Internationalization of education as an emerging field? A framing of international education for cross-domain analyses

Abstract

The internationalization of education (IE) has accelerated across the past two decades. Although there are now a range of representations and theorizations of IE, they find little connection across domains and levels. Toward bolstering a more coherent field of IE, which translates across distinctive expressions of IE, this paper argues for a conceptual approach that includes theorizing IE’s past and present enabling conditions, motivating visions, significant (operational) obstacles, and ensuing tensions. The main contribution is a conceptualization of late 20th century international education, which historically situates the current 21st century IE movement. This conceptualization is informed primarily by a periodization of the International Baccalaureate that surfaces the semantic contours and structuring tensions of international education as embedded in the shifting historical and socio-political conditions of the last 50 years. Semantically, 20th century international education carries with it literal (educational activities across national jurisdictions) and normative/aspirational significations (liberal-humanist education for making a better world). And the structuring tensions of international education are constituted in the entangling of the normative visions, as “education for international understanding,” with the instrumental agendas, as revenue generation. An emerging IE field can draw on the conceptual framing offered in this paper as a basis for theorizing across the somewhat siloed IE discourses.

Introduction and Analytic Orientation

This special issue seeks to better connect the various domains and levels of the internationalization of education (IE) under unfolding 21st century globalization processes. Yemini claims a “relatively high fragmentation of scholastic areas in [IE] and thus the relative isolation between scholars and stakeholders” (Yemini, 2014, p. 67). Indeed, there are many unique manifestations of IE that are distinctly engaged by different stakeholders and theorized from diverse perspectives. My recommendation for finding conceptual coherence across multiple domains and levels of IE is informed by my ongoing research examining the meanings and uses of 20th century international education and its evolving character under heightened processes and imaginaries of globalization (Appadurai, 1996; Ong, 1999; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010).

In this introductory section, I present the purpose and analytic approach of the paper. The next section offers a conceptualization of international education in the 20th century from an Anglo-Western perspective. In the following section, the paper marks a post-cold war “internationalization of education” movement accelerating into the 21st century, when international education becomes an expedient. To ground the argument on the expediency of international education, I consider the changing uses of the International Baccalaureate (IB). The paper then turns to briefly discuss how the framing offered in this paper is useful to understand and analyze other domains of international education. Finally, the paper concludes with the hypothesis that, by drawing on the conceptual framing presented in this paper alongside other contributions in this special issue, an emerging field of IE might facilitate more generative theorizing of IE across the somewhat siloed discursive communities studying IE phenomena.

While IE and international education are sometimes used interchangeably, their meanings can be differentiated. My sense, as I explicate below, is that international education as a form or context of education tends to contain normative dimensions related to internationalism and progressivist pedagogy, whereas IE refers to intensifying processes of educational activities, products and/or actors that extend their reach, or are mobile, across political borders. IE, where driven from above, as in higher education, can therefore enable a whole set of educational and non-educational activities. And, given this wider scope, the term IE suggests a more instrumental, less-normative connotation. Nevertheless, as IE is enacted in concrete instances in the world the more normative and educational features tend to (re)assert themselves. For example, on the internationalization of higher education (IHE), Stier (2004) also emphasizes that the “idealist” and “educationalist” core ideologies are found alongside the “instrumentalist” core ideology of IHE, particularly for on-the-ground practitioners. Thus, despite IE’s instrumentalist qualities under larger neoliberal globalization pressures (Andreotti et al., 2012, 2016), this stickiness of the educational and the internationalist visions/agendas to IE, provides a strong rationale for tethering the emergent field of IE to a conceptual genealogy of 20th century international education. To offer a late 20th century framing of international education, I draw upon the evolution of IB from its creation in the “embedded liberalism” of the 1960s to its increasing expediency under globalization (Tarc, 2009).

