Anglo-Western international school teachers as global middle class: portraits of three families

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study on the global middle class (GMC) examines three representative experiences of the tens of thousands of Anglo-Western international schoolteachers (ISTs), who teach in private, K-12, English-immersion international schools for extended periods of time. The notion of GMC provokes consideration of social class making and forms of belonging of professional and managerial service workers who are ‘middling actors’ in the flows of transnational migration. We ground our analysis by examining three IST families as a unique group within the GMC. We find that ISTs, oriented by pre-sojourn middle-class histories, differentially (re)fashion their social class locations in the more elite transnational milieu of the international schools. These families accumulate and exchange economic, cultural and social capital under their transnational routes, connections and returns. Their children’s access to an elite international education as a condition of their international employment represents a unique form of school choice.     

Religion and the global middle class: towards a new research agenda

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the role of religion as a central facet when researching the emerging social group – the global middle class (GMC). It is argued here that religion is a particularly relevant feature for the constitution of this social group because of the GMC’s transnational and cosmopolitan character. In this essay, I will draw on several examples focused on Islamic education provision in Western, pre-dominantly Christian societies to illustrate why and how religion should become critical to our study of the GMC. The essay’s central argument is that there remains a gap in research related to the role of religion in the making and practising of the GMC as a social group. I conclude by proposing a future research agenda that addresses the intersections of religion, education, and the GMC on an individual, national, and global level.     

Struggling with capital: a Bourdieusian analysis of educational strategies among internationally mobile middle class families in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Drawing on empirical data regarding educational strategies among internationally mobile families in the Stockholm-Uppsala region, this study questions the notion of a global middle class. First, a quantitative analysis shows that immigrating middle class professionals and their children are few, having marginal impact on the demand for international education. Furthermore, they far from constitute a homogeneous class, instead comprising of fractions opting for different types of schools. A second, qualitative study on capital conversion among mobile families illustrates that even well-educated international movers face serious challenges converting their existing knowledge, skills and contacts into well-informed social, professional and educational strategies in their new context. This suggests the limitations of concepts such as international capital. It is argued that the GMC concept overshadows the fact that social groups within the middle classes have varying degrees of international mobility that constitutes just one dimension of what separates them from each other.     

The purpose of travel in the cultivation practices of differently positioned parental groups in Israel

ABSTRACT

Travel has become ubiquitous for most social groups as holidaying abroad has become ever cheaper and ecumene. This paper considers how travel can be understood as part of family practices around children’s educations and futures. Drawing on Kaufmann’s concept of motility, we examine how spatial mobility might become a form of cultural capital to reproduce privilege or facilitate social mobility. We generated data on family spatial mobility during the act of international air travel itself, interviewing 22 participants. We argue that spatial mobility and its link to social mobility is differently conceived of by our working, middle, and global middle class families, but that all three seek to use travel overtly as a form of cultivation for their children. This leads us to suggest that international travel may illuminate new ways that social class differentiations and lines of striation are being forged through movements across transnational spaces, offering new insights for education professionals and scholars.     

Modalities of cosmopolitanism and mobility: parental education strategies of global,immigrant and local middle-class Israelis

ABSTRACT

In this study, we explore how different forms of family mobility shape parental education strategies of three middle-class groups (moored Israeli professionals, immigrants from Israel to the UK and global middle class Israeli families). By focusing on families from the same nationality, we show how different practices of mobility differentiate between these middle-class fractions. Building on Andreotti’s framework for ‘global mindedness’ we suggest that orientations to cosmopolitanism also differentiate between these groups – from tourism (moored middle class), to empathy (immigrant middle class), to visiting (global middle class). By drawing on this conceptualisation, it is possible to understand why, despite the considerable uncertainty that constant mobility generates for children’s education and futures, global middle-class parents appear to assuredly navigate processes of securing and transmitting advantage.     

Transnational accreditation for public schools: IB,PISA and other public–private partnerships

ABSTRACT

This article examines a particular type of public–private partnership (PPP) that is rarely studied in comparative educational policy studies: one in which a government funds privately run international schools. The aim of this PPP is to enrich and thereby improve the regular curriculum or to the quality of education in public schools. As the exponential growth of International Baccalaureate (IB) illustrates, such forms of PPP have increased significantly over the past few years. The authors show that transnational accreditation holds a special appeal for the middle class that is committed to cosmopolitanism, international mobility, and global citizenship. However, international standards schools such as IB are not alone with advancing a transnational accreditation of their educational programmes. Symbolically, Programme in International Student Assessment also provides a transnational accreditation, albeit not on individual education programmes but rather on entire educational systems. The article examines the reasons for the popularity of this type of PPP, analyses the interaction between the private and public education sectors, and investigates how governments explain, and what they expect from, the close cooperation with private education providers.     

