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Although international school teachers have always been hired on short-term contracts (usually from two to three years in duration), there has been relatively little research examining this aspect of international schooling. Whilst short-term contracts may appear to be a positive feature of international schooling, particularly for younger teachers who are keen to be mobile, recent studies have begun to examine the short-term as a feature of precarity and the precaritisation of international schooling. This paper adds to this small but growing body of scholarship by focusing on contract non-renewal as a form of international school precarity. In order to explore this issue, this paper utilises autoethnography, drawing on the author's experiences of contract renewal in an internationalised school in Shanghai, as well as interviews with two participants. Whilst the author's experiences of precarity as a foreign teacher in China were characterised by vulnerability and discrimination, his positionality as a white, British male teacher enabled him to negotiate contract non-renewal relatively easily, something that women teachers or minority groups might be unable to do due to the differential nature of precarity. Despite being privileged, white male international school teachers must still negotiate contractual employment and diminished white-skin privilege. This paper goes some way to bringing into focus white male teachers' "precarious privilege".

The global education reform movement has led to the development of quasi-markets and the promotion of business-like operation of schools with the goal of improving education for students and opportunities for teachers. While many types of schools have been influenced by marketisation, the international school market is a prime example of how such processes can be fully integrated into education. However, despite the prevalence of market reforms, little is known of their impact on educational employees. This research investigates the perspectives and experiences of teachers in compulsory-age international schools operated by large multi-national for-profit education management organisations to understand how business-like operations within a school market affect their daily work. Semi-structured interviews were used to create items to measure the business influences. Scales were then developed with Mokken Scale analysis and Rasch analysis. The two scales demonstrate distinct patterns of marketisation. The scale of direct business influences on teachers' work includes items on competition between schools, increasing admissions and improving finances, while the scale of indirect influences includes items about job insecurity, hierarchical organisational structures, fear of repercussions when voicing professional opinions, and an emphasis on evidence of learning. Notably, these quantitative patterns were consistent across many different types of schools, both for-profit, non-profit private schools and government schools. These findings demonstrate the strength of researching teachers' experiences to understand the impact of marketisation on education.

Work-related temporary migration became more common recently among privileged groups of global professionals. This globally mobile middle-class cohort typically place their children in international schools. Such international schools usually teach in English, follow a different curriculum from local schools, and have a wide cultural mix. Our study provides new data on the barely documented parental involvement of this emerging cohort of the globally mobile middle classes. We examine, using Bourdieu's framework, how these parents seek to maintain their status and advance the cultural capital of their children despite their loss of nationally based class reproduction strategies. Our analysis applied a qualitative approach, using data from 28 interviews with parents from five international schools in Limassol, Cyprus. We show how variations on traditional middle class school involvement at international schools help families accumulate cultural, social, and cosmopolitan capital.

This paper critically surveys four typologies that have been used to identify and understand international school teachers. The critique highlights two main limitations with the typologies. The first, ontological in nature, is that reifying teachers as a type does not capture the complexity of lived experience. The second, ethico-political in nature, is that labelling marginalises the teacher in the research process. Research is done on, rather than with, teachers. This paper's central argument is that the typology represents a form of symbolic violence that silences teachers' voices. In order to address the issues highlighted above, this paper proposes an alternative approach to researching international school teachers, which is situated within postmodern accounts of identity and relational ethics. This paper's contribution lies in highlighting the limitations of typologising international school teachers and teachers in general and proposing an alternative approach that reconfigures the researcher-teacher dyad within the context of a relationship of care, mutual respect and negotiation.