Beyond a lack of historicization, another part of the problem for cohering IE as a field is the (functionalist or discourse-centered) preoccupation with fixing definitions. Where these definitions become iterative syntheses of how the terms are used by members in a discursive community, the phenomena or concept that was to be the center of inquiry risks being overshadowed. For example, if search/selection strategies expediently focus on specific terms over the concepts being explored, the knowledge being built might be more about stabilizing a term in a discourse over illuminating the phenomenon under study. This problematic tendency is more common in emergent and transdisciplinary fields and one sign of its presence is where the “theoretical framing” and the “literature review” find little connection. In discourses of IE, definitional debates on difficult-to-define areas surface across several domains, such as “IHE” (Knight, 2004), “global education” (Marshall, 2015), “global citizenship education” (Goren and Yemini, 2017), “global competence” (Hunter et al. 2006), “international schools” (Hayden and Thompson, 2013), and “international mindedness” (Haywood, 2007).

The utility of such definitional debates in IE come into question where too much focus is placed on the instances or activities of, or prescriptions for, IE. While the work of finding more precision in our working categories is always important, sometimes, again, the definitional approach myopically loses sight of the key features of the phenomenon under study. More salient to developing understandings that can translate and be extended productively across contexts, I think, are the analytic strategies that take a broader and historically situated approach, those that consider the (historical) structuring conditions and the agendas, and visions in play—indeed, the “questions” or desires that give rise to the “answers” or solutions (Scott, 2004) as particular manifestations of IE.

For example, Jonas Stier seeks to address the “ambiguous and unclear” character of IHE across contexts and purposes (Stier, 2004, p. 83), by excavating the underlying ideologies, more implicit than explicit, that shape how IHE is conceived and practiced. In particular, Stier is motivated to explain “why the spirit of internationalization does not let itself easily be transformed into educational practice” (Stier, 2004, p. 84). He finds idealism, instrumentalism and educationalism as three

different normative motives and ideologies embedded in the educational discourse on internationalization… that… significantly influence policy makers and educators in their understanding and approach to internationalization. (Stier, 2004, p. 93)

He explains how these three ideologies overlap and conflict in the various modalities of IHE (vision, focus, goals, strategies) and across different stakeholders’ positions (policy makers, administrators, teachers). The analytic framework Stier offers can help clarify the distinct approaches and conflicts that IE engenders and a three-dimensional matrix of the three ideologies, the modalities of IE, and the stakeholder positionalities can be employed in domains outside of higher education. To clarify, it is the three-axes framework that is the productive transferable, over the specific content of the individual cells. Andreotti et al. (2016) offer a different analytic framework, accentuating the liberal, neoliberal, and critical “discursive orientations” of IHE discourse; this framework also appears to be a productive conceptual framework for interpreting and steering IE across distinct levels and domains, particularly in how they illustrate IHE practices at the “interfaces” of these orientations

Another productive approach focused on “global citizenship education” (GCE), situates GCE as a 21st century variant of the longer-running set of idealizations and practices of international education  (Tarc, 2011, Goren and Yemini, 2017). My approach was not to view GCE as a new idea in need of definitional clarity by mapping representations called “GCE” or synthesizing typologies or polling experts on what GCE means or ought to mean. Rather, I (2011) took the ‘dream’ of 20th century international education—an outward-looking education attuned to the present world and oriented to making sustainable human futures— to continue to be the motivating desire of GCE. What I understood to be new, rather, was the historical context. The changed and changing conditions of the 21st century present new enablers and constraints and therefore altered expressions of the enduring dream of international education. Here, I borrow the analytic approach from David Scott (2004, pp. 1–11) to historicize the dream/vision, as well as obstacles, of a historical movement, rather than the specific outcomes (or terminology).

Indeed, if one looks at current instances of IE across domains and levels, there typically are a set of idealist visions (Tarc, 2013) or ideological perspectives (Stier, 2004) of the world and of education that intersect with wider state and institutional constraints of educational provision, themselves increasingly affected by post-Westphalian features of globalization. These intersections produce challenges and tensions that take similar forms and can be identified across domains and levels of education, as this paper will reveal and discuss. By anchoring this recent post-cold-war wave of IE that accelerates into the 21st century to a genealogy of international education, one finds conceptual anchors to support and bridge theorizations of the IE movement by scholars and practitioners.