How does mobility shape parental strategies – a case of the Israeli global middle class and their ‘immobile’ peers in Tel Aviv

We examined the parental strategies of global middle class (GMC) parents currently living in Israel, and compared these to their local middle class (LMC) peers. Both groups of parents were focused on securing advantages for their children through education choices and practices of cultivation. The central difference between these two groups of middle class parents was the ways in which ‘mobile-mindedness’ was conceived of, and in turn shaped the future aspirations they held for their children. A second critical finding was that this group of GMC actively fostered strong relations to belonging to their ‘home’ nation, challenging the suggestion of rootless nomads found in the literature. We argue that the GMCs in our sample think locally in each place they settle in order to secure the educational advantage, but act globally with respect to their children’s prospective futures. Meanwhile, the LMCs think globally in terms of cultivating forms of capital to secure advantages for their children, but do so with a locally-informed frame of reference for their imagined futures. These conceptual insights into the lived narratives of the GMC have implications for the ways we come to understand this emerging middle class fraction, and should shape further research in this area.     

Explanation and metaphor: Some empirical questions in science education

This paper examines how science education becomes institutionalized in Third World countries using Malaysia as a case study. The findings shows that the development of science education in Malaysia has been greatly influenced by international trends and the country's socio‐political development. Science gained a place in the school curriculum in the midst of British colonial rule. The strong colonial influence on school science continued throughout the early independence period but, in the 1980s, external influences on science education came from both Western and Islamic countries. In each of the historical periods, external world cultural forces interacted with internal socio‐political forces resulting in a national science curriculum which is in accord with world cultural rules but at the same time quite indigenous in character. This study also suggests that while each nation‐state aspires to develop an indigenous form of science education that would best suit the national context, the outcome tends to be more universalistic than particularistic due to global influences.     

International study in the global south: linking institutional,staff, student and knowledge mobilities

ABSTRACT

The international mobility of institutions, staff, students and knowledge resources such as books and study materials has usually been studied separately. This paper, for the first time, brings these different forms of knowledge mobilities together. Through a historical analysis of South African higher education alongside results from a quantitative survey of academic staff in three international branch campuses in South Africa, the paper suggests three things. First, it points to the importance of regional education hubs in the global South and their role in South–South staff and student mobilities. Second, it points to the importance of reading these mobilities as outcomes of historically attuned policymaking – educational, migratory and political. Finally, the paper points to the theoretical possibilities that arise by bringing institutional, staff, student and knowledge resource mobilities in place and suggests new avenues for further research.     

Futurescaping: school choice of internationally mobile global middle class families temporarily residing in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This paper explores internationally mobile global middle class families (GMCF) in terms of how they rationalise moving away from their home country, select schools and reimagine their young children’s futures in an international setting. Building on Appadurai’s notion of ‘the future as a cultural fact’ and Anagnost’s concept of ‘life-making in neoliberal times’ we analyse how the search for escaping the past is dialectically related to seeking better futures. For GMCFs, the search for better futures within current neoliberal times leads to them discursively constructing spatial–temporal movements across international boundaries. The term ‘futurescaping’ is introduced and used to understand the act of imagining futures that are shaped by a person’s past and present experience. We argue that futurescaping is more than simply transnational mobility, but is a multidimensional act, which is dynamic, culturally value-ladened, historically embedded, futuristic and provides a unique view into the everyday lives of internationally mobile GMCF.     

Re-invigorating the being of language in educational studies: unpacking Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ in Yijing as an exemplar

ABSTRACT

In international educational studies, cultural context matters and demands increased attention by educational researchers worldwide. Along with a globalized discourse, how to map historical–cultural understandings of teaching and learning without getting bogged down in modern Westernized epistemology has become a paradigmatic dilemma. This paper argues a Heideggerian–Foucauldian language perspective can provide a way to address this dilemma. As an example, the paper demonstrates how their language perspective has enabled the author to encounter a ‘wind-education’ discourse in China’s current schooling, and to explore, as the originary (re)source of the whole Confucian educational culture, Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ as expressed in Yijing. This unique historical–cultural ‘wind-education’ discourse is salient, yet goes unnoticed, in China’s current schooling largely due to a planetary signifier-signified style of reasoning. This paper sheds new light on educational literature on Confucian educational thinking and provides an alternative paradigm to the (cross-)cultural studies of education in China and beyond.     

Outdoor education in Scotland

Abstract

Although Scotland is part of the United Kingdom it has a distinct cultural identity and a separate education and legal system. These factors, which have influenced the development of outdoor education, are likely to have an even greater impact in the future following the re-establishment (after a break of almost 300 years since 1707) of a Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Scotland was one of the first countries in the world to formalise outdoor education. This was the result of a combination of factors:

• ? Geophysical and climatic factors together with landholding and land-use practices established in the 18th Century have ensured that much of Highland Scotland is depopulated and devoid of forests; leading to the perception that the area is a “wilderness” and therefore attractive for outdoor recreation.

