The arena of International Schooling is growing rapidly and changing in nature. The number of schools delivering a curriculum wholly or partly in English outside an English-speaking nation reached 12,000 in 2020. China and the Middle East is the emerging centre of activity, and local parents are the main customers.
Poole’s book illuminates the experiences and perspectives of host country national teachers at internationalised schools in China. The international school sector in China has undergone significant changes in recent years. This is due to the growing demand for international education from local middle-class families. In response, a new type of school has emerged. Going by various names, such as private, bilingual or internationalised, these schools offer a fusion of national and international curricula and are staffed predominantly by host country national teachers. Despite these changes, we still know little about who host country national teachers are and what draws them to the world of international schooling. Accordingly, this book explores the motivations and mobilities of host country national teachers in China. It identifies three types of teacher: Returners, Reachers, and Remainers. Returners are graduates who have returned to China from overseas study. They are drawn to international schools by the opportunity to use their international experience and qualification. Reachers are internal migrants who face structural inequality and attracted to international schools by the opportunity for social mobility. Remainers are married teachers with children. They are motivated to work in international schools by the perceived stability and security these schools offer. Discussing implications for teacher recruitment, development, and retention in international schools, this book is an essential read for international educational researchers as well as students researching international education or teacher identity.
The arena of International Schooling is growing rapidly and changing in nature. The number of schools delivering a curriculum wholly or partly in English outside an English-speaking nation reached 12,000 in 2020. China and the Middle East is the emerging centre of activity, and local parents are the main customers.
This book explores the emerging and under-researched phenomenon of internationalised schooling in China. It focuses on a group of “accidental” teachers who fell into teaching through happenstance or necessity, a group of teachers increasingly seeking refuge in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Chinese Internationalised Schools cater to an affluent middle class in China, offering some form of international curriculum which is taught by host country Chinese nationals and expatriate teachers. Chapters focus on three dimensions of teachers’ lived experiences of working in these schools: the intercultural, which explores teachers’ negotiations of intercultural teacher identities; the precarious, which highlights the struggles they might face at work; and the resilient, which illustrates how teachers survive—and even thrive—in the position. The author identifies a complex interplay between surviving and thriving, giving rise to the concept of “sur-thrival.”
Offering contributions and vignettes from teachers, school leaders, and scholars, this volume purposefully dismantles practitioner-academic divides to invite dialogue around diverse understandings of global citizenship education (GCE). Recognizing that the field of GCE is often explored and conceptualized by educators and academics in silos, this book confronts this issue by focusing on how schools, educators, and researchers can together support the enactment of GCE in international and national settings. In doing so, issues of westernization, inequality, access, and divergence between GCE policy and practical implementation can be overcome. The novel dialogical format links together theory, practice, and lived experience to create discourses between voices that are rarely connected. Ultimately, this volume offers important insights for those aiming to make equitable GCE a reality in schools worldwide and illustrates the value of collaborative dialogic exchange. This text will benefit scholars, academics, and students in the fields of international and comparative education, the sociology of education, and citizenship more broadly. Those involved with multicultural education policy and citizenship in the context of political sociology and social policy will also benefit from this volume.
International schooling has expanded rapidly in recent years, with the number of students educated in international schools projected to reach seven million by 2023. Drawing on the author's extensive experience conducting research in international schools across the globe, this book critically analyses the concept of international schooling and its rapid growth in the 21st century. It identifies the forces driving this trend, asking to what extent this is an enterprise that meets the needs of a global elite, and examining its relationship to national systems of education. The author demonstrates how wider social inequalities around socio-economic difference, ethnicity, 'race' and gender are reproduced through international schooling and examines the theory that 'international' curricula are in fact Western curricula. Presenting research from diverse countries including Russia, Malaysia, the UAE, the UK, and Bahrain, the author explores ways in which international schools adapt to local cultural contexts and examines the views of parents, students, teachers and school leaders towards the education that they provide.
With original contributions from leading experts in the field, this cutting-edge Research Handbook combines theoretical advancement with the newest empirical research to explore the sociology of organizations. While including the traditional study of formal, corporate business organizations, the Handbook also explores more transitory, informal grassroots organizations, such as NGOs and artist communities.
This book critically examines the international, geopolitical, policy, institutional, and curricular challenges facing Canadian offshore school programs. Bringing together scholars and practitioners concerned with addressing the pedagogical, organizational, curriculum, and policy aspects of this transnational mode of schooling, it represents a ground-breaking exploration of K-12 offshore schools within the wider contexts of global geopolitics and forms of soft power. The book examines the vulnerability that arises from having to manoeuvre political, social, geopolitical, and economic policy simultaneously in both the host and home-licencing countries. It delves into conflicts within the context of neoliberal economic agendas, neocolonial and geopolitical interests, and social class reproduction within host countries. The book is the first scholarly space that questions how international educational initiatives are affected by emerging global threats, such as the recent Covid pandemic. Additionally, it unpacks the question of citizenship and its intersections with social class, immigration, and sociocultural dynamics. It explores how these intersections forge new paths not only to mobility but also to new configurations of power and new spaces of politics and identity. With a range of reflexive, empirical, and theoretical contributions that cover every aspect of offshore schools, the book reassesses the trope of globalization dominated by Eurocentric perspectives. It decompartmentalizes diverse perspectives and insights on the internationalisation of schooling opportunities, and provides an overview of the challenges and possibilities open to offshore schools in different cultural contexts, making it the first comprehensive body of research on this type of schooling. This book will be of great value to researchers, faculty, scholars, and postgraduate students working across international and comparative education. It will be particularly useful to those interested in the intersections betweeneducation and geopolitically situated forms of soft power.
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.
Temporary migration is a human response to uncertain economic, ecological, political and socio-cultural environments. This book provides an important contribution to the literature on the rights, lived experiences and trajectories of temporary migrants. It focuses on the precarity of temporary migrants at different scales in urban settings, varying from the household, institution, and neighbourhood, to the city. Temporary migrants experience oscillations in precarity that vary with their categorization as skilled (professionals with valued skill sets, international students) or unskilled (domestic workers, labourers), their ambiguous legal status and the locales in which they reside and work. Individual chapters use case studies from around the world (USA, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Singapore, China) to show how temporal and scalar precarity intersect and are mediated by national and local policies, civil society, as well as the personal and social attributes of migrants themselves such as gender, race, and country of origin. Although often overlooked due to their transitory status, the chapters demonstrate how temporary migrants are embedded in urban life and resist their categorization as disposable through individual and collective efforts. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Human Geography, Urban Studies, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
