James Cambridge

Global Product Branding and International Education

International education has been compared with other globally marketed goods and services such as soft drinks and hamburgers: a reliable product conforming to consistent quality standards throughout the world. This article explores the issues of international education, globalization and product branding, and examines the extent to which it may be claimed that international schools constitute a network of independent franchised distributors of globally branded international education products and services. The concept of branding and the implications of global branding are also discussed.

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and the Construction of Pedagogic Identity: A Preliminary Study.

Bernstein (1999, 2000) proposes that contrasting educational discourses construct contrasting retrospective, prospective, decentred (market) and decentred (therapeutic) pedagogic identities. In different times and geographical locations the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) has been projected onto a variety of pedagogic identities. In its earliest years there appears to have been vacillation between a weak form of retrospective identity, expressed as nostalgia for a grouped curriculum that prevailed before the introduction of A level in England, and an educational discourse projecting selected elements of the past into the future. A ‘progressive’ decentred therapeutic identity, exemplified by the IB Learner Profile, is the version the IB currently appears to project. However, this article proposes that the IB is assailed by market forces and that the IB DP is being driven towards a decentred (market) identity.

International Education Research and the Sociology of Knowledge.

The ontology of the field of international education is described and analysed in terms of singular, regional and generic modes of pedagogized knowledge. In contrast to singular and regional modes of knowledge which synthesize introjection (orientation onto themselves) and projection (orientation towards external contingencies), generic modes concentrate solely on projection onto the demands of the market. Generic knowledge is characterized as a reductive discourse that couples education to the acquisition of skills and competences. International education may be characterized as a region in which singulars (academic disciplines) are brought together in an integrating framework. ‘Internationally minded values’ are identified as constituting an overarching master view that weakens classification between the contents of the field of international education. It is proposed that the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile, as a specification for international education, constitutes pedagogized knowledge in the generic mode. Possible directions for future research in international education are discussed in the context of these contrasting modes of knowledge.

Book review: Revisiting Insider-Outsider Research in Comparative and International EducationRevisiting Insider-Outsider Research in Comparative and International Education by CrossleyMichaelArthurLoreElizabethMcNess (eds) Oxford: Symposium Books, Bristol Papers in Education 6, 2015 ISBN: 978-1-873927-67-0

‘Anywheres’ look to global citizenship, whilst the ‘Somewheres’ treasure their local and national allegiances. How these two opposing forces can be reconciled will surely be the greatest challenge to our notions of what citizenship will both confer and demand. The book also does not really address the problems of students emerging from schools into a world where debate is anything but reasonable, critical, perspectival and rational. Political debate has been on a downward spiral of late, with name-calling increasingly used as a substitute for reasoned argument. How are these young critical thinkers going to cope in the brave new world of safe spaces and no-platforming? Responsible citizenship is a worthy aim in itself, and Citizenship Education is an attempt by governments to mandate schools to do their bit as shapers of young minds. The book’s editors could have done two things to make this volume a much more interesting and accessible read. Firstly, they could have purged the various contributions of stating the same repetitive claims about their subject and making too many unprovable generalisations. Once would have been enough! And secondly, they could have invited more controversy and unorthodoxy in their choices of contributors and content. I look forward to the sequel, if that is what it can deliver.

Book Review: Educating for Global Citizenship: A Practical Guide for Schools by Boyd Roberts Cardiff: International Baccalaureate, 2009 199 pages, ISBN 978—1—906345—16—7

Discourses of international education are inscribed with not only instrumental order values, relating to the acquisition of qualifications that are portable between schools and transferable between education systems, but also expressive order values that relate to the cultivation and development of appropriate manner, demeanour and attitudes (Bernstein, 1975). We see in documents such as the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile reference to the development in learners of instrumental qualities such as being inquirers, being knowledgeable, and being thinkers but we also see encouragement to nurture other expressive qualities such as being principled, open-minded and caring. Hence, the aims of international education have grown from being principally instrumental to being identified more strongly with the expressive order. It may be proposed that such values – frequently identified as ‘international mindedness’ – are associated with the development of the learner as a global citizen. This book by Boyd Roberts, a distinguished international educator who is currently director of the IB Community Theme ‘Sharing Our Humanity’, discusses global citizenship education from both instrumental and expressive perspectives. This is foremost a book about action. Boyd Roberts is emphatic in wanting to distinguish between education about global citizenship and education for global citizenship. He identifies this book as an advocate on behalf of the latter view – ‘how global citizenship is practised, not how it is studied’ (p. 1). He locates ‘education for global citizenship’ in a discourse that draws together a wide variety of different strands:

Book Review: Education Management in Managerialist Times: Beyond the Textual Apologists

national media to an extent never experienced by the IB. Education success is a key indicator for the government. The toughest question one can ask of the IB is how it would fare under such an inspection, where every perceived injustice triggers a media circus. How resilient is the IB? There is a true IB story that tells of a former IB Coordinator being appointed as IB Director of Examinations. On his first day in his new job, a single letter was placed conspicuously on his desk. It was the one he wrote a short time earlier in typically passionate style outlining his response to that year’s IB results and reflecting the feelings of many teachers at his school. The world has changed since then. Has the IB?

