In other words, an equalisation of access to quality education could perhaps be enabled by these moves. International certification is usually justified on the basis of use of the medium of English, of technology, and supposedly more robust standards than national accreditation (Steiner-Khamsi 2018). Such an argument overlooks that what constitutes ‘the best’ is socially constructed, and not all have equal power to effect what becomes seen in this way. National education systems will be under pressure to respond to the ‘best’; in fact, it is this potential for wider ripples that the IB has used to justify its use in government schools. Transnational education is, therefore, potentially impactful, but there are contrasting accounts of exactly what this impact may be. In this section, I explore different ways of conceptualising the rapid expansion of transnational certification and qualifications. I shall examine theories of standardisation and Westernisation, and then compare them with more nuanced accounts that acknowledge for agency in responding to these globalising trends. There is some evidence that transnational education is part of a process of cultural diffusion through globalisation, with shared economic pressures resulting in diverse national systems gradually converging on the model(s) they employ for educational delivery. In this view, educational changes are leading towards a universal approach, with an emphasis on shared goals of choice and accountability, delivered through decentralised and privatised systems which employ testing and assessment. Such educational changes are just one feature of a more generalised cultural phenomenon of homogenisation, with the emergence of a world cultural order, to the benefit of a global elite. One example of cultural diffusion theories is the thesis of ‘McDonaldisation’. In the early years of this century, theorists posited that changes to universities in England were McDonaldising the higher education system (Hayes and Wynyard 2002), and subsequently theorists such as Altbach (2013) suggested that the franchising of British qualifications overseas is part of the international McDonaldisation of higher education. The term ‘McDonaldisation’ is chosen to evoke distaste, to imply that the massification of education is leading to an erosion in quality. It draws on an instinctive prejudice against the successes of a huge, international corporation, based on standardisation and quality control in the pursuit of vast profits. For example, Altbach suggests that British institutions are offering sub-standard products overseas; he notes that the franchisees are often for-profit organisations with little background in education, and that there is poor quality oversight by the British universities. Others have posited that MOOCs present even greater pressures towards McDonaldisation (Lane and Kinser 2012; Ritzer 2013). Other empirical studies from diverse locations support this claim that the marketing of educational standardisation may come at a cost in quality. For example, Leung and Waters (2013) explore how a British degree in Hong Kong is promoted and delivered. They note that it is presented as if it is the same experience as studying in the UK, but in reality participants in the programme are frustrated by superficial relationships with fly-in lecturers, a lack of student culture and unequal

148  Certification and curriculum in international contexts treatment to students studying on Hong Kong programmes on the host campus. They didn’t feel that their English language skills were nurtured as well as they would have been either in the UK or on a Hong Kong programme. The cultural diffusion model has also pointed to a wider phenomenon of Westernisation, so that (for example) higher education becomes secularised across large parts of the world (Miller-Idriss and Hanauer 2011). For example, Siltaoja, Juusola, and Kivijärvi (2019) analyse branch campuses in the UAE to argue that their marketing materials denote quality by including images of iconic UK or US landmarks, and emphasise that the certificates awarded are the same as those as the home campus, implicitly suggesting that a non-Western location might be seen as lesser. They argue that the discourse of being ‘world-class’ operates as a fantasy which structures neo-colonial relationships in international branch campuses, with ‘world-class’ used to denote Western. I have noted pressures towards, and evidence of, Westernisation above; transnational institutions are, in some of these instances, selling whiteness as a model for the selection of elites. However, it is important to acknowledge that a simple thesis of whiteness cannot explain apparent agency within this universalisation. First, it cannot explain the role of local state actors within what has occurred, such as governments or other state agencies who have actively facilitated the growth of offshore education. Second, it does not explain why this ostensible homogenisation has, in fact, been highly variable, with (for example) parts of the Middle East experiencing more demand for offshore education than others (Miller-Idriss and Hanauer 2011). With the emphasis on difference, we can note that students at top UK and US institutions are likely to envisage their future careers in international terms, whereas students at elite French and Japanese universities seem to be more oriented to making a national contribution (Hartmann 2018). In other words, a more nuanced approach is needed to understand instances of transnational education within particular national settings. A second approach, then, is to replace theories of universalisation and homogenisation with attention on the actions and agency of those in the locales impacted by transnational education. Here, there is no universalising imperative; indeed, understanding why Western universities need to internationalise (the privatisation of higher education in Western countries and the economic pressures on their universities) requires a different account to understanding why a number of countries are eager to receive transnational institutions (which is related to particular economic, social or political pressures which are specific to a locale). For example, there is considerable variation between British universities in the extent to which they have invested in transnational education – the University of Nottingham was a forerunner and the model has not been embraced by many others, who see Nottingham’s experiences as signalling reasons for caution. An offshore campus is a sizable investment that involves significant potential reputational risk; a British university, for example, not only has to manage quality assurance procedures for a campus elsewhere but may also find itself attacked in the media if academic freedom is compromised at its offshore campus. In addition, as Kleibert (2021) points out, what is for sale here is Britishness, but this Britishness is diluted

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 149 by the international venture. Nevertheless, under the imperatives of neoliberal education, its financial allure may prove irresistible. Similarly, there are differences between different countries in the extent to which they wish to host transnational education, and the models they employ to manage it. For example, the extent of transnational education in the countries of the Arabian Gulf is driven by a need to pivot youthful economies rapidly away from a dependency on oil. By contrast, Singapore’s digital tracking of international students on transnational campuses is the result of a wish to position itself as an educational leader without inadvertently facilitating low-skill labour migration under the guise of student recruitment (Kleibert 2022). Therefore, it is possible to visualise the change involved in the expansion of transnational education in very different ways – one approach sees it as the product of an unstoppable force for homogenisation, driven by market imperatives, whereas the other focuses on the choices of the individuals and institutions involved. Each of these accounts has its limitations. Although the cultural diffusion model ignores agency, the alternative emphasis on local factors inherent in such change renders it inadequate to explain how broad the phenomenon of offshore education has been (Miller-Idriss and Hanauer 2011). Following Miller-Idriss and Hanauer (2011), I propose a merging of the insights from both, for example, by emphasising shared regional economic, educational and social trends while noting that there is space for agency in responses to these commonalities. For instance, research has demonstrated that post-colonial relationships continue to influence student mobilities in French higher education, but that these no longer determine university strategies (Bobée and Kleibert 2022). Post-colonial mobilities are partly a pragmatic response to linguistic necessity; French universities have hitherto focused their recruitment efforts on former French colonies in Africa as Francophone students from Africa may more easily study for French qualifications. However, Bobée and Kleibert (2022) also note discontinuities with post-colonial higher education mobilities; with a broadening range of French higher education offerings in Africa, encompassing online courses, overseas campuses, franchise arrangements, academic partnerships and more, they argue that the strategies employed by institutions are increasingly influenced by neoliberal market pressures, rather than by political motivations to maintain influence over former colonies. Trans-national flows of students are not accidental; they cannot simply be understood in terms of individual choices by individual students. However, they are equally not simply the result of global trends; they are also a product of institutional and state policies. International education and national immigration policies are intrinsically connected, with education used strategically by governments to serve their national labour market. In addition, international education policy is in part a political endeavour, a statement about a nation’s vision for its future identity. As a consequence, although the historical inequalities associated with whiteness help to explain some of the Western beneficiaries of transnational education, we also see institutional, national and regional variation in engagement with transnational education, and its related social and economic inequalities.