The IB DP is widely perceived as a globally recognised, outstanding international curriculum by a growing number of education scholars and policymakers in South Korea. Recently, education authorities from certain provinces have taken steps to adopt the IB DP in public high schools, contending that the programme will improve and galvanise teaching practices to be student-centred and inquiry-based. It is important to emphasise, however, that this ambitious belief lacks empirical research evidence. To address such research gaps, this study interviewed 13 Korean graduates who participated in the IB DP from a wide range of international schools and currently attend higher education institutes in Korea. Major findings revealed that, contrary to the dominant perceptions in Korea (and probably elsewhere), the participants had ambivalent feelings about the curriculum and instructions of the IB DP. Findings also demonstrated that the participants' experiences of the international curriculum were affected by local contextual factors such as school ethos, academic culture and belief systems, not just by the educational philosophy of the IB DP. As findings portrayed gaps between the academic principles of the IB DP and experiences of students, this study contends both Korean policymakers and international scholars to carefully consider the potential implications of enacting the IB DP in local school systems. As curriculum change is nestled within a web of global-local dynamics, more context-specific knowledge is needed to understand how students will participate in the IB DP.

Drawing on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools across the world, this article explores how elite schools prepare students for an increasingly interconnected world characterised by difference and competition through global citizenship education. In this exploration, I identify the four domains that give meaning to global citizenship education within elite contexts: "cultural," "relational," "emotional," and "material." These domains reveal the ways in which these schools are responding to the challenges of globalisation by providing students opportunities to develop awareness and knowledge of differences, to establish and maintain relationships across differences, to gain a sense of obligation towards others, and to accumulate valuable forms of human and cultural capital. Through globally-oriented practices, students are being prepared to be flexibly mobile, to imagine themselves as leaders within a globalised world and to thrive in the hypercompetitive and unpredictable global knowledge economy. These practices play an important part of elite schools' larger strategy of making and remaking elites.

International schools in China have enjoyed soaring popularity in recent years. Many of these schools adopt curricular forms and/or school brands originating from the US, UK or Canada, and they brand themselves as American-style ("meishi"), British-style ("yingshi") and Sino-Canadian ("zhongjia") international schools respectively. Beyond this general observation about the different types of international schools, there is little empirical research done to understand how these different international schools position themselves "differently" in the national field of international schooling in China. Our study takes a transnational analytic perspective because international schools are models that travel. Our comparative and multiple case study of international schools from three Chinese cities aims to throw light on the idiosyncratic differences of these international schools, highlight commonalities they share, and point out issues and challenges in their transnational practices. We draw from the theory of positional good as our theoretical framing, but update this theory with a discussion about international schools to suit the context of our research. The paper concludes with a call for more governmental efforts to regulate and support the international school sector.

The diverse arena of International Schooling concerned with schools delivering a non-local curriculum in English largely outside an English-speaking nation, has grown enormously during the current wave of globalisation. Traditionally, the arena of "International Schools" played an intended ideological and pragmatic role, albeit in a rather discrete and peripheral manner which in practice facilitated an exclusive schooling experience for a limited and already privileged transnational elite clientele. Its growing appeal and access to a wider, localised clientele is now a key source of tension. A period of fast-paced, reactionary policy-making in areas such as China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Qatar, has quickly and rather quietly ushered in a new, diverse provision of private international schooling, supported by a complex global package of commercially-driven support-agencies and backed by private equity. Further, a body of state-backed "Public International Schools" are discretely beginning to appear, offering an entirely new arena of activity. Moreover, there is evidence that much of this is occurring without national debate or awareness, creating a newer and more complex form of "crypto-growth". The arena of International Schools now competes directly within the national sphere of education, raising both their political profile and critical discussion about their emergent purpose and intentions. The role now seems much more blurred and problematic, and tensions are beginning to appear at a local and national level adding to the sense of insecurity and precarity.

