International Communication

U.S. TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES IN EUROPEAN MARKETS (Washington: Office of Technology Assessment, August 1993—$14.00, paper, S/N 052–003–01334–7, 220 pp.)

MEDIA INDUSTRY IN EUROPE edited by Antonio Pilati (London: John Libbey, 1993—$48.00, paper, ISBN 0–86196–398–9, 246 pp.)

BEYOND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY: INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN THE 1990s edited by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Herbert I. Schiller (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993—price not provided, paper, ISBN 0–89391–960–8, 483 pp.)     

Steering the National: Exploring the Education Policy Uses of PISA in Spain

This article presents findings from a recent study of the education policy uses and impact of international large-scale assessments, namely the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The paper focuses on two overlapping dimensions of PISA’s education policy use in the context of Spain. These include political dimensions, such as the use of PISA to initiate and justify the 2012?2013 educational reforms; and technical dimensions, namely the use of PISA in the development of national-level indicators used to benchmark progress and guide education and curriculum reform. The study points to the growing dominance of PISA as a powerful policy tool. Findings from the paper add to the body of literature on the different ways in which international assessments are used to guide education policy within national spaces and the role of the OECD as an agent of transnational policy steering.     

A cross-national comparison of international strategies: global citizenship and the advancement of national competitiveness

This paper examines national-level strategies concerning internationalisation of education and the extent to which global citizenship is deployed in their discourse. We focus on a cross-national comparison of selected internationalisation strategies in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the USA, all countries with highly developed economies and a relatively high proportion of the market share of international students. We draw on a thematic textual analysis and the use of corpus technologies to explore the framing of discourses and language use in each strategy. Our comparative analysis of national strategies highlights a dominant approach to international education that is primarily competitive in its orientation, with national interest as the key driver. This cross-national comparison also revealed considerable variation in framing of strategic internationalisation on a discourse level. Based on findings, we argue that internationalisation strategies limit the possibilities of advancing central tenets of global citizenship.