150  Certification and curriculum in international contexts Conclusion This chapter has explored the phenomena of international credentials. It has shown how Western qualifications are increasingly being used to assess global childhood and youth in a variety of ways, from international school-leaver qualifications to accreditation of global standards for teaching to accreditation of ­extra-curricular activities. Transnational higher education has complemented these changes, with Western institutions graduating non-Western students through offshore campuses, franchised programmes or study online. Although this suggests the domination of whiteness – the standards of neo-colonialism being used to judge the world – I have also noted agency in how national governments, institutions and individuals respond to tendencies of educational homogenisation and Westernisation. This agency will be explored further in the concluding chapter. References ABRSM. 2022. “Our History.” Accessed 14th September. https://bh.abrsm.org/en/ about-us/our-history/. Altbach, Philip G. 2013. “Franchising—The McDonaldization of Higher Education.” In The International Imperative in Higher Education, edited by Philip G. Altbach, 111–3. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Azzi, Iman. 2018. “Reading the “international” Through Postcolonial Theory: A Case Study of the Adoption of the International Baccalaureate at a School in Lebanon.” International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 17 (1):51–65. Bell, Emma. 2016. “Soft Power and Corporate Imperialism: Maintaining British Influence.” Race & Class 57 (4):75–86. doi: 10.1177/0306396815624865. Bobée, Alice, and Jana Maria Kleibert. 2022. “Choose France! Containment, Circulation and Postcolonial (dis) Continuities in Transnational Education.” Globalisation, Societies and Education:1–13. doi: 10.1080/14767724.2022.2075329 Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity.    . 2006. “The Forms of Capital.” In Education, Globalization and Social Change, edited by Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown, Jo Anne Dillabough and Albert Henry Halsey, 105–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brightwell, Giles William Edward. 2013. “Book Review: The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music: A Social and Cultural History.” Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 70 (2):283–6. British Council. 2022a. “About Us.” Accessed 23rd November. https://www.britishcouncil. org/about-us.    . 2022b. “Building Connections in 2021-22.” Accessed 23rd November. https:// www.britishcouncil.org/about-us/how-we-work/review-2021-22. Brown, Phillip, Sally Power, Gerbrand Tholen, and Annabelle Allouch. 2016. “Credentials, Talent and Cultural Capital: a Comparative Study of Educational Elites in England and France.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 37 (2):191–211. doi: 10.1080/01425692. 2014.920247. Brown, Phillip, and Manuel Souto-Otero. 2020. “The End of the Credential Society? An Analysis of the Relationship between Education and the Labour Market Using Big Data.” Journal of Education Policy 35 (1):95–118. doi: 10.1080/02680939.2018.1549752.

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 151 Bunnell, Tristan. 2017. “International Education in the ‘Global South’: An International Baccalaureate Perspective.” The International Schools Journal 37 (1):8–16. Cai, Liexu. 2019. “A Comparative Study of the Confucius Institute in the United Kingdom and the British Council in China.” Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 18 (1):44–63. doi: 10.1177/2047173419845531. Cohn, Bernard S, and Nicholas B Dirks. 1988. “Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism, and the Technologies of Power.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (2):224–9. Coutet, Karl. 2022. “International School Accreditation: An Isomorphic Force Against Creativity in a Growing Competitive Market.” Journal of Research in International Education 21 (2):105–22. doi: 10.1177/14752409221117252. Dober, Richard P. 2000. Campus Landscape: Functions, Forms, Features. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Faulconbridge, James R., and Daniel Muzio. 2011. “Professions in a Globalizing World: Towards a Transnational Sociology of the Professions.” International Sociology 27 (1):136–52. doi: 10.1177/0268580911423059. Gardner-McTaggart, Alexander. 2018. “The Promise of Advantage: Englishness in IB International Schools.” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 22 (4):109–14. doi: 10.1080/13603108.2018.1456491. Garrett, Richard. 2017. “International Branch Campuses—Curiosity or Important Trend?” International Higher Education (90):7–8.    . 2018. “International Branch Campuses: Success Factors.” International Higher Education 2 (93):14–6. Grove, Jack. 2021. “Nottingham rebuked for ‘misleading’ students over China campus.” In Times Higher Education. Accessed 4th March 2023. https://www.timeshighereducation. com/news/nottingham-rebuked-misleading-students-over-china-campus. Hartley, Joshua. 2021. “University of Nottingham to ‘secure long-term future’ of Malaysian campus in buy out.” In Nottingham Post. Accessed 6 September 2022. https://www. nottinghampost.com/news/university-nottingham-secure-long-term-5796329 Hartmann, Michael. 2018. “Internationality Within Business Elites and National Elite Educational Institutions.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 75–91. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Hayes, Dennis, and Robin Wynyard. 2002. The McDonaldization of Higher Education. New York: Praeger. Hill, Ian. 2006. “Do International Baccalaureate Programs Internationalise or Globalise.” International Education Journal 7 (1):98–108. International Baccalaureate. 2022a. “Frequently asked questions about the Diploma Programme.” Accessed 7th September. https://www.ibo.org/globalassets/new-structure/ recognition/pdfs/dp-faqs-recognition.pdf.    . 2022b. “Diploma Programme.” Accessed 7th September. https://www.ibo.org/ programmes/diploma-programme/.    . 2022c. “Government Partnerships.” Accessed 24th November. https://www.ibo. org/benefits/ib-as-a-district-or-national-curriculum/government-partnerships/.    . 2022d. “Office Locations.” Accessed 7th September. https://www.ibo.org/ contact-the-ib/office-locations/. Johnson-Williams, Erin. 2020. “The Examiner and the Evangelist: Authorities of Music and Empire, c. 1894.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145 (2):317–50. Kleibert, Jana M. 2021. “Geographies of Marketization in Higher Education: Branch Campuses as Territorial and Symbolic Fixes.” Economic Geography 97 (4):315–37.

