Abstract
I enjoyed Paul Tarc’s (2009) previous study of the International Baccalaureate (IB), so I welcomed the opportunity to read his latest contribution to thinking about international education. I was not disappointed: Tarc’s book joins a growing list of timely warnings about the Utopian or ‘wishful thinking’ approach to international education which trusts that, given an appropriate set of values, an impressive mission statement and sufficient goodwill, all will be well (Tate, 2012).
Not quite so simple, writes Professor Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza from the University of Sao Paulo in her foreword: [O]ne of the major issues in critical considerations of trans-/inter-cultural/global citizenship education is being able to locate and identify … where one (and one’s interlocutor) is speaking from and to use this awareness as a basis for understanding the ensuing interchanges.
and Tarc adds:
Another challenge was to bring the level of criticality into the largely celebratory and Western-centred imaginaries of international education.
which is not an easy task, given the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the number of English medium international schools (the majority now for profit) and growing international ambitions in response to globalization, in all parts of the education market.
Tarc describes his background and sets out his stall in the Preface. He taught for 7 years in private international schools in the global South (Quito, Ecuador) which is where he first met the IB. In 2009, he developed and started teaching a new course for pre-service education teacher candidates at Western University, Ontario, Canada, entitled International Education: Opportunities and Challenges as part of the university’s mandate to ‘internationalize’. Refreshingly, therefore, we are going to read about teachers and their preparation for, and reaction to, international experiences rather than the students with whom they will be working and about whom there is no shortage of published material.
‘At its core, this book presents an image of literacy as an emergent and ongoing process of subject-making’. Tarc explores this statement with the human sensation of ‘feeling hot’ which depends on previous encounters with the word ‘hot’ and will, in turn, reposition that word in relation to future encounters. I can see what he means, and why it is important, but it is a strange choice of example, given that we have scientific measurements of ‘heat’, as well as of its impact on the human body (degrees of burning). In these uncertain postmodern times, it does no harm to remember that there do exist qualities that can be measured unambiguously.
However, Tarc is interested in the capacity to bear difference and to live with contradiction. I am reminded of the number of times I have urged groups of international educators to avoid the polarizing blacks and whites in order to explore the more subtle shades of grey: but did I have any idea what I actually meant?
‘As an educator and researcher’, writes Tarc, I have become more interested in engaging pedagogical tensions or difficulties that emerge in practices of international education than in refining packages of prescribed knowledge that are to prepare students for international experience or to be ‘globally competent’ … My purpose is to open up for others my situated and partial perspective and thinking on the pedagogical dimensions of international education, gaining prominence in global times.
The first chapter, ‘The Rise of International Education: Expanded Opportunities, New Complications’, describes the contradictions inherent in international education. The idealist’s vision of a more just world is at odds with – or is it? – the need to improve economic performance through international competition. The teacher’s ambition to engage with a new culture also looks quite impressive on her CV. Education for international understanding can quickly run into trouble from those who thought education was for developing a flag-waving sense of national pride and achievement. Finally, active global citizenship can easily turn into inappropriate (and ineffective) charity. I can recognize each of these dilemmas from my time with the International Baccalaureate.
Tarc, while consistently supporting the visionary dimension, insists that
[I]f one is to attempt to re-animate the deeper visions or hopes in international education, it is important to understand the conditions of the contemporary moment in which international education is being advanced.
The second chapter, ‘The Challenge of Learning across Difference’, is a tour de force, based on an exercise developed with the author’s students and, one imagines, hugely enjoyed by them. Tarc uses the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant to explore the pedagogical heart of international education: the capacity to ‘see through another’s eyes’. Six learned but blind men meet an elephant but, since their perception is wholly dependent upon the sense of touch, each of them imagines, and is convinced