Framing 20th Century international education

International education is a complex and historically inflected term, which means that its meanings and uses shift in relation to larger geopolitical, economic, and social conditions. Indeed, the ebb and flow of international education somewhat mirrors or follows the larger historical conditions of conflict, war, resolution, nationalisms, internationalisms, and protectionisms as energized by the most powerful nation-states and blocs. In the 20th century, in parallel with internationalist and peace movements, international education gained traction in the aftermath of large-scale war. One of the most radical institutional expressions of internationalism for its time—the League of Nations—emerged in the 1920s in the wake of the devastation and unresolved animosities of the First World War. The creation of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization in Geneva Switzerland, produced the conditions for the birth of what is now considered the longest-running international school, the International School of Geneva. The next period where internationalism and international education peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s occurred, again, in the decades following a “world war” with the reconstruction of Europe and the decolonization of European empires. During this post-WWII era, the United Nations (UN) was formed, with UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization) as the official multilateral promoter of international education. In 1966, President Johnson initiated the United States’ adoption of the “International Education Act.” The UN named 1970 as the “Year of International Education”; funding opportunities for IE peaked in the 1960s before the global financial crisis of the early 1970s (Tarc, 2009).

From the mid-1970s with the “global” economic downturn and Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberal policy reforms, IE was in a downward trend, albeit still visible in states’ “soft power” strategies under cold war geopolitics (Sidhu, 2006). With the emergence of globalization came the contradictory effects of unifications and disintegrations, cosmopolitanisms and parochialisms, loss of economic autonomy, and the rise of new national ethnos (Appadurai, 2006). Nevertheless, one can mark a key shift in the acceptability of international education precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and bipolarity, and, thereby, the unfettered reach of capitalism. From the early 1990s with notions of a “new world order,” there was an opening up to internationalism and a new-found space for articulations of international education as directed toward “world citizenship.” In the last two decades, with the ascendency of neoliberal educational reforms and heightened interconnectedness through intensifying mobilities and telecommunication technologies, international education has found very fertile conditions for growth. Under these conditions of “global times,” the opportunities for IE in the second decade of the 21st century seem unprecedented.

From this brief historical arc, I now turn to the difficult task of explicating upon international education’s core features. Across the last century, in the West and its peripheries, the term “international education” has carried two core semantic components as oriented by: (a) the literal/instrumental and (b) the aspirational/normative. Manifestations of IE are constituted by the interplay of these two core meanings of (and agendas for) international education. Literally, inter-national education refers to educational activities that cross political borders. IE thus describes a whole array of activities where students, teachers, curricula, qualifications, and “best practices” are mobile, translated, or connected up with actors, processes or structures across state educational jurisdictions. And clearly these activities have expanded in scale and frequency particularly in the last two decades of globalizing processes (Tarc, 2009; Tarc, 2013).

The other semantic component arises from the normative/aspirational or larger humanist and progressive set of idealist visions, which have motivated the many creators, supporters and advocates of international education. In the 20th century, in the West, these larger visions were founded on a liberal-humanist ideology that an outward (less-nationalistic), forward-looking and more child-centered model of education could help make a less-violent and more egalitarian world; in simplest terms, IE was cast as an education to foster “international understanding” that could lead to greater sympathy and peace between nations and groups as well as free up education from nationalist-serving agendas (Peterson, 1972). These two core roots of international education in the 20th century continue to structure the meanings and uses of international education in the present.

The two roots of international education are inherently interdependent, as resonant and conflicting. In the first place, the literal definition of IE as an education that crosses political borders is already implicated in a wider (cultural) politics given schooling’s conventional role in nation building. Education and formal schooling themselves contain a de-parochializing aim of expanding students’ understandings beyond their local conditions and experience. To be educated is to be “worldly.” In this regard, the tension between the particular and the larger/universal is already a constitutive feature of education. However, given the geopolitical (Westphalian) order of the last few centuries, that “larger” has been primarily set at, and confined by, the national level (albeit partitioned out to state or provincial jurisdictions). Thus, international education has also implied a challenge to state sovereignty within its citizenship mandate in schooling. Indeed, one of the factors involved in the marginalization of international education for most of the 20th century, were the periodic attacks that international education was unpatriotic (Heater, 2002). Admittedly, dimensions of citizenship, and to some extent citizenship education, are now transforming under heightened transnational mobilities and flows (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Banks, 2017; Ong, 1999). Nevertheless, the point is that, for most of the 20th century, the more radical internationalist visions for international education remained tempered and constrained due to national priorities and politics.

