Catherine A. Doherty

How the West is done: simulating Western pedagogy in a curriculum for Asian international students

Imagination is now understood to be playing a more prominent role in the production of cultural identities in ‘new times’, as groups seek to build and shore up collective identities in the shifting flows and conditions of globalization. This paper documents the institutional work of cultural imagination in the preparatory curricula designed to manage the cultural difference of international students studying on-campus in Australian universities. These Foundation and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) curricula construct an idealised version of the ‘Western student’, ‘Western lecturer’ and of the social code governing the relationship between lecturers, students, and disciplinary knowledge in the Western academy. This paper analyses the versions of imagined, ‘authentic’ Western pedagogy constructed in teacher interviews, and produced in videotaped classroom activities in these courses. In particular, the analysis focuses on forms of student oral participation in this imagined pedagogy of the West, and teachers’ attempts to simulate the ‘real’ Western university for their students. These ‘authentic’ versions are theorised as nostalgic in that they fail to acknowledge the transformation of Australian universities in globalizing times and globalized markets, and work to re-centre pedagogic identities in slippery conditions.

The appeal of the International Baccalaureate in Australia's educational market: a curriculum of choice for mobile futures

In Australia there is growing interest in a national curriculum to replace the variety of matriculation credentials managed by State Education departments, ostensibly to address increasing population mobility. Meanwhile, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is attracting increasing interest and enrolments in State and private schools in Australia, and has been considered as one possible model for a proposed Australian Certificate of Education. This paper will review the construction of this curriculum in Australian public discourse as an alternative frame for producing citizens, and ask why this design appeals now, to whom, and how the phenomenon of its growing appeal might inform national curricular debates. The IBs emergence is understood with reference to the larger context of neo-liberal marketisation policies, neo-conservative claims on the curriculum and middle-class strategy. The paper draws on public domain documents from the International Baccalaureate Organisation and newspaper reportage to demonstrate how the IB is constructed for public consumption in Australia.

Planning mobile futures: the border artistry of International Baccalaureate Diploma choosers

This paper reports on a study of students choosing the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma over state‐based curricula in Australian schools. The IB Diploma was initially designed as a matriculation certificate to facilitate international mobility. While first envisaged as a lifestyle agenda for cultural elites, such mobility is now widespread with more people living ‘beyond the nation’ through choice or circumstance. Beck and others highlight how the capacity to cross national borders offers a competitive edge with which to strategically pursue economic and cultural capital. Beck’s ‘border artistes’ are those who use national borders to their individual advantage through reflexive strategy. The study explored the rationales and strategy behind the choice of the IB Diploma curriculum expressed by students in a focus group interview and an online survey. This paper reports on their imagined transnational routes and mobile orientations, and how a localised curriculum limits their imagined mobile futures.

Choosing your niche: the social ecology of the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Australia

The International Baccalaureate’s (IB) branding and reputation targets academic high achievers aiming for university entrance. This is an empirical examination of the growing popularity of this transnational secondary credential amongst local populations in Australia, focusing on its uptake across the community, and the discourses underpinning its spread and popularity. This paper reports on online surveys of 179 parents and 231 students in schools offering the IB as an alternative to Australian state curricula. It sets out to understand the social ecology of who chooses the IB and who it chooses. Statistically significant differences between IB and non-IB choosers were found in terms of family income, parent education, student aspirations, transnational lifestyles and neoconservative, neoliberal and cosmopolitan beliefs. The analysis demonstrates how the reproduction of advantage is accomplished through choice behaviours in stratified educational markets.

Teachers' Work in Curricular Markets: Conditions of Design and Relations between the International Baccalaureate Diploma and the Local Curriculum

Abstract School‐level strategy enabled by neoliberal choice policies can produce internal curricular markets whereby branded curricula such as the International Baccalaureate are offered alongside the local government curriculum in the same school. This project investigated how such curricular markets operating in Australian schools impacted on teachers’ work. This article reports on teachers work in three case study schools that offered both the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) program and the local senior schooling curriculum, then draws on an online survey of 225 teachers in 26 such schools across Australia. The analysis reveals the impact of curricular markets along two dimensions: the curriculum’s internal design, and the relational aspects of how schools manage to deliver tandem offerings within institutional constraints. Teachers working in the IBD program were shown to relish its design, despite additional demands, while teachers working in just the local curriculum reported more relational issues. The article argues that these trends suggest that there are winners and losers emerging in the work conditions produced by curricular markets.