152  Certification and curriculum in international contexts    . 2022. “Transnational Spaces of Education as Infrastructures of im/mobility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47 (1):92–107. Knight, Jane. 2004. “Internationalization Remodeled: Definition, Approaches, and Rationales.” Journal of Studies in International Education 8 (1):5–31. Kopsick, Kyle. 2018. “Continuing the Discussion of International Education in the ‘Global South’: A Cambridge Perspective.” The International Schools Journal 38 (1):67–75. Lane, Jason, and Kevin Kinser. 2012. “MOOCs and the McDonaldization of Global Higher Education.” Education 30536:1. Leung, Maggi W. H., and Johanna L. Waters. 2013. “British Degrees Made in Hong Kong: an Enquiry into the Role of Space and Place in Transnational Education.” Asia Pacific Education Review 14 (1):43–53. doi: 10.1007/s12564-013-9250-4. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, and Elizabeth Hanauer. 2011. “Transnational Higher Education: Offshore Campuses in the Middle East.” Comparative Education 47 (2):181–207. Paris, Paul G. 2003. “The International Baccalaureate: A Case Study on Why Students Choose to Do the IB.” International Education Journal 4 (3):232–43. Phillipson, Robert. 2016. “Native Speakers in Linguistic Imperialism.” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 14 (3):80–96. Poonoosamy, Mico. 2018. “Third Culture kids’ Sense of International Mindedness: Case Studies of Students in Two International Baccalaureate Schools.” Journal of Research in International Education 17 (3):207–27. Qian, David. 2013. “Fundamental Issues Affecting Offshore Education: Experience from a Developing Country.” OIDA International Journal of Sustainable Development 6 (04):79–86. Rawnsley, Gary D. 2018. “Challenging the Snake-Oil Salesmen: a Critique of British Approaches to Soft Power.” The Journal of International Communication 24 (1):1–17. doi: 10. 1080/13216597.2017.1422779. Ritzer, George. 2013. “MOOCs and the McDonaldization of Education.” Accessed 4th March 2023. https://georgeritzer.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/moocs-and-themcdonaldization-of-education/. Romanowski, Michael H. 2022. “CAEP Accreditation: Educational Neocolonialism and Non-US Teacher Education Programs.” Higher Education Policy 35 (1):199–217. doi: 10.1057/s41307-020-00205-x. Royal Academy of Dance. 2022. “Royal Academy of Dance Home Page.” Accessed 14th September. https://www.royalacademyofdance.org. Siltaoja, Marjo, Katariina Juusola, and Marke Kivijärvi. 2019. “‘World-class’ Fantasies: A Neocolonial Analysis of International Branch Campuses.” Organization 26 (1):75–97. Smith, Lois. 2009. “Sinking in the Sand? Academic Work in an Offshore Campus of an Australian University.” Higher Education Research & Development 28 (5):467–79. Steiner-Khamsi, Gita. 2018. “Businesses Seeing Like a State, Governments Calculating Like a Business.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31 (5):382–92. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2018.1449980. Stevenson, Howard, Stephen Joseph, Lucy Bailey, Lucy Cooker, Stuart Fox, and Alicia Bowman. 2016. “‘Caring’ across the International Baccalaureate continuum.” International Baccalaureate Organization. Accessed 28th March 2023. https://www.ibo.org/cont entassets/952a2e6109b144ac86485780bfc8f bec/caring-across-the-continuum-eng.pdf. Study International. 2021. “Here’s what getting a top UK degree in China is like.” Accessed 4th March 2023. https://www.studyinternational.com/news/heres-what-getting-atop-uk-degree-in-china-is-like/. Thier, Michael. 2017. “Can Qatar Buy Sustainable Educational Excellence?” In Imagining the Future of Global Education, edited by Y. Zhao and B. Gearin, 99–118. London: Routledge.

Certification and curriculum in international contexts 153 Tholen, Gerbrand. 2016. “Symbolic Closure: Towards a Renewed Sociological Perspective on the Relationship between Higher Education, Credentials and the Graduate Labour Market.” Sociology 51 (5):1067–83. doi: 10.1177/0038038516641857. Ubell, Robert. 2021. “In China, Online Degrees on Hold, Even as MOOCs Rise.” In EdSurge. Accessed 6th September 2022. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-12-10in-china-online-degrees-on-hold-even-as-moocs-rise. University of Nottingham China. 2022. “University Life.” Accessed 6th September. https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/University-life/Index.aspx. University of Nottingham Malaysia. 2022. “Current Students.” Accessed 6th September. https://www.nottingham.edu.my/CurrentStudents/index.aspx. University of Nottingham UK. 2022. “Life on Campus.” Accessed 6th September. https:// www.nottingham.ac.uk/studywithus/student-experience/life-on-campus.aspx. Waters, Johanna L. 2018. “International Education Is Political! Exploring the Politics of International Student Mobilities.” Journal of International Students 8 (3):1459–78. Xu, Zhenyang. 2021. “Examining Neocolonialism in International Branch Campuses in China: A Case Study of Mimicry.” Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education 13 (5):72–85. Yusof, A. 2021. “Boustead sells controlling stake in University of Nottingham for RM137mil.” Accessed 21st June 2022. https://www.nst.com.my/business/2021/08/ 718769/boustead-sells-controlling-stake-university-nottingham-rm137mil. Zhang, Le. 2019. “Cultural Colonialism, Academic Rigor, or Both? A Study of ABRSM Examinations in Northern China.” Visions of Research in Music Education 34 (1):3.

10 Conclusion The global gaze

Revisiting the Internationalisation of Education Knight defined the internationalisation of higher education as ‘the process of ­integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, function or delivery of post-secondary education’ (Knight 2004, 11). Knight intentionally used the three terms – international, intercultural and global – ­together to capture the scope and diversity of matters she intended to fall under the definition. She used international to refer to the elements that involve relationships between countries and their cultures; intercultural referred to the diversity within countries and institutions; and global emphasised that this was worldwide in scope. In summary, the intention was to provide a definition that captures the expanding and multidimensional aspects of internationalisation of higher education. This book has captured the complexity of the internationalisation of education at multiple levels, beyond the tertiary sector focused on by Knight. It has examined internationalisation of educational policy-making, how classrooms have been internationalised, the expansion of international schooling, and the increased mobility of educators and students (ranging from refugee students to international school teachers). Throughout this book, I have questioned and problematised the language to be used to consider the issues of inequalities discussed. ‘Western’ is widely used as an umbrella term to capture a geographical, as well as economic divide in privilege, but rests on a Euro-centric vision of the globe (the East is only East if Europe is taken as the starting-point) and additionally does not explain the position of Australia. Perhaps then we should refer to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or high-income nations, but these include a number of cultures that have been historically excluded or colonised, and emphasis on economic measures alone is a blunt tool for understanding global inequalities. Bunnell (2017) proposes using self-identification instead as the means for operationalising the concept of nations experiencing economic disadvantage; the G77 is a group of 134 countries (there were originally 77) who see themselves as having a shared economic positioning; yet, a term developed for political reasons is not necessarily the best for offering sociological insight. Instead, the terms Global North and Global South have been used widely as euphemisms to DOI: 10.4324/9781003344131-10

Conclusion 155 capture inequality. These terms are, however, equally contested, imprecise, and may serve to homogenise culturally, socially and economically diverse countries. There has been no easy resolution to this issue of nomenclature throughout this book. The terminology is problematic and imprecise because it is used to capture multiple overlapping, but distinct, issues – sociocultural hierarchies, economic inequalities and political differences. I have charted the emergence of a Global Education Industry (GEI) that benefits from the internationalisation of education, but noted that the factors driving internationalisation are multiple and complex. There are various rationales that have been given for internationalisation – economic, socio-cultural, academic and political (De Wit et al. 2015), and the impetus for internationalisation has come at national, institutional or individual level. It would be simplistic to see internationalisation merely as the expansion of neoliberal capitalism, solely as the cultural encroachment of Westernisation, or purely as the political enactment or neo-colonialism. Each of these theories has some explanatory power, but I have also noted counter-tendencies to these universalising theories, thereby opening up space for agency and resistance. I have argued that internationalisation remains conceptually vague yet is presented to us as desirable. Following Buckner and Stein (2019), I have noted that institutions tend to focus on quantifiable aspects of internationalisation (where increased global reach is equated with better), and do not consider historical inequalities or ethical responsibilities which might inform how internationalisation is shaped. Being international is presented as a value, but is practised as a resource that is measured and compared between institutions (Bloch et al. 2018). Being international is being transfigured to participate in a global competition – whether it is to be the best student, the best teacher, the best university or the best education system. Marginson (2011) argues that there are three key elements to a global imaginary in higher education: belief in a global capitalist order and a global market for higher education; belief in a global higher education sector within which rankings and other comparisons of performance can occur; and belief in a global network of universities, connected by partnerships and other links. These three beliefs – in global capitalism, global comparison and global knowledge networks – are equally part of the global gaze that permeates other aspects of internationalised education. However, there are other beliefs as well which contribute to this gaze – that education is a universal good, and that sharing educational ideas is meaningful and important. Problematising the Global Gaze Throughout this book, I have problematised the global gaze, noting that it is a technology of subjectification, delimiting possibilities by its constructions of the good student or the good educator. I have explained ways in which the global gaze reflects historical inequalities and can be seen as a white gaze.