Even the more instrumental approaches to present-day internationalization of education often invoke the second aspirational meaning of IE—as Stier (2004) found. Sometimes the conditions of cross-societal/cultural educational initiatives effectively usher in the normative/aspirational visions and agendas by actors working on the ground level. At other times, demands for the idealist agendas come belatedly. One could consider, for example, the recruitment of international students in Western universities as founded solely on an instrumental logic of generating revenue. However, the actual practices of supporting and educating these international students on the ground, such that recruitment efforts might be sustainable, means that the idealist visions, as fostering intercultural understanding and respect, also find expression, if in a reactive fashion, via the goals of the program and curricula.

To probe further, the liberal-humanist/cosmopolitan vision of international education (the second root) was not a random outcome newly produced by a set of arbitrary actors connecting beyond their political borders, but a result of the ideological inclinations of the actors (as educators or internationalists) who were converging in multilateral spaces as a result of dissatisfaction with their own systems of education and/or nationalistic mindsets. In other words, the representatives enrolled to engage in multilateral/international projects in education were more inclined to have a more progressive/cosmopolitan outlook. For this reason, educators in international (multilateral) contexts may just as easily represent a set of like-minded progressives as a diverse set of actors representing or embodying their national educational systems/approaches (Mayer, 1968). Further this reality also implies a downside; in the context of international education initiatives in developing country contexts (often synonymous with “development education”), the aspirational vision can represent much more a parochial Eurocentric/Western vision than a truly open and egalitarian orientation. Thus, international education as an alternative to national education can mean that, on the one hand, procedurally, there is the bringing together of different perspectives to create, for example, a more open inter-national curriculum as in a world history syllabus or in setting international standards to facilitate student mobility (relatively an “instrumental” task). On the other hand, the “international” of IE domains represents a new, convergent space of reform, which is not (necessarily) a place that values epistemic or inter-cultural difference. Finally, the idealist/aspirational visions of international education may be somewhat “free-floating” in rhetorical discourse in “safe” domains, as at a UNESCO roundtable. But the idealist visions themselves typically find a route for articulations and possible enactments under specific material conditions and pragmatic needs (Jones, 2000). Therefore, the idealist agendas of IE often become co-dependent with instrumental agendas.

In summary, where inter-national educational activities are initiated for pragmatic or instrumental reasons, many times there is an expectation, or an emergent demand, that the more idealist aims of international respect and understanding are worked at in the operationalization. In practical terms, wherever there are new demands for or initiatives of international education, there are opportunities for (and expectations of) enacting the aspirational goals as fostering international/intercultural cooperation, respect, and understanding. The growing number of university student support services engaged in cross-cultural learning for incoming international students and outgoing domestic students is a case in point. While the top-down driver of building a new revenue generation stream under declining government funding is the initial agenda, on-the-ground support staff are being hired to respond to pedagogical demands of supporting inter-cultural engagement and learning. Some of these staff are taking courses in “international education” in a Master of Professional Education program our faculty offers, where they discuss these very institutional roles and the tensions that surface—staff at technical colleges and secondary schools cite similar tensions. Conversely, working to realize the more cosmopolitan and progressive aspirations of international education typically requires the set-up and maintenance of international education activities that have a practical use and are financially sustainable. In this way the literal/instrumental and the aspirational/normative are often different sides of the same coin.

For much of the 20th century, “education for international understanding” represented the overarching purpose of IE (Peterson, 1972; Renaud, 1974). And this normative/aspirational agenda, with updated terms as “intercultural understanding” (de Leo, 2010) “global citizenship” (Oxfam, 2006), or “international mindedness” (IBO, 2013) continues to be embedded in the meanings and practices of IE today. That is, the basic notion of an outward-looking education that can contribute to making a “better” world in a context of global interdependence cuts across the many variants of international education. The embeddedness of the normative/aspirational is further evident by the frequent calling out of a growing set of international and transnational educational activities deemed antithetical to the goal of greater understanding and respect between nations or cultures. Indeed, that international education practices can be critiqued as “contradictory” or “antithetical” or “hypocrisy” illustrates how the idealist visions remain tethered to manifestations of international education. What has changed and is still evolving in the 21st century, is the increased depth and frequency of transnational/international educational activities as well as the altered dynamics of the instrumental and idealist agendas forming international education, particularly under neoliberal logics (Rizvi, 2007).