Is the world their oyster? The global imagination of pre-service teachers

This paper reports on a qualitative interview study with eleven pre-service primary teachers in Queensland about their career plans, exploring whether, and how, a global imagination motivates this next generation of teachers. The study is framed within sociological theory of globalisation, with regard to the growing possibilities for international mobility for work purposes, and the new life circumstances that make this imaginable. Teaching as a profession has changed and teachers are no longer as entangled with specific systems or geographical locations anymore. International recruitment campaigns are shown to pursue pre-service teachers during their university preparation. The analysis of the interview data reveals the kind of impact these possibilities make on how pre-service teachers imagine their career, and what other considerations enhance or limit their global imagination. The findings are used to reflect on the highly localised governance of pre-service teacher preparation and the limited State-bound imaginaries to which these pre-service teachers are unnecessarily confined in their preparation.

Forging the heteroglossic citizen: articulating local, national, regional and global horizons in the Australian Curriculum

This article offers a discourse analysis comparing selected articles in the national press over the consultative period for Phase 1 subjects in the new Australian Curriculum, with rationales prefacing official Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority documents. It traces how various versions of Australia, its ‘nation-ness’ and its future citizens have been taken up in the final product. The analysis uses Lemkes analytic elaboration of Bakhtins concept of heteroglossia and its derivative, intertextuality. It identifies a range of intertextual thematic formations around ‘nation’, ‘history’, ‘citizen’ and ‘curriculum’ circulating in the public debates, then traces their presence in official curriculum documents. Rather than concluding that these themes are contradictory and incoherent, the conclusion asks how these multiple dialogic facets of Australian nation-ness potentially offer a better response to complex times than any coherent monologic orthodoxy might.

Making a point of difference: the glocalised ecology of the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Australian schools

The International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) is an independent, globally available curriculum currently enjoying rapid uptake in government systems as an alternative curriculum. This paper explores the logic of its consumption in three case study schools across different states of Australia, and the relational ‘points of difference’ it creates in each local context and its curricular market. The analysis uses a typology of goods to describe the nature and dynamics of the IBDs glocalised ecology in each site. The conclusion argues that the success of the IBD as a curricular alternative risks eroding its appeal as a positional good.

Educational markets in space: gamekeeping professionals across Australian communities

This paper argues that the logic of neoliberal choice policy is typically blind to considerations of space and place, but inevitably impacts on rural and remote locations in the way that middle-class professionals view the opportunities available in their local educational markets. The paper considers the value of middle-class professionals’ educational capitals in regional communities and their problematic distribution, given that class fraction’s particular investment in choice strategies to ensure their children’s future. It then profiles the educational market in six communities along a transect between a major regional centre and a remote ‘outback’ town, using publicly available data from the Australian Government’s My School website. Comparison of the local markets shows how educational outcomes are distributed across the local markets and how dimensions of ‘choice’ thin out over the transect. Interview data offer insights into how professional families in these localities engage selectively with these local educational markets or plan to transcend them. The discussion reflects on the growing importance of educational choices as a marker of place in the competition between localities to attract and retain professionals to staff vital human services in their communities.

Mobile Students, Flexible Identities and Liquid Modernity: Disrupting Western Teachers’ Assumptions of ‘The Asian Learner’

This chapter examines international students’ accounts of their educational journeys and their personal motivations using interview data collected from Asian international students enrolled in preparatory TESOL programs in an Australian university. A selection of these interview accounts are analyzed to demonstrate how these students carefully negotiate the contradictions and possibilities of globalizing times, their investments in diverse cultural capitals, and the restrictive cultured identities made available to them in the internationalized university. We argue that Asian international students may at times strategically take up essentialist versions (Spivak, 1990) of Asian learner identities that are discursively constructed and influential in Western TESOL practices. At the same time, these students also disrupt such narratives of Asian learner identities that circulate in TESOL classrooms, and offer alternative imaginings through discursive re-articulations (Hall, 1996a). Both of these tactics may be used strategically by students to further their project of appropriating new resources as they travel across transnational educational routes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of new theorizations about the flexible identities of mobile students under conditions of liquid modernity for educators in internationalized education.