156  Conclusion Internationalisation of education is seen as a global good because of false myths about the benefits that it brings, which have been systematically debunked by Knight (2011). Universities assume they can internationalise their culture by admitting international students; improving their international reputation/ranking; developing international partnerships; seeking international accreditation; or creating a global brand image. However, Knight (2011) shows that none of these is a marker of benefits gained from internationalisation, and that each myth is misleading because it encourages a focus on quantitative performance indicators rather than qualitative change. The ‘best’ universities worldwide, towards which millions of dollars in revenue flow in consequence, are wealthy institutions often situated in the UK or the US. Recent scandals have exposed that some of these universities have massaged their own data in order to move their place up the rankings. For example, a professor from Colombia University (Thaddeus 2022) demonstrated that his own university submitted misleading and inaccurate data to the US News University Rankings (which ranks universities in the US and globally) – a charge that was eventually admitted by the university (McGreal 2022). Elsewhere in the US, the former Dean of Temple University was convicted of fraud as a result of false submissions to the same rankings (United States Department of Justice 2021). What this suggests, then, is that these rankings do not serve to improve access to high-quality education, but rather impede it, as they focus energy on the rankings themselves. The myths perpetuated as a result of international comparisons can be dangerous. Asian-Americans have been constructed as a ‘model minority’, partly on the performance of East Asian countries in international comparative assessments. This has been used to stereotype and essentialise Asian-American students, as well as to castigate other minorities (Zhao and Qiu 2009). In China, students and parents saw high-stakes exams as the only way to survive under generations of brutal dictatorship, and consequently dedicated immense resources and hard work – yet now their success on such assessments is being held up in American as a model (Zhao 2014). Desperation to escape the consequences of oppression is now held up as an educational example to the world. The discourse of internationalisation lauds its benefits in terms of diversity and multiculturalism, but in fact such diversity is limited to the affluent who can pay high students fees and the ‘diverse’ students who are expected to adjust to meet the cultures of learning of the countries to which they travel (Bamberger, Morris, and Yemini 2019). Bamberger, Morris, and Yemini (2019) note how economic rationales for student and institutional mobility have been privileged in discourse concerning the internationalisation of higher education, and other humanistic motivations have been marginalised or linked to employability. I have shown how being international offers symbolic capital and a route to upward mobility; it is a social resource, which may be in tension with other, for example, national sources of identity (Basaran and Olsson 2018). In place of ostensible diversity, education is becoming ‘increasingly global, homogeneous and structured’ (Zhao and Gearin 2017, 13) as a consequence of

Conclusion 157 the ‘Grand Educational Narrative’ constructed by organisations such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This narrative places education at the centre of a child’s life and a nation’s future, endowing it with transformative potential. At the individual level, education supposedly enables a child to pursue a successful career. At the national level, investment in education (seen as human capital) promises economic and social development. This narrative has created a story about transformation through specific educational policies that are supposedly equally good at ensuring a happy-ever-after ending across all nations. Yet, while offering the promise of policies, the global gaze has simultaneously diminished the role of democratic institutions in our education systems. Ball (2012) argues that the expansion of the GEI implicitly rests upon an assumption that national governments have failed to address educational problems and that global capitalism can do it better. Social capitalists claim to leverage the profit motive to ensure that marketised educational solutions can somehow contribute to the global good. Individual students, teachers, schools, edubusinesses and education systems are set in competition with one another and at a global level this is supposed to generate the optimal outcome. The role of government is reduced to merely promoting academic competition, rather than regulating it (Bamberger, Morris, and Yemini 2019). Progressive educators are perhaps beginning to wake up to the more dangerous consequences of internationalisation. Although it is discursively presented as a good, in my chapter on refugee education I questioned how good it really is when it is so arbitrary in distributing its benefits. Internationalisation has, I have suggested, become an irresistible candy that we keep feeding to our young people, despite now being aware of its ill effects. Yet, academics are subjectified by internationalisation no less than their students. As the global gaze has expanded, so the conceptual world of each academic has grown smaller as areas of expertise have shrunk. Academics now work within a tiny sphere, burrowing ever deeper into a specific concept or tiny field of enquiry. Meanwhile, the global gaze is a large enveloping fog. Perhaps this explains why there has been so little resistance amongst academics to aspects of the gaze, such as the performativity of Research and Teaching Excellence Frameworks. Being an international academic, ironically, rarely means focusing on the bigger picture of internationalisation; rather, the pressures of performativity mean that academics are instead focused on their micro practices related to bolstering global rankings, such as publications. Nevertheless, as I was writing this book, the law schools at Yale, Harvard and UC Berkeley announced their decision to withdraw from the US News & World Report’s rankings (Aratani 2022), citing concern that the way the rankings were compiled disincentivised law colleges from admitting students from diverse backgrounds (as a result of an emphasis on selectivity) or from encouraging engagement in public-interest law careers (the latter graduates are categorised as ‘unemployed’ and so adversely impact a course’s employability rankings). Although this only impacted a US ranking, the withdrawal raises fundamental questions about the premises upon

158  Conclusion which other such rankings are based. It suggests that a resistance to the global competition of the global gaze may be emerging. I consider this in more detail in the following section. Reimagining the Global Gaze At her speech to the 2016 Conservative Party Conference, Theresa May, then Prime Minister of the UK, declared: Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street. But if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means. The Washington Post was quick to point out that 51% of people surveyed over 18 countries disagreed, identifying themselves primarily as global citizens rather than national citizens (Bearak 2016). The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah took to the BBC News to argue that although cosmopolitanism has become suspect, associated with a jet-setting elite, it is essential in a globalised world, where our fates are interdependent. Appiah concludes: If cosmopolitanism involves a simple recognition that our lives are interrelated in ways that transcend boundaries and that our human concerns must, too, it has brute reality on its side. A citizen of the world? Better believe it. (Appiah 2016) The word ‘cosmopolitan’ derives from the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, who termed himself a ‘kosmou polites’, translated as citizen of the world. For Diogenes, this did not mean that he subscribed to the idea of a world government, but rather that he thought we should care about all people, and that we can find ideas worth considering from disparate cultures, not just our own (Appiah 2006). The term was revived during the Enlightenment period when, too, it referred to the value in recognising and learning from our common humanity, and was not in any way counterposed to the idea of national citizenship. On the contrary, Appiah (2006) argues, modern cosmopolitanism was complementary to modern nationalism, and not an alternative to it. Appiah sees cosmopolitanism as celebrating both universality and difference; it sees human beings as bound by their commonalities, as well as acknowledging that cultures differ and that we can learn from diversity. For Kurasawa, there are three elements of the cosmopolitan: that individuals see themselves as belonging to a world humanity, perhaps alongside more specific, territorial, forms of belonging; that they are open to, and value, a plurality of viewpoints; and finally that they belief in the unity of humankind, which surpasses human differences (Kurasawa 2011). There is no inherent necessity why

