Abstract
Introduction
Many contemporary national educational reforms are underpinned by emerging policy-level commitments to contemporary global supranational knowledge and skills (Auld and Morris). These processes are driven by globalisation, technological advancements and knowledge-based economic pressures, which in turn are facilitated by inter-governmental agencies such as OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank. The pressures of internationalisation emerge in addition to the existing pressures of nationalisation (Anderson, 1991), forcing national education systems to comply with essentially opposing influences and trends that can be expressed in various ways (Yemini, 2012; Yemini, Bar Nissan, and Shavit, 2014). As such, in the past decade, ‘internationalisation’ has become one of the most prominent phenomena in the education arena (Brooks and Waters, 2011; Fielding and Vidovich, 2017; Knight, 2004).
While several scholars have discussed the future of internationalisation through either an academic or practical lens (Dolby and Rahman, 2008), and though the academic discourse is open to new developments and ideas (Yemini and Sagie, 2016), 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 (Dolby and Rahman, 2008), leading to the relative isolation of the relevant scholars and stakeholders. Scholars who tend to focus on particular sectors and localities study internationalisation through social, economic, pedagogical, psychological, anthropological and political lenses. Hence, some of the aspects of this field of study have remained largely concealed by the micro-context focus that has been applied to date.
Inter-governmental organisations, especially OECD and UNESCO, have increased their influence on national education policies through an international ranking of countries’ performances (as in the case of OECD with PISA) and by gaining a global consensus over joint goals (as in the case of UNESCO with Sustainable Development Goals). In both cases, there has been fierce advocacy for including global-citizenship education (UNESCO) and global competencies (OECD) in schooling experiences and subsequently monitoring, measuring and testing them. Thus, internationalisation in schools is being promoted sometimes not due to the states’ desires to internationalise schooling but rather through the states’ desires to outperform one another in the international testing arena.
As in higher education, internationalisation in schooling is overloaded with questions of social justice and access, and wider questions of the benefits of engaging in this process. In much of the contemporary critical writing, internationalisation is depicted as a process that leads to accumulation of global/international/cosmopolitan capital, which is unevenly distributed and thus contributes to social reproduction, thereby increasing inequality.
Within discussions of internationalisation in education and its effects on society, much of the scholarship in the past decade has addressed its potential for widening social and economic gaps, both on a global level and within countries and regions (Fielding and Vidovich, 2017; Myers, 2016). Indeed, the research shows that internationalisation can deepen social inequality through its impact on wages and opportunities for mobility (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016; Goren and Yemini, 2017). Education for global competence – or Global Citizenship (Rapoport, 2010) – has emerged both in the literature and in practice under the assumption that education systems should be preparing students to compete in the global workforce (Gaudelli, 2016). However, this acceptance of the need to internationalise is not uniform within nations nor even within schools and higher education institutions (Brooks and Waters, 2015). Differences of this regard could lead to further widening of the gaps between students from different backgrounds in their ability to compete in this globalised, highly individualised society.
In this special issue, several leading scholars in the field are raising some interesting questions regarding the real means and influences of the process. In their seminal paper, question the testing of globally oriented skills by the OECD’s PISA; Angel characterises internationalisation in the USA, and Rakhkochkine and colleagues do the same for Russia; and Tarc critically addresses the notion of internationalisation in schools. Finally, this special issue brings in Bosio’s interview with Alberto Torres, discussing the links between schooling, higher education, global citizenship and internationalisation.
I hope that the papers of this special issue will bring the internationalisation discourse into a new level and that more scholars and students will be able to join in this fascinating field of study.