• ? Exploration for political, economic and scientific reasons in the second half of the millennium, which both led to and developed from Britain's empire, stimulated a national taste for adventure as expressed in seafaring, mountaineering and polar exploration.

• ? Growth in wealth, mobility and leisure-time in the late 19th and 20th Centuries provided the means by which many more people could engage in their own, more modest adventures, leading to the development of stylised forms of outdoor activities in the UK.

Consequently the landscape and surrounding seas of Scotland have long presented challenges for outdoor recreation, and post-war development of outdoor education fitted quite naturally into this physical and social landscape.

In the 1960s and 1970s outdoor education (often formalised as physical outdoor activities and based on a residential experience) was extensively developed in Scotland and was of international significance. In recent years, primarily as a result of political effects, provision has been in some decline; a trend markedly at odds with the concurrent rapid growth in outdoor recreation. A shift away from public provision through the education service seems to be countered by growth in “charitable” and “private sector” provision, especially in the case of residential outdoor education centres.

Some concerns are raised about possible future trends, and the argument made that educational theory should be taken into account in the design of programmes which focus on personal and social education; or which capitalise on the learning potential of the landscape to encourage cultural awareness and principles of sustainability, which are seen as having both local and global significance.     

Science,Society and Trends in Science Education‐‐some Thoughts on the Development of Integrated Science in the Educational Systems of the World

Summaries

English

Before constructing a new curriculum for any level in integrated‐science education, it is very important to establish a basic philosophy of science teaching which reflects a symbiotic relationship between education and the socio‐economic development in a particular country of the world.

The curriculum structure of integrated‐science education should broaden the basis of curricular decision and should be designated to follow the expectations of the society in providing professional intellectual training so that education can make a significant contribution to the socio‐economic growth of the country. This basic assumption which established a link between cultural and socio‐economic growth, involves a diversification of the cultural trends of science education which must become appropriate to the economic and historical context of each country in a fast changing world of work.

Therefore, by critically removing outside influences in the transmission of scientific knowledge, there should be less uniformity in the context and methods of teaching, and considerable restructuring of education for each country should occur. Thus, considering the historical and geographical differences, a new order in international division of labour would come into being.

In such a hypothesis, a research‐oriented integrated curriculum in science education can play a central role (certainly a better one than in the traditional, discipline‐oriented scheme of science teaching) in obtaining an adequate interaction between scientific education and social problems; this is required for modern cultural and economic development of the world.     

The End of Expansion and the Consolidation of Differentiation in English Higher Education

Abstract

Following systems theory to distinguish between cultural and occupational information, this paper reviews the history of English higher education to show the predominance of cultural over occupational transmission in the messages communicated to its students. Despite its formal commitment to vocational purposes, recent expansion of further and higher continuing education (F&HCE) is suggested to have had more to do with cultural than occupational transmission. For a process of class recomposition potentiated by new technology has eroded traditional social divisions between manual and non‐manual labour. Together with mass un‐and under‐employment, this posed a legitimacy crisis for the state to which it responded with new forms of ‘selectivity’ (Offe, 1974) based upon educational credentials (Broadfoot, 1996). In conclusion however, it is suggested that with the consolidation of the new class formation this expansion of F&HCE has halted and will not be restarted by Dearing's 1997 contradictory attempt to do so.     

Teaching with the Flow: Fixity and fluidity in education

In this paper I suggest that as educators we need to understand that the spaces and cultures our students inhabit are to be found not so much in predefinitions of cultural background or in studies of classrooms as cultural spaces as in the transcultural flows with which our students engage. Thus, my argument is not only that, as Singh and Doherty (2004 Singh, P and Doherty, C. 2004. Global cultural flows and pedagogic dilemmas: Teaching in the global university contact zone. TESOL Quarterly, 38(1): 9–42.  ) suggest, the flow of “international” students turns many classrooms into “global education contact zones” (p. 11), but also that the global flows of English and popular culture turn classrooms in many parts of the world into spaces of transcultural contact. Students can no longer be understood as located in a bounded time and space in and around their classrooms but rather are participants in a much broader set of transcultural practices. Taking the global culture of hip-hop as an example, with a particular focus on hip-hop in parts of East and Southeast Asia, I argue that with English increasingly becoming the medium of global transcultural exchange, we need to understand the relations between English, popular culture, education and identity, or the ways in which global Englishes become a shifting means of transcultural identity formation. What I want to suggest here, then, is that in order to be attentive to the politics of location in the global context, we need a pedagogy of flow.     