Conclusion 159 being cosmopolitan, in this sense, should be restricted to a global elite. There is no connection between this form of cosmopolitanism and the acquisition of cosmopolitan cultural capital through international education, subsequently used to protect and enhance social advantage, perhaps through racist presuppositions about whiteness. On the contrary, I suggest that we can re-seize the notion of cosmopolitanism in order to develop another, socially transformative way of being international, to exercise our academic agency to resist the inequalities inherent in the current global gaze. The global gaze will not be easy to change; it is not merely a feature of education alone, but is reflected in myriad other decisions, from how people present their resumes to their vacation destinations (Basaran and Olsson 2018). Yet, there has never been a more important time to redefine what it means to be international. With humanity facing an existential climate crisis, we must ask fundamental questions about how we view travel, about the exclusion or occlusion of non-Western perspectives, and also about how we view the importance of collective international action. I follow Ledger and Kawalilak (2020) in calling upon universities to adopt ‘conscientious internationalisation’. Drawing on case studies of higher education institutions in Australia and Canada, they identify a pre-occupation with neoliberal approaches and economic rationalism, which accepts existent power inequalities. In place of this, they propose that each university should intentionally and transparently articulate the principles that underpin internationalisation, with a focus on seeking to redress inequalities. They call for market-driven internationalisation to be replaced by ethics-driven internationalisation. I propose that conscientious internationalisation necessitates that we be far more cautious in our use of terms such as ‘global’ and ‘international’ to discuss education, being mindful of how these terms can be used to reproduce historical inequalities. The onus is on nations, institutions and individuals to be more intentional in their processes and practices of internationalisation, paying attention to how historical legacies privilege or exclude, and their own role in countering those legacies. Conclusion This book has analysed the multi-layered ways in which subjectivities are created through the discourse of internationalisation. We have seen that the internationalisation of education is Janus-like, it not only offers a progressive face and a neoliberal face, but it also privileges a particular view of what it means to be educated, a view which privileges some schools, students and educators, but does so by entangling everyone in an endless and ultimately fruitless race towards educational excellence. Education has been reinvented as a global competition in which, set against billions of others, we all lose because we are inevitably never the best. I have argued that international academics have a responsibility to be more intentional and critical in our own use of discourses of internationalisation, and consider how we ourselves have been affected by the global gaze. The question,

160  Conclusion then, is not only how we see the internationalisation of education, but also how the internationalisation of education makes us see ourselves. References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. “Global Citizenship.” Fordham L. Rev. 75:2375.    . 2016. “‘Mrs May, we are all citizens of the world,’ says philosopher.” In BBC News. Accessed 20th June 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37788717. Aratani, Lauren. 2022. “Yale, Harvard and UC Berkeley law schools withdraw from US News rankings.” In The Guardian. Accessed 28th March 2023. https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2022/nov/17/yale-harvard-law-school-us-news-world-report-rankings? CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Ball, Stephen J. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. London: Routledge. Bamberger, Annette, Paul Morris, and Miri Yemini. 2019. “Neoliberalism, Internationalisation and Higher Education: Connections, Contradictions and Alternatives.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 40 (2):203–16. Basaran, Tugba, and Christian Olsson. 2018. “Becoming International: On Symbolic Capital, Conversion and Privilege.” Millennium 46 (2):96–118. doi: 10.1177/030582981 7739636. Bearak, M. 2016. “Theresa May criticized the term ‘citizen of the world.’ But half the world identifies that way.” In The Washington Post. Accessed 20th June 2022. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/05/theresa-may-criticizedthe-term-citizen-of-the-world-but-half-the-world-identifies-that-way/. Bloch, Roland, Reinhard Kreckel, Alexander Mitterle, and Manfred Stock. 2018. “Stratification Through Internationality in German Higher Education.” In Elite Education and Internationalisation: From the Early Years to Higher Education, edited by Claire Maxwell, Ulrike Deppe, Heinz-Hermann Krüger and Werner Helsper, 257–78. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Buckner, Elizabeth, and Sharon Stein. 2019. “What Counts as Internationalization? ­Deconstructing the Internationalization Imperative.” Journal of Studies in International Education 24 (2):151–66. doi: 10.1177/1028315319829878. Bunnell, Tristan. 2017. “International Education in the ‘Global South’: An International Baccalaureate Perspective.” The International Schools Journal 37 (1):8–16. De Wit, Hans, Fiona Hunter, Laura Howard, and Eva Egron-Polak. 2015. “Internationalisation of higher education.” Brussels: European Parliament, Directorate-General for Internal Policies. Knight, Jane. 2004. “Internationalization Remodeled: Definition, Approaches, and ­R ationales.” Journal of Studies in International Education 8 (1):5–31.    . 2011. “Five Myths About Internationalization.” International Higher Education (62). doi: 10.6017/ihe.2011.62.8532. Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2011. Critical Cosmopolitanism. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company. Ledger, Susan, and Colleen Kawalilak. 2020. “Conscientious Internationalisation in Higher Education: Contextual Complexities and Comparative Tensions.” Asia Pacific Education Review 21 (4):653–65. doi: 10.1007/s12564-020-09650-0. Marginson, Simon. 2011. “Imagining the Global.” In Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, edited by Roger King, Simon Marginson and Rajani Naidoo, 10–39. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Conclusion 161 McGreal, Chris. 2022. “Columbia whistleblower on exposing college rankings: ‘They are worthless’.” In The Guardian. Accessed 20th September 2022. https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2022/sep/16/columbia-whistleblower-us-news-rankings-michaelthaddeus?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Thaddeus, Michael. 2022. “An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking.” Accessed 20th September. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ ranking/investigation.html. United States Department of Justice. 2021. “Former Temple Business School Dean Convicted of Fraud.” Accessed 4th March 2023. https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/ former-temple-business-school-dean-convicted-fraud. Zhao, Yong. 2014. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons. Zhao, Yong, and Brian Gearin. 2017. Imagining the Future of Global Education: Dreams and Nightmares. New York: Routledge. Zhao, Yong, and Wei Qiu. 2009. “How Good Are the Asians? Refuting Four Myths About Asian-American Academic Achievement.” Phi Delta Kappan 90 (5):338–44. doi: 10.1177/003172170909000507.

