Policy Futures in Education: Special Issue Call for papers Connecting different spheres of internationalisation in education Internationalisation policies in schooling - national and organisational perspectives Special issue editor: Miri Yemini, Tel Aviv University, Israel Education systems worldwide have served as a nationbuilding apparatus especially since the appearance of the modern nation-state. However, in recent decades, internationalisation can be increasingly traced in both education policy and practices within schools and in higher education institutions. Despite internationalisation’s contemporary centrality in education, it has been studied in a fragmented, disconnected manner. Over the past 20 years, several transformations driven by the effects of globalisation have changed the education system, from kindergarten all the way to university. Since the first decades of the last century, education worldwide has shifted from a luxury of the elite classes to a basic right of the people (Yemini, 2014). The massification of education has exerted tremendous impact on governance, finance, quality, curriculum, faculty, and student enrolment, whereas globalisation entails the formation of worldwide markets operating in a common financial system with cross-border mobility of production (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009). Within the growing global education system, a meteoric rise in student mobility can be traced – especially in higher education but also increasingly in schools (Waters & Brooks, 2015); international student recruitment campaigns are now often linked to national science, technology, innovation, trade, and immigration policies and comprise part of the great ‘brain race’ of the 21st century (Knight, 2011). Regional and global trade agreements began to include (higher) education as a tradable service, and both private and public education providers recognised new commercial possibilities in cross-border education. In schools, the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) has been instrumental to the growth of internationalisation. The IBO was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1968 as a nonprofit educational foundation. Its original purpose was to facilitate the international mobility of students preparing for university by providing private schools with a curriculum and diploma qualification recognized by universities around the world. It has since expanded into public schools worldwide, providing a competitive alternative to local national programs for the upper-middle classes, ultimately resulting in the formation of a uniquely internationalised social class (Bunnell, 2012). Furthermore, in recent decades, the entire concept of education has become more internationalised and more interconnected. While the ‘education system’ is a broad notion and is comprised of general subdivisions (kindergarten, preschool, K-12, higher education, lifelong learning, etc.), most of the literature addresses specific elements within the education system. Specifically, in this SI I expect studies to take a bold leap for a broad inclusive approach in order to address the entire system jointly, so as to offer a new and much-
needed macro perspective. While several scholars have discussed the future of internationalisation through either academic or practical lens (de-Wit, 2011, Dolby and Rahman, 2008, Yemini & Sagie, 2016), and the academic discourse is open to new developments and ideas, in practice most of the current research is still highly concentrated on refining the existing knowledge rather than on opening up new frontiers and areas. One of the main challenges in framing future research and best practice trends is the high degree of fragmentation of the scholastic areas in this field (Dvir & Yemini, 2017) and thus the relative isolation between the relevant scholars and stakeholders. Internationalisation is studied through social, economic, pedagogical, psychological, anthropological, and political lenses, by scholars who tend to focus on particular sectors and localities. Hence, some of the aspects of this field of study have remained largely concealed by the micro context of focus that has been applied to date. This SI aim to explore the nature and extent of integration of international, global, and intercultural dimensions in education (coined as the internationalisation process), to characterise the process at different educational levels (from schools to higher education), over geographical dimension (in different countries), over time (last twenty years), in policy and its implementation, with respect to diverse educational contexts (private/public, central/peripheral and high/low socio-economic status). Thus open up a new strand of educational research that will inherently merge previously fragmented fields and lead to new understandings in the critical field of internationalisation in education. In particular, studies dealing with the following questions are invited: -
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Studies that contribute to a major reappraisal of the concept of internationalisation as a unified force that affects the entire education system from its beginnings in primary schools all the way to higher education Studies that conceptualise and establish the relationships between the outcomes of internationalisation at the individual level in different socioeconomic classes and diverse educational circumstances and institutional and national policies Studies that provide new insights into the interactions at the interface between top-down internationalisation policies applied at different levels of governance and those of individual bottom-up, grass root entrepreneurial agencies related to internationalisation
Deadlines 1 July 2018: submission of abstracts to be submitted to the guest editor (
[email protected]) 1 August 2018: Notification and acceptance and invitation to submit a full manuscript (online, following PFIE submission guidelines) 1 October 2018: Full draft of manuscript submitted online at: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/policy-futures-education#submissionguidelines All papers will undergo double-bind peer review. References Bunnell, T. (2012). Global Education Under Attack: International Baccalaureate in America. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. de-Wit, H. (2011). Internationalization of higher education: Nine misconceptions, International Higher Education, 64 (1), 6-7.
Dolby, N., & Rahman, A. (2008). Research in international education. Review of Educational Research, 78(3), 676-726. Dvir, Y., & Yemini, M. (2017). Mobility as a continuum: European commission mobility policies for schools and higher education. Journal of Education Policy, 32(2), 198-210. Knight, J. (2011). Education hubs: a fad, a brand, an innovation? Journal of Studies in International Education, 15(3), 221-240. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2009). Globalizing education policy. London: Routledge. Waters, J., & Brooks, R. (2015). ‘The magical operations of separation’: English elite schools’ on-line geographies, internationalisation and functional isolation. Geoforum, 58, 86-94. Yemini, M. (2014). Internationalisation discourse What remains to be said?. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 18(2), 66-71. Yemini, M., & Sagie, N. (2016). Research on internationalisation in higher education– exploratory analysis. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 20(2-3), 90-98.