Key spokespersons of UNESCO or IB might want to singularly define international education by the idealist goal of an education for “intercultural understanding” or “international mindedness;” however, the very material conditions that have spawned, and that have, at least, subtly shaped these definitions, are the uni/multi-lateral character of their creation and operation (and the parochializing/de-parochializing mindsets of key actors) as shaped by colonial, financial, and other competing instrumentalities. In this way the instrumental rationale and vision cannot be ignored as it affects how the aspirational (and the educational) is expressed and enacted. Clearly, there is a difference between university administrators reacting to the educational needs of international students after successfully recruiting them to the university as a revenue stream, and UNESCO’s focus on international education to promote intercultural understanding and world peace. But the need to acknowledge and illuminate the dynamic relations between the more normative and instrumental visions in play are important in each case. And on the instrumental side, funding is an intractable dimension, and UNESCO is no exception (Jones, 2000). Moreover, this co-dependence dynamic can be analyzed as much in the internationalization of K-12 education as in HE, as I will discuss in the penultimate section.

The co-dependence of the instrumental and idealist visions/agendas of international education is not to imply that one must accept undesirable forms of international education; rather, as a starting assumption, its acknowledgement presses for nuanced analyses that can reveal the dynamics of how the instrumental and idealist agendas form and inform one another, across the levels of governance, policy, program, and practices. Such illumination promises not only better understanding of existing phenomena, but offers insight into strategic responses and interventions to develop more self-reflexive, progressive, and ethical practices of international education. Thus, critiquing that an international initiative is directed by instrumental or pragmatic logics may be accurate, but have little consequence. More useful are analyses that illustrate, in a specific time-space conjuncture, how the instrumental agenda, for example, is specifically constraining or short-circuiting the realization of the aspirational agenda, and, thereby, the worthiness of the IE initiative itself. Where an initiative is without such an aspirational agenda that can be called upon to reorient practices, then it is decidedly outside what can be considered international education. The modifier “international” is not the only term of the pairing that transcends the purely instrumental; the “education” term also places a demand that transcends pure expediency. As is suggested in the Introduction, it is also quite evident that current manifestations of IE also carry both instrumental and aspirational/idealist dimensions. Moreover, in the current IE movement these dimensions become increasingly entangled across IE’s multiple domains, and the instrumental agenda tends to dominate under the global policy convergence of neoliberal educational reform (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010; Mundy et al., 2017).

The expediency of international education in global times: The case of IB

Ideas and practices of international education date back many centuries, and the interplay and tensions between idealist and instrumental agendas endure. However, in “global times,” international education has become much more an expedient, a “value-added” qualification for both families and governments seeking competitive advantage in processes and imaginaries of the global knowledge economy (Doherty, 2009; Ong, 2006; Tarc, 2009; Weenink, 2008). Unprecedented are the expanding opportunities for international education under transnational cultural and economic networks and flows. These opportunities come with new complications and altered risks as the idealist and pragmatic agendas of international education become ever more imbricated. Indeed, the radical neoliberal agenda seeks to circumscribe and recast the idealist vision by the necessity and value of the “market.” Neoliberal logics and institutional branding advance a both/and logic to the instrumental and idealist relation. Making profits and “doing good” are framed as symbiotic. Recruiting international students as new revenue streams represents the way forward to achieve financial sustainability and the university’s academic, social, and reputational missions. Intercultural competence is valued for fostering more respectful relations between cultures as well as for finding and exploiting niche markets across cultural frontiers (Tarc, 2013).