Index

ABRSM see Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) academic migration 120, 124–126 academic tourists 118–131 adult education 28 Afghanistan 141 Africa 31; international schools in 96 algocracy 64 Alice Smith School 30 Alkhateeb, Hadeel 61 Altbach, Philip G. 26, 130 Anderson, Benedict 14, 129 Anderson, Tim 111 Anywheres 11, 12, 33–34, 36 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 158 Arab culture and identity 5 Arab League 139 Armenia: IB Diploma certification 138 Arnove, Robert F. 32 ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 139 Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) 140 Atlas Economic Research Foundation 59 Auld, Euan 64, 73 Australasia 126 Australia 26, 35, 42, 58, 59; higher education institutions 159; refugee education 109; Westernisation 98; whiteness in higher education academics 125 Azzi, Iman 138 Bahrain: Bahrain Teachers College 130–131; policy borrowing 60, 61; Quality Assurance Authority for schools in Bahrain (the BQA) 60 Baker, David P. 24 Ball, Stephen J. 4, 28, 42, 44, 59, 62, 157 Bamberger, Annette 156

Bangladesh 60 ‘banking model’ of education 81 Basaran, Tugba 93 Beijing 87 being international 1–3, 7, 9–15, 17, 34, 36, 71, 80, 82, 83, 88, 91, 93–95, 97, 98, 101, 106, 110, 112, 113, 114, 129, 130, 155, 156, 159 Berg, Jana 111 Berger, John 14–15 Biesta, Gert 35, 50 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 62 Bittencourt, Tiago 90 Blair, Tony 24 Bobée, Alice 149 Boer War (1899–1902) 23 Bolay, Matthieu 92 Bologna Declaration (1999) 27 Boston College 35 Bourdieu, Pierre 90, 136–137 Boy Scouts Movement 23 Bradbury, Alice 77 brain circulation 124 Britain see UK British Commonwealth 25 British Council 26, 141, 142 British Empire 23, 24 British Foreign Office 141 British High School Certificate 139 Britishness 148–149 British Schools Overseas 30 Brown, Phillip 135–136 Buckner, Elizabeth S. 27–28, 155 Bunnell, Tristan 88–89, 139, 154 CAEP see Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) Cambridge International: certification 139; literature syllabi 96 Cambridge University 45

Index  163 Camenisch, Aldina 127 Cameroon: international schools in 96 Canada 100; higher education institutions 159; IB Diploma certification 138; international education policy 49; refugee education 111; Westernisation 98; whiteness in higher education academics 125, 126 Carfax Education 70 Caruso, Marcelo 20–22, 32–33 cash cows 79 Centeno, Vera 28 Chacko, Elizabeth 122 character education 75, 77, 92 childhood leisure, transnational certification of 139–141 China 26, 31, 58, 79, 82, 156; Confucius Institute 141; higher education, transnational certification of 142; MOOCs 143; Shanghai Jiao Tong University 27; whiteness 122, 125, 127 Choo, Suzanne S. 78 Chromebooks 62 Cignia 146 Clinton Global Initiative 62 coercive normalization 52 Cold War 24 Coleman, James A. 129 Colombia University 156 colonial inequalities 79 colonialism 1, 12, 80, 135–150; neo-colonialism 9, 57, 146, 155; post-colonialism 9 colonial relationships, reproduction of 82–83 commodification 3, 39, 42, 50 compulsory schooling 28 Confucius Institute 141 ‘Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning programme’ 141 conscientious internationalisation 159 constructivism 61 Copenhagen 87 Coppari, Pablo Rojas 122 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 92 cosmopolitan capital 77, 78, 91, 101 cosmopolitanism 6, 12, 158, 159 cosmopolitan nationalism 65 Cote d’Ivoire: international schools in 96 Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) 61–62, 146 Council of International Schools 30, 146 Coursera 143

Courtois, Aline 78 credentials 135–137 critical border studies 120–121 Critical Discourse Analysis 46 critical pedagogy 81 critical whiteness theory 119–120 CSR see corporate social responsibility (CSR) cultural capital 6, 136, 145, 159 cultural diplomacy 30 cultural diversity 123 cultural identity 96 cultural invasion 81 cultural synthesis 81 curriculum, internationalised 71–75, 135–150 Danaher, John 64 de Wit, Hans 26, 49, 51, 115 Dickens, Charles 30 Diogenes the Cynic 158 Diokno, Maria 127 diversification 44 documentation of life 141 Doerr, Neriko Musha 80 Doherty, Catherine 113 doxa 90 Drewski, Daniel 123 Dryden-Peterson, Sarah 107, 108 Dubai 87 Dulwich College 31, 44, 90 Dumenden, Iris E. 109 East Asia 124 economic competitiveness 100 economic globalisation 3, 24, 100 economisation 39 Ecuador: IB Diploma certification 138; IB into government schools, expansion 72 edu-businesses 42 educational arms race 99–100 educational comparisons, growth of 27–29 edutech industry, policy borrowing in 62–63 EdX 135, 143 Egypt 35 emerging precarity 122 employability 41 England see UK English: and ideal student 79–80; and imagined academic community 129–130; and whiteness 129 English, Rebecca 109 Englishization 129

164 Index entrepreneurism 39 epistemic violence 51 equality 57; see also inequality Erasmus programme 27 Erfurth, Marvin 64–65 ethnicity 24, 88, 96, 98, 122, 125–127, 130 Eton College 45 EtonHouse 45 EU see European Union (EU) Europe 25–27; economic reconstruction of 28 European Coal and Steel Community 30 European Community 26–27 European Economic Community 30 European Higher Education Area 27 European Research Area 27 European School Movement 30 European Union (EU) 26–27, 42 Evison, Jane 129 expatriate academics 123 Fahey, Johannah 72 Fascism 24, 141 Faulconbridge, James R. 136 financialisation 39 Finland 29, 65, 70 First World War 26 flexible learning 77 Fontdevila, Clara 58–59 France 30, 45 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 23 Freire, Paolo: ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ 80-81 French Baccalaureate 139 Fulbright Program 26 Galloway, Nicola 79 Gardner-McTaggart, Alexander Charles 97, 127 gaze theory 14–15 GCC see Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) GEI see Global Education Industry (GEI) Gerhards, Jürgen 123 Germany 25; IB Diploma certification 138; international schools in 95; new apprenticeship structure 24; refugee education 111; schooled society, evolution of 23 GERM see Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) Gibson, Mark 127 Gilmartin, Mary 122

global capitalism 11, 77, 78, 93, 155, 157 global citizenship 75 global competence 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16, 29, 58, 71, 73, 75–77, 80, 111, 112, 114, 115 Global Education Industry (GEI) 28, 39–53, 57, 61–66, 155, 157 Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) 63 global eye 75 global gaze 3, 12–17, 21, 22, 27, 32, 34–36, 40, 53, 57, 60, 63, 65, 66, 70–72, 75–81, 83, 87, 89–91, 100–102, 106, 112, 114, 122, 131, 135, 154–160; problematising 155–158; reimagining 158–159 global good 1, 3, 9–12, 16, 17, 27, 52, 53, 113, 114, 131, 156, 157 global imaginary 13, 14, 90–92, 121, 122, 155 globalisation of education 3–8, 25, 44, 57, 99; credentials 136; economic 3, 24, 100; implications of 5; neoliberal 4, 6; origins of 21–22; whiteness and 120–122; see also individual entries Globalised English Medium of Instruction Schools 88 Global Middle Class (GMC) 6, 34 Global Nomad 91 Global North 40, 154; refugee education 113; whiteness 120, 121, 123, 124 global precariat 128 Global Schoolhouse 65 Global South 40, 42, 43, 51, 76, 154; refugee education 113; Western-centric education 139; whiteness 120, 121, 124 glocalisation 36 GMC see Global Middle Class (GMC) Goodhart, David 11, 33 Google docs 62 Google Classroom 43, 62–63 governmentality 52, 77, 78, 102, 120 Grand Educational Narrative 157 Green, Andy 22, 24, 25 Green, Ian 123, 129 Gress-Wright, Catharina 31, 95–96 Griffiths, Tom G. 32 Grimm, Adam T. 4 Grotlüschen, Anke 76 Guerin, Cally 123, 129 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 125; policy borrowing in countries of 60–61 Halliday, Daniel 99 Hanauer, Elizabeth 142, 149 Hans, Silke 123