Educational sciences,morality and politics: international educational congresses in the early twentieth century

Internationalism became one of the keywords in the international intellectual and political debates at the end of the nineteenth century. As a political, cultural and social movement it also included science and education. The desire for international cooperation and global understanding was caused by the growing economic interdependence in the world and the threat to peace by nationalistic politics of the imperialistic powers. Within the context of discipline formation and fragmentation, cultural critique, social reform and pacifist movements, academic educationists, teachers and educational and social reformers in various countries tried to establish an international network to promote scientific cooperation, peace, mutual understanding and professional collaboration. In this article, the author will try to place the phenomenon of internationalism within the context of the formation of educational sciences in the early twentieth century. Drawing from the example of other scientific disciplines at this time, such as geography, meteorology and physics, one can assume that the internationalizing of education also increased its professional and scientific standards. The “disciplinarization process”1 Whereas this term is used by Hofstetter and Schneuwly, Van Gorp, Depaepe, and Simon prefer the notion “discipline‐formation process”. See Rita Hofstetter, “The Construction of a New Science by Means of an Institute and Its Communication Media. The Institute of Educational Sciences in Geneva (1912–1948)”, and Angelo Van Gorp, Marc Depaepe & Frank Simon, “Backing the Actor as Agent in Discipline Formation: An Example of the ‘Secondary Disciplinarisation’ of the Educational Sciences, Based on the Networks of Ovide Decroly (1901–1931)”, both in this issue. of educational sciences was closely intertwined with the genesis of an international scientific network through special institutions. In order to investigate this assumption, the genesis, structure, contents and effects of international cooperation in the field of education in the first decades of the twentieth century will be considered. This international cooperation took on different shapes. It included, among others, the international exchange of teachers and students, international educational exhibitions, international congresses, transnational institutions, multilateral standardization and international journals. The focus will be on the main agents of institutionalized internationalization, namely international congresses and associations, and individual forms of international communication and cooperation will therefore not be dealt with. The article begins with a short overview of the different kinds of international educational congresses. Two types of internationalization within this institutional setting will then be introduced: the research‐oriented, “scientifically” based model of academic educationists (“new educational sciences”) and the instruction and reform‐oriented, “politically and morally” based model of a social movement (New Education). Finally the geographical extension of internationalization will be analyzed briefly before the main argument is set out in the concluding remarks, namely that the internationalization of education through international institutions found its driving force in moral and political assumptions of the teaching profession and its goals of school reform within the New Education rather than in an international scientific paradigm of the academic “new educational sciences”.     

Intercultural understanding through a ‘similar but different’ international teaching practicum

The ethnic and cultural diversity of many schools calls for teachers with well-developed intercultural understanding. Teacher education programmes have traditionally offered international fieldwork in bilingual settings to challenge ethnocentric attitudes to teaching. However, an international practicum in a ‘similar but different’ education system with English as the dominant language offers a different pathway, providing opportunities to deepen intercultural understanding and global education. This study investigates the impact of a three-week international teaching practicum in the American Midwest on two groups of Brisbane-based pre-service teachers in 2014 (n = 9) and 2015 (n = 4). Their reflective journals and reports indicate that international professional experience disrupts stereotypes and fosters global education and intercultural understanding. The paper presents key programme measures to promote intercultural understanding and concludes that the benefits of international teaching in a ‘similar but different’ education system are a nuanced understanding of cultural diversity and increased readiness for the classroom.     

Problematizing global educational governance of OECD PISA: Student achievement,categorization, and social inclusion and exclusion

Abstract

This study problematizes the global educational governance of OECD PISA and its statistical data as a governing technology in contemporary discourses of education reforms. The study examines principles that order the discourses and practices of the international comparative assessment. The effort of analysing the impact of an education reform regime led by OECD PISA reveals how statistical reasoning defines problems in educational systems and forms social discourse surrounding educational reform to solve such problems. In doing so, this article focuses on standardization, classification, and normalization for measuring and comparing student achievement and national effectiveness. The study also offers an alternative way of considering the politics of inclusion and exclusion embedded in practices of education reforms propelled by the international comparative assessment.     

International academic staff in UK higher education: campus internationalisation and innovation in academic practice

Abstract

Amidst opportunities for universities to consider international academic staff in supporting internationalisation and innovation in academic practice, there is very little research to provide insights into their attitudes towards institutional approaches and frameworks in place to enable this. This article focuses on this research gap, suggesting that this academic community might enhance the development of internationally-informed and innovative pedagogic practice. The research reported within the article constitutes a preliminary study, set within a UK higher education case study setting. Methods included focus groups and themed in-depth interviews with a sample of 34 international academic staff from over 15 countries. The findings and discussion provide insights into the perspectives and experiences of international academic staff in relation to the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning and other institutional practice. Innovative pedagogic practice as enabled by international academic staff is discussed, as are approaches to the internationalisation of the curricula. The findings are relevant to the UK higher education context but also to the global context: academic institutions need to consider whether curriculum and processes are limited and limiting in favour of a narrow cultural lens.