In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) added to their PISA regime the assessment of "global competence". Given this novel, data-driven approach to governing the internationalisation of K-12 education, this study compares this recent intervention to a longer-standing mode of governing for the pedagogical ideals of international education -- the approach of the International Baccalaureate (IB) across its 50-year lifetime. It employs a comparative, critical discursive analysis of how these two influential transnational organisations advance the pedagogical ideals of international education in neoliberal times. It illuminates the history and development of the IB's soft governing for "international mindedness" and the OECD's more recent approach to governing for "global competence" via PISA. As an entity without state authority, the IB has used a regime of centralised examinations for curricular control and quality assurance in the international schools where it was first adopted. However, IB has never attempted to use formal assessment as a direct technique of governing for international mindedness. Arguably, its liberal-humanist foundations and the need for "malleability" of IB across its many sites of adoption has mitigated from taking a too direct approach to its idealist ambitions. Whereas OECD's testing for "global competence" is more ambitious and problematic. Despite the OECD's use of liberal and social-justice vocabulary, its human capital development orientation remains active in its neoliberal conception of global competence. Contrasting these two transnational modalities of governing for the pedagogical ideals of international education, offers insights into the trends and prospects of internationalisation of K-12 education.

Using the notion of "flexible citizenship", this paper examines how Chinese international secondary school students accumulate and exchange different forms of capital as governed by their transnational social networks. This study draws on data from a 14-month ethnographic field study on the transnational lives of 11 Chinese students in a Canadian international secondary school. This study illustrates that the instrumental dimension of "flexible citizenship" produced both opportunities and tensions in student participants' lives when their new and existing social relations converged to mediate their transnational lives and trajectories. The force of multiple transnational actors to maximise opportunities exerted emotional pressures on students and caused relational tensions. In addition, when the participating students encountered challenges in broadening social connections in the host society, they solidified home social connections for emotional support and further academic and career development, although such practices constrained their effort in intercultural learning for embodied cultural capital. This paper advocates that beyond the governmental logic of instrumental "flexible citizenship", all social actors should gain more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of students' lives and their relational and emotional development. Additionally, Chinese students may be given more freedom in enacting their agency to engage with their transnational and intercultural lives in the ways they desire rather than those that are desired by external social forces.

The recent growth in the number and diversity of schools around the world classified as "International Schools" raises questions about what makes a school's claim to be an International School legitimate. From the analysis we report here, the provision of an international curriculum emerges as what a school must do to be legitimate as an International School. It is an International School's primary task and those in such a school ideally undertake institutional work on that task. We consequently bring the idea of the institutional primary task into institutionalisation theory where it assumes a significant but previously unacknowledged place and a key consideration in institutional legitimacy. In the article, we use the provision of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme in an International School to illustrate the notions of the institutional primary task and the pillars and carriers of institutionalisation in practice. The analyses reported in the article develop understandings of International Schools and institutionalisation theory.

This paper explores the effects of the internationalisation of higher education on the working lives of academics at an offshore campus in eastern Malaysia. Using the interpretivist paradigm and grounded theory methods it investigates their perspectives on various themes as those emerge during a series of interviews. These emerging themes are: "Professional Practice", "Communication", "Quality Assurance" and "Curriculum Issues". These themes are interrelated, are tied together with the anchor theme of "serving two masters" and expose important areas that need to be monitored by both the offshore and Australian partners in order to ensure the quality and success of their cooperation in the long term.