Index  165 Hearn, Jonathan 100 higher education: academics, whiteness and 122–126; transnational certification of 142–143 Hoang, Andrew Pau 113 holistic schooling 77 Hong Kong 79, 147–148; whiteness in higher education academics 125 human capital 52, 90, 145, 157 IB see International Baccalaureate (IB) ideal internationalised student 76–79 IELTS 141 iGCSEs see International General Certificates of Secondary Education (iGCSEs) imagined academic community, English and 129–130 imagined community of international school 90–92 imperial professors 118–131 Inanç, Gul 110 India 26, 45, 58, 83, 141 inequality 1, 11, 124; colonial 79; economic 149; historical 149; normalisation of 96–97; post-colonial 60; social 11, 79, 80, 90, 149; see also equality Institute for Economic Affairs 39 institutional ‘isomorphism’ 146 intellectual capital 40 international accreditation 61–62 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement 28 International Baccalaureate (IB) 5, 11, 31, 34, 72–73, 79, 87, 89, 92, 128, 147; certification 137–139; character education 92; Learner Profile 10, 13, 77, 138 International Bureau of Education 27 International College at Spring Grove, London 30 International General Certificates of Secondary Education (iGCSEs) 128 internationalisation of education 1–17, 20, 154–155; aspects of 4–9; definition of 154; historical change in 32; neoliberal vision of 10–12; numbers and 34–35; origins of 21–22; progressive vision of 10; refugee education 109–112; and social exclusion 112–114; see also individual entries internationalised curriculum and assessment 71–75

internationalised higher education, history of 25–27 International Labour Organisation 30 international-mindedness 92–93 International Qualified Teacher Status (IQTS) 49, 61 International Red Cross 27 International School Advisor 100–102 international school educators, whiteness and 126–129 international schools 20, 21; growing phenomenon of 88–90; history of 29–31; imagined community of 90–92; national schools vs 94–96; reality 96–97 International Schools Association 30 IQTS see International Qualified Teacher Status (IQTS) Israel 35, 65 Istanbul: French high school 30 Jakarta 87 James, Henry 93 Japan 29, 40, 42, 65, 79; educational policies 28; IB Diploma certification 138; international schools in 97; schooled society, evolution of 24 Johnstone, Marjorie 49, 52 Jones, Elspeth 115 Jordan, Lucy P. 113 Juilliard School 10 Juusola, Katariina 148 Kawalilak, Colleen 159 Keßler, Catharina I. 93 Kenway, Jane 72, 128 Kim, Hyejin 121 Kippels, Susan 43 Kivijärvi, Marke 148 Kleibert, Jana M. 142, 148–149 Knight, Jane 5, 137, 154, 156 knowledge acquisition 61 knowledge economy 28, 41–42, 91 Koh, Aaron 100, 157 Kopsick, Kyle 1369 Korea 65, 79, 83 kosmou polites 158 Kotzyba, Katrin 78 Krüger, Heinz-Hermann 93 Kurasawa, Fuyuki 158 LAMDA see London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) language, transnational certification of 141–142 Latin America 26

166 Index LEAMS Education 45 Lebanon: refugee education 107 Ledger, Susan 159 Lee, Eunjung 49, 52 Leek, Joanna 94 Lesotho 29 Leung, Maggi W. H. 125 Lewis, Steven 74–75 Libya 141 local imaginary 13 London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) 140 Lubienski, Christopher 43, 65 Macedonia 138 Mahajan, Anupama 95 Malaysia 7, 12, 30, 60, 79; higher education, transnational certification of 142; IB Diploma certification 138; international school leadership 127; international schools in 31, 89–90, 96; Malaysian English Language Teachers Association Annual Conference 118; Ministry of Education 31; professional identities by faculty, construction of 129; refugee education 107–109; Westernisation 98; whiteness 125, 127, 128 Mali, international schools in 96 Mallki, Lisa 109 Mangan, Doireann 110 Marginson, Simon 122, 155 market-driven internationalism 90–91 marketisation 3, 39, 50–51; of higher education 26 Maseru English Medium Preparatory School 29 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 10, 143 ‘massification’ of higher education 26 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) 143, 147 Maxwell, Claire 65, 83, 94 May, Theresa 158 McCarthy, Greg 81–82 McDonaldisation of education 50, 51, 147 McKinsey 61 Mdzanga, Nokhanyo 79 Meyer, Heather A. 13, 14, 90 Middle East 5 Miller-Idriss, Cynthia 109, 142, 149 Mishra Tarc, Aparna 128 MIT see Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

mobile nationalism 95 mobility 26, 78, 80, 81; academic 121, 123–124; patterns of 113; post-colonial higher education 149; residential 93; social 45, 109, 145; student 27, 48, 72, 113, 124, 142 Moeng, Muki 79 MOOCs see Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Moosavi, Leon 124 Morley, Louise 124 Morris, Paul 64, 73, 156 multiculturalism 156 multinational edu-businesses 42 Mulvey, Benjamin 91 Münch, Richard 73 Muzio, Daniel 136 Nalanda University 21 Nasser, Ramzi 61, 125 national identity 9, 13, 20, 23, 34, 94–96 national schools vs international schools 94–96 national security 26 national sovereignty 57 nation-state 32–33 Nazism 24 neo-colonial classrooms 80–83 neo-colonialism 9, 57, 146, 155 neoliberal capitalism 32, 72, 77, 78, 155 neoliberal globalisation 4, 6 neoliberalism 1, 3–4, 9–12, 100 Nepal 141 Nespresso 6 Netherlands, the 28; IB Diploma certification 138 New Zealand 42, 58; whiteness in higher education academics 125 Nguyen, Thuy-Phuong 60 Nigeria 83 Nokia 43 Nord Anglia Education 10 North America 22, 44, 96 Northern America 40 North London Collegiate School 44 Nóvoa, António 15 Numajiri, Takuya 79 Ochs, Kimberly 58 OECD see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) OEEC see Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) Ofsted 60

