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…

Traditionally serving expatriate elites, international schools now increasingly cater to local middle-class families in developing countries. With the industry's explosive growth, attention turns to the role of expatriate teachers in preserving the institutional legitimacy of non-traditional international schools. However, expatriate teachers'…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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:…