The global education reform movement has led to the development of quasi-markets and the promotion of business-like operation of schools with the goal of improving education for students and opportunities for teachers. While many types of schools have been influenced by marketisation, the international school market is a prime example of how such processes can be fully integrated into education. However, despite the prevalence of market reforms, little is known of their impact on educational employees. This research investigates the perspectives and experiences of teachers in compulsory-age international schools operated by large multi-national for-profit education management organisations to understand how business-like operations within a school market affect their daily work. Semi-structured interviews were used to create items to measure the business influences. Scales were then developed with Mokken Scale analysis and Rasch analysis. The two scales demonstrate distinct patterns of marketisation. The scale of direct business influences on teachers' work includes items on competition between schools, increasing admissions and improving finances, while the scale of indirect influences includes items about job insecurity, hierarchical organisational structures, fear of repercussions when voicing professional opinions, and an emphasis on evidence of learning. Notably, these quantitative patterns were consistent across many different types of schools, both for-profit, non-profit private schools and government schools. These findings demonstrate the strength of researching teachers' experiences to understand the impact of marketisation on education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although international school teachers have always been hired on short-term contracts (usually from two to three years in duration), there has been relatively little research examining this aspect of international schooling. Whilst short-term contracts may appear to be a positive feature of international schooling, particularly for younger teachers who are keen to be mobile, recent studies have begun to examine the short-term as a feature of precarity and the precaritisation of international schooling. This paper adds to this small but growing body of scholarship by focusing on contract non-renewal as a form of international school precarity. In order to explore this issue, this paper utilises autoethnography, drawing on the author's experiences of contract renewal in an internationalised school in Shanghai, as well as interviews with two participants. Whilst the author's experiences of precarity as a foreign teacher in China were characterised by vulnerability and discrimination, his positionality as a white, British male teacher enabled him to negotiate contract non-renewal relatively easily, something that women teachers or minority groups might be unable to do due to the differential nature of precarity. Despite being privileged, white male international school teachers must still negotiate contractual employment and diminished white-skin privilege. This paper goes some way to bringing into focus white male teachers' "precarious privilege". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work-related temporary migration became more common recently among privileged groups of global professionals. This globally mobile middle-class cohort typically place their children in international schools. Such international schools usually teach in English, follow a different curriculum from local schools, and have a wide cultural mix. Our study provides new data on the barely documented parental involvement of this emerging cohort of the globally mobile middle classes. We examine, using Bourdieu's framework, how these parents seek to maintain their status and advance the cultural capital of their children despite their loss of nationally based class reproduction strategies. Our analysis applied a qualitative approach, using data from 28 interviews with parents from five international schools in Limassol, Cyprus. We show how variations on traditional middle class school involvement at international schools help families accumulate cultural, social, and cosmopolitan capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private international education is on the rise, but we still have limited knowledge on how different commercial actors operate in this field and how it affects local teachers and their work in the schools abroad. Swedish school companies have been active in exporting schooling in the international arena, including “Swedish” education models. In this article, we examine one company and their operations in India. We explore the interpretations of the company education model by teachers in the Indian schools, and how this affects their professional capacity. Mixed qualitative methods of interviews, on-site school visits and documentary reviews, were used to examine the possibilities for teachers to exercise professional agency within their working environment. Our findings show that teachers operate within a highly structured pedagogical environment characterised by a given curriculum, a centralised learning platform and training programme, and a set of dominant discourses around values and teaching practices. Teachers are expected to embrace a new professional identity in a process of discarding past experiences and adopting the new professional language given by the company's particular education model. In willingly embracing the company discourses and expectations, teachers’ agency tends to be constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Commentary reflects upon the articles in this Special Issue to provide an overview and discussion of their core arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting the growing spotlight on international schooling over the last three decades, this special issue aims to illuminate how education is straddling complex tensions between global and national forces across various contexts. Taking a comparative perspective, the special issue addresses the following key questions: How does the growing provision of and desire for international programmes affect education not only in international schools but also in other types of schools in their local/regional/national/international arenas?; How are schools across diverse contexts engaging with what international programmes represent as a global education for a global future?; How might a focus on "the global" facilitate or undermine engagement with local and national citizenship?; How have public schools and local governments responded to the expansion of international programmes into national education systems?; How are the educational opportunities and experiences of marginalised communities influenced? Eight research articles and a commentary in the special issue deepen our understanding of the changing nature of international schooling and its influence on national education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of a literature review conducted from 2005 to 2013 on the elements involved when a school internationalises. In the past there has been predominant focus on the teachers or the international students at schools with little emphasis on a whole school approach to internationalisation. This review considers the body of literature on internationalisation and synthesises the findings using a stage play metaphor to construct the ideal performance of a school-wide approach to internationalising. The first act by the school leadership is that of organising and managing the school, the second act involves the international student and their experience, and the third and final act is that of the teachers and their pedagogy. This literature review presents all the elements through the acts, key roles and essential scenes for the best performance of a school for internationalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]