Book Review: Education and the Middle Class

ging for those who may not have higher degrees or previous research experience, yet it is comprehensive enough to permit any teacher of however many years of experience or with whatever age range of students with whom the learning-teaching interaction takes place, to engage in basic constructive research into their own, or another’s, actual teaching practice, both for personal professional development through deriving knowledge about aspects of their own pedagogy, and/or researching about the effectiveness of students’ learning resulting from their interaction with students. The text moves through 12 chapters, beginning with definitions and moving into the practicalities of practitioner research. Each chapter offers helpful, preparatory hints to considering or engaging in the initial steps leading to actual research. Many offer actual examples appropriate to the research aspect being considered, thus provoking an understanding of both the importance and the ease of engaging in on-going practitioner research by teachers. This is not an encyclopaedic academic treatise on research per se, covering every detail and approach possible for researchers engaged in graduate study, and it clearly was not conceived to be so. Rather, it serves more the role of a ‘primer’ for neonate researchers. Definitions and explanations both of concepts (such as validity, reliability, positivism) and of particular approaches to research (such as case-study, triangulation, ethnography, action-research, and the like) are introductory only, although at the end of each chapter additional references for further reading on any particular approach to research are provided. Again, these are not exhaustive, but are certainly more than adequate for the purposes of this text. Further, as a primer, there are also suggested activities for the teacher–practitioner– researcher to test out the advice offered, and there are examples of the research of others in the form of examples, check lists and case studies. The text concludes with a comprehensive bibliography and index. I thoroughly recommend this text for school staff rooms, common rooms, and libraries, with the support of principals and directors of schools who wish to encourage their teaching personnel to engage in practitioner research for their personal professional development, and to inform them about the effectiveness of their craft.

Book Review: Education and Social Change

Amanda Coffey is the co-author with Sara Delamont of Feminism and the Classroom Teacher (RoutledgeFalmer, 2000). I found that a very useful book because it explained with lucidity the impact of postmodernity and poststructuralism on the development of feminist theory as applied to the educational context, so it was with great anticipation that I came to reviewing her new work Education and Social Change. This is a book that claims to offer ‘a sociological commentary on contemporary educational times’ by examining how ‘postmodern discourses of uncertainty and fragmentation’ can exist side by side with ‘emergent rhetorics of economic efficiency, accountability and effectiveness’ (p. 1). The reader seeking an academic text that discusses the sociology of education in an international context may be disappointed by the grounding of the author’s arguments in examples from England and Wales almost exclusively. Nonetheless, the discussion is wide-ranging and there is much in the book that will be of relevance for readers of this journal if they are interested in applying this book’s arguments to their own contexts. In successive chapters, the author discusses auditing education; parents, consumers and choice; educational knowledge(s) and the school curriculum; identities and biographies; pathways, outcomes and difference; and teachers and teaching. The closing chapter addresses the (re)definition of educational research. The chapter on auditing education addresses the implications of inspection regimes that involve the public identification and denigration, also known as ‘naming and shaming’, of schools deemed to be failing to meet and maintain educational standards. The focus of this chapter is the operation of the Ofsted schools inspection framework in England but evidence from other systems, notably Australia and New Zealand, is also included. As Morrell (1989) has argued, the fusion of F. A. Hayek’s vision of individual freedom and the monetarist economic thesis of Milton Friedman, coupled with the Conservative acceptance of a hierarchicaly structured society, informed the Education Reform Act in England and Wales (1988). However, this is not directly discussed by Coffey. In the chapter on parents, consumers and choice – so-called ‘parentocracy’ – she discusses how local management of schools (LMS) has devolved to schools’ management of their budgets so that heads and governors have greater control over their day-to-day running. This policy identifies parents of pupils as the customers of schools, a trend in school management that has led towards the establishment of market competition based on the assumption of rational choice by parents, who are informed by ‘league tables’ for making comparisons between schools. Education has become established within the realms of consumption. This has led to schools becoming involved in public relations – ‘semiotic strategies’ – in order to attract customers. These concepts will not be unfamiliar to those working in international schools, many of which operate independently of state systems and in competitive markets. However, at the same time as Book Reviews