SILENT PARTNERS IN MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION by Tuija Itkonen;

SILENT PARTNERS IN MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION by Tuija Itkonen;

Author:Tuija Itkonen; [Itkonen;, Tuija]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Information Age Publishing
Published: 2017-02-16T00:45:01+00:00


Acronym

Responsibility Within the School

FIIS1

Head of School

FIIS2

Upper School Assistant Principal

FRIS1

Founder & President

FRIS2

Marketing & Communication

FRIS3

General Manager*

* Replaced by a new GM end of 2015.

RESULTS

Our analysis focuses on the impact of internationalism as it is understood in two international schools, on the educational practices, school ethos and structure, and the desired student outcomes. We deploy the concept of institutional habitus to observe these influences. Institutional habitus is a useful concept for understanding the translations of internationalism in the two institutions and to analyze the divergences and convergences between them without detaching the schools from their wider social context. Institutional habitus can be discussed through the analysis of its components: educational status, cultural and expressive characteristics, and organizational practices (Reay et al., 2001). First, the educational status refers to the school’s curriculum choice that guides its practices. Second, the cultural and expressive characteristics indicate the school’s ethos that conveys messages of “who we are and how we do things here” and third, the organizational practices tell about the general organization of the school, including its approach to pedagogy and didactics. Before a concise analysis of these components, we explore how the aspects of “international” are understood and put forth within the discourses of our informants in the two schools. These discourses form the conceptual and ideological framework for the school’s institutional habitus.

“International” as a United Divide

The definition of “international” is an important aspect of institutional habitus in international schools, because it is a premise—the schools’ fundamental raison d’être. All international schools claim uniqueness and willingly draw a line between “us” and the “others” regarding competitors in the same region. While each school is inherently different from within and in relation to its surroundings and location (Caffyn, 2010), there is less distinctiveness in the imageries and visions the schools are actually conveying through their public images and branding. Analyzing how 100 international schools worldwide branded themselves on their web pages, Tamatea (2007) observed a reproduction of very similar discourses in terms of outcomes of student profiles and skills that each school is purported to produce. Global responsibility and global citizenship were most often considered as the ultimate goals for students, complemented with attributes such as tolerance, respectfulness, high achievement, confidence, and academic excellence, just to state a few (Tamatea, 2007, p. 161). All these aspirations are recurrent in the international schools worldwide, and actively used in the discourses of our informants as well.

The external facets of internationalism can be objectively measured on the basis of the school’s curricular choices, programs, and the number of nationalities in the student and staff bodies. Indeed, the extent to which a school can demonstrate its internationalism seems to be a question of prestige––the informants of the present study were keen to “prove” the international nature of their school. However, the understanding of internationalism is based on different rationale in the two schools.



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