Index  167 Olsson, Christian 93 oppression 9, 74, 80, 81, 156 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 5, 28, 52, 139, 154; on global competence 75–76; Higher Education Program 26; Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 7, 8, 12–13, 28, 29, 33, 35, 58, 65, 73–76, 157 Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) 28 Ottoman Empire 22, 29 Oxford Royale Academy 45 Oxford School Dubai 45 Pakistan 79 parentocracy 11 Parreira do Amaral, Marcelo 39 patriotism 23 Pearson 42, 63 Perrotta, Carlo 63 Peter, Tobias 114 Phelan, Dean 122 Pherali, Tejendra Jnawali 125 Philippines 83 Phillips, David 58 Phillipson, Robert 142 PIRLS see Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) PISA see Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Poland 70 policy advocacy 42 policy borrowing 28, 57–66; in countries of GCC 60–61; critiques of 58–60; definition of 57–58; edutech industry 62–63; implications for the state 63–66; international accreditation 61–62; nomenclature of 59–60; partnerships and 62; stages of 58 policy learning 59 Poonoosamy, Mico 139 Popkewitz, Thomas S. 4 post-colonialism 9, 57 power 52 PPPs see public–private partnerships (PPPs) privatisation 27, 39 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 7, 8, 12–13, 28, 29, 33, 35, 58, 65, 73–76, 157; ‘PISA for Schools’ 75 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 28, 35 promised capitals 91

promising precarity 122 pro-social behaviour 9 public–private partnerships (PPPs) 62, 66 Putin, Vladimir: invasion of Ukraine 33 Qatar: Education City 145; higher education, transnational certification of 142; policy borrowing 61; whiteness in higher education academics 125–126 RAD see Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) Raffe, David 59 RAND 61 Rees, Nerys 79 refugee education 106–115; internationalisation and 109–112; understanding 107–109 Resnik, Julia 11 Rey, Jeanne 92 Rhodes, Cecil 25 Rhodes Scholarship programme 25–26 Richardson, Julia 126 Ridge, Natasha 43 Ripley, Amanda 70 Rizvi, Fazal 4, 78 Romanowski, Michael H. 61, 125, 146 Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) 140 Royal Charter 141 Sahlberg, Pasi 63 Schleicher, Andreas 59, 63 schooled society, evolution of 22–25 Schubiger, Elisabeth 92 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Second World War 23, 24, 26, 28, 41 self-governance 15 self-responsibilisation 78–79 Semple, Sheila 59 Shahjahan, Riyad A. 4 Shanghai 29 Shanghai Jiao Tong University 27 Shell Corporation 30 Siltaoja, Marjo 148 Sin, I. Lin 127 Singapore 29, 31, 35, 40, 45, 66, 87; digital tracking of international students on transnational campuses 149; education system 24; higher education, transnational certification of 142; IB Diploma certification 138; National Institute of Education 60; whiteness in higher education academics 122, 125

168 Index Smith, Steve 48, 49 social capital 136 social democracy 9 social exclusion, internationalisation and 112–114 social inequalities 11, 79, 80, 90 socialism 9 Social Network Analysis 76 SOCRATES programme 27 Song, Xianlin 81–82 South Africa: Westernisation 98 South America: IB Diploma certification 138; international schools in 90 South Korea 65, 70; international schools in 92–93 Souto-Otero, Manuel 136 Spain: IB Diploma certification 138 Spear’s 70; index of the best schools 45 Standing, Guy 122 St Andrew’s University 45 Stanford University 143 Starbucks 6 Stein, Sharon 155 Steiner-Khamsi, Gita 43, 44, 52, 65 Stevenson, Jacqueline 110 Streitwieser, Bernhard 109, 112 student preparation, for globalised world 70–84; English and ideal student 79–80; globally competent student 75–76; ideal internationalised student 76–79; internationalised curriculum and assessment 71–75; neo-colonial classrooms 80–83 Study International 144 supranational organisations 27–29 Suresh Babu, Savitha 95 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 10, 47, 73 Switzerland: IB Diploma certification 138 symbolic capital 136 symbolic violence 127 Taiwan 40 Takayama, Keita 74 TANs see transnational advocacy networks (TANs) Tanu, Danau 98 Tarc, Paul 128 TCKs see Third Culture Kids (TCKs) Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 118 TESOL see Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Thailand 7, 12, 79; professional identities by faculty, construction of 129

Thier, Michael 51–52 Third Culture Kids (TCKs) 91 Tholen, Gerbrand 136 Thompson, Christiane 39, 69 TIMSS see Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Tooley, James 53; ‘Global Education Industry: Lessons from Private Education in Developing Countries, The’ 39 Trans-Cultural Kid 91 transnational accreditation of institutions 145–146 transnational advocacy networks (TANs) 59 Transnational Capitalist Class 34 transnational certification: of childhood leisure 139–141; of higher education 142–143; of language 141–142; of schooling 137–139 transnational identity capital 121 travel, valorisation of 93–94 Trembath, Jodie-Lee 123 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 28, 35 Trump, Donald 33, 51; Make America Great Again movement 11 Turkey 141 UAE see United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ubuntu 76 Udacity 143 UK 26, 29, 41, 44, 45, 58, 96; accreditation 148; Brexit referendum 11, 33; Cambridge Examinations 60; childhood leisure, transnational certification of 140; credentials 137; Department for International Trade 47; Department of Trade 48; IB into inner city schools, expansion 72; International Education Champion 46, 48; International Education Strategy 46–50; Office of the Independent Adjudicator in Higher Education (OIA) 144; Ofsted 60; policy borrowing 64; schooled society, evolution of 23; soft power 47; Westernisation 98; whiteness in higher education academics 125 UN see United Nations (UN) UNESCO see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) UNHCR see United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) UNICEF 10

Index  169 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 87; accreditation 148; GEMS schools 44; higher education, transnational certification of 142; policy borrowing 65, 66 United Nations (UN): Sustainable Development Goals 10, 47, 73 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 26, 27, 43 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 108 United World Colleges 30 University of Bologna 21, 22, 41 University of Cambridge: Cambridge Assessment 139 University of Harvard 130–131 University of Nottingham 92; ‘Knowledge Without Borders’ 121; Malaysia Campus 143–145 University of Oxford 21, 25, 41, 45 University of Padua 21 University of Paris 21 US 25, 27–29, 33, 42, 45, 58, 59, 65, 87, 96, 126; accreditation 148; Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation 61–62; credentials 137; Department of Defence 30; Fulbright Program 26; IB Diploma certification 138, 139; IB into inner city schools, expansion 72; Institute of International Education 26; multinationality schools 95; News University Rankings 156; News & World Report 157; Westernisation 98; whiteness in higher education academics 125

venture philanthropy 42 Verger, Antoni 43, 58–59, 65 Vietnam 7, 12, 60, 79; professional identities by faculty, construction of 129 Vietnam War 60

Varkey Foundation: Global Teacher Award 131 vegetarianism 95

Zhang, Le 140 Zhao, Yong 66 Zikic, Jelena 126

Waldow, Florian 83, 113–114 Waters, Johanna L. 125 Western Europe 22, 40, 96, 126 Westernisation 9, 24, 44, 51–52, 97–99, 102 Western-style critical thinking 81–82 whiteness 82, 97, 119–120; English and 129; as futurity 120; and globalisation of education 120–122; and higher education academics 122–126; and international school educators 126–129 Willetts, Alexandra 90 Willott, John 110 Winter, Laura Anne 110 World Bank 41, 60 World Congress of Education 27 World Culture Theory 32, 33 World Trade Organisation 26 Wright, Ewan 91 Wu, Wenxi 100 Wu, Xi 128 xenophobic nationalism 51 Xu, Zhenyang 82 Yale University 45 Yariv-Mashal, Tali 15 Yemini, Miri 94, 95, 156 Yokohama International School 30