From its emergence during the last rise of international education in the 1960s to its elevated status as the “gold standard” in a period of internationalization as branding in the 21st century, the IB provides a useful window on the shifting uses of IE under globalization. The creation and experiment of the IB, made possible by a Ford Foundation grant in 1966, was founded on a practical need for an internationally recognized secondary school leaving diploma for international school students to access their home country universities. However, most of the creators and key advocates of the IB were much more vested in the aspirational vision of an “education of the whole person” as the way to develop international understanding for a less conflicted world (Peterson, 1972; Renaud, 1974). Nevertheless, the internationalist or “global dreams” of the creators and supporters of the IB experiment had to strategically sideline these foundational dreams in their rhetoric and policy statements until the early years of the 1990s, as mentioned above. Soon, IB and other organizations began using terms like “world citizens” and “global citizens” (Tarc, 2009).

By the turn of the century, increasing numbers of families were recognizing the value of the “international” of international education. Governments were also soon to follow in recognizing the advantages of promoting global (de-territorialized) and flexible citizenships (Ong, 2006). In some sense, in the West, developing (global) citizens to contribute to global economic competitiveness began to trump developing citizens as loyal “flag-wavers” (Green, 1997). “International understanding” was no longer deemed a threat but a resource in developing human capital to participate in the global economy. In the case of the IB, its take up in the 1980s by state schools in the US, as a “nation at risk,” had most to do with its perceived high academic standards. Today, IB continues to be used for its academic reputation and as a choice option; But today, international mindedness is no longer peripheral, but a core “value-added” component of the program (Tarc, 2009). Perhaps the most striking current example of the rising import of IE within state K-12 schooling is the current initiative to include “global competence” as an area to be evaluated in upcoming international PISA tests (Piacentini, 2017).

In increasingly wider realms, having an “international experience” (i.e., study abroad) is framed as a worthwhile activity not only for its purported intrinsic value but for its currency in the schooling-career nexus. For example, study abroad has several potential uses as developing intercultural sensitivity and global competence, enhancing one’s resume/portfolio, and developing a “serving others” disposition. Under conditions of diminishing governmental support for social services and safety nets, the flexible or “active” (Tarc, 2015) “globally ready,” entrepreneurial, and service oriented (middle or upper-middle class) person is the idealized student-subject of international education for contemporary times. Clearly there are conservative and communitarian reactions to, and opponents of, the increasing import of international education (Bunnell, 2012; Heater, 2002), but they have yet to slow the growth and intensification of IE in global times. Time will tell how the recent rise of regressive politics as evidenced by Brexit and “strong man” populism (Geiselberger, 2017) will affect IE; perhaps only the geometries of mobilities will alter rather than the intensities.

Most troubling about the expediency of international education on this complex neoliberal terrain is how the idealized visions and outcomes of a liberal-humanist international education are altered or minimized. Beyond the uncritical framing of the both/and neoliberal logics, there are grave risks that manifestations of international education re-inscribe the very parochial, arrogant, and neocolonial mindsets that international education is theoretically supposed to challenge and undo. Clearly a growing set of critiques attest to these actual and potential negative outcomes of IE (ACDE 2015; Andreotti et al., 2011). While there is no getting around the co-dependence of the idealist and instrumental agendas, practitioners of international education must be vigilant that the de-parochializing core idealist vision of international education is not muted or co-opted.

This section has illustrated that globalization has greatly enabled international education, but that the dream or vision is potentially short circuited by the very conditions that have enabled its rise. The obstacles of cold-war international education of the 1960s—war between nation-states, geographic distance and isolation—have largely diminished due to cheaper travel costs, internet communication technologies, heightened mobilities and super-diversity within the nation-state (Vertovec, 2007). In their place, new obstacles to the dream of international education have surfaced including the dominance of unfettered global capitalism and its advancing of inequality, internal ethnic conflicts, terrorism with its targeting of civilian casualties and the related securitization discourses threatening cosmopolitan hospitality (Bauman, 2016).

New iterations of international education, such as global citizenship education, are tasked with analyzing and strategically steering IE so that the educative and internationalist aspirational components are not overshadowed by the instrumental. This is an important demand because an instrumentalist approach for IE under larger processes of neoliberal economic globalization and ongoing legacies of colonialism risk exploitive, othering and mis-educative outcomes. At the same time, the aspirational dream of educating for the goal of respectful (intercultural) relations across all of humanity comes with financial and pragmatic conditionalities to even appear in the world.

Theorizing IE across domains and levels

In academic and practice-based discourses, the structuring tensions of the idealist and pragmatic agendas across the many domains of IE are apparent, despite the use of different terms. In my own graduate teaching, I encounter practitioners who work across the K-12 to graduate education spectrum. These practitioners also work in a range of IE activities such as recruiting international students, supporting domestic students’ international exchanges, teaching English, and teaching internationally. The tensions of IE derived from the conceptual genealogy of the international education of IB seems to be applicable across the many domains and levels in which these practitioners work. From personal experience, they can speak to the expediency of international education—the new opportunities it affords, and the challenges or complications that come with it. Clearly, different domains and stakeholder positions will necessitate analyses that are context-specific, but the general qualities of IE discussed above seem to hold analytic purchase across these domains and levels.

On connecting IE across the K-12 and HE levels, Yemini (2014) is instructive. She acknowledges their distinctive traditions. K-12 schooling was much more a state-governed institution for national citizenship. Further, universities as knowledge producers have been historically internationally connected (Yemini, 2014, p. 67). Although IE processes are more pervasive in higher education, they have also entered state K-12 schooling, if in contradictory ways. Yemini argues that currently “schools and higher education institutions are similarly directed towards internationalization” (Yemini, 2014, p. 68). In many respects, this converging IE trend is directly contributable to globalization. Indeed, many of the trends Yemini (2014) identifies as decentralization, privatization, international testing, school choice, and the shift from institutional levels to “individuals and their cosmopolitan capital,” represent the logic of globalization over internationalism (Jones, 2000). Neoliberal school reform has created fertile conditions for new options in schooling, including the turn to international education. It opens up potential for the dream of IE: “reconciliation, fostering peace, and mutual understanding” (Yemini, 2014, p. 69) in Yemini’s vocabulary. But, the conditions for this opening advance a more individualist, competitive schooling-career nexus, as the more pragmatic uses of IB in state schooling suggest (Doherty, 2009; Tarc, 2009).

Yemini is correct in identifying a converging set of IE practices and discourses across the school to university continuum that can be studied more holistically. It is interesting to note that publicly funded schools in Canada also recruit international students and some school boards have international offices for both recruitment and student support services, very much mirroring internationalization in HE. These IE manifestations, however, as Yemini implies in her article, are much more the result of globalization than a proactive enactment of the longer standing dream of international or global education. Schools, as with universities, now will also have to assert the idealist and educative dimensions of IE given the wider structuring conditions of neoliberal educational reform. Nuanced analyses of the historical conditions that give rise to internationalization of education and careful attention to the agendas and governing logics in play represent productive approaches to connecting the different activities and domains of IE. Although, sometimes sidelined, the internationalist and educative function of IE do remain consequential in IE enactments, and provide a common basis for scholarship on IE.

Conclusions: IE as a new field?

This paper has argued for the importance of situating IE within a larger historical arc of 20th century international education, and, more generally, for a conceptual framing over terminological or descriptive cataloging of IE. On the one hand, I am arguing that IE shares with international education normative desires that are enabled but complicated or even short-circuited by large-scale conditions and institutional constraints that privilege the instrumental or pragmatic agendas for IE. On the other hand, I’m suggesting that IE as a newer movement requires an analysis of contemporaneity. Neither definitions nor idealizations of intercultural or global competence offer much cause for hope as commodified outcomes for individual academic progression in the global educational marketplace. If internationalization has any potential to help make education be a force for human thriving in the world as it is today, scholars and educators will have to understand the relationship between the conditions of IE’s propagation and its intended and unintended outcomes.

One final note on the possibility of IE as an academic field. It seems that international education is no longer the “practice-based” tag-along to Comparative Education (cf. Epstein, 1997; Wilson, 2003). Scholarship on the IE movement may be morphing into a transdisciplinary field, where educationalists are examining IE phenomena across a range of domains, invoking constructs as mobilities, flexible citizenship, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, multilingualism, etc. If the emergent literature remains too fragmented, one corrective, as argued in this paper, is to pay special attention to historicizing the shifting conditions, animating visions and ensuing tensions of IE to illuminate both its educative potentialities and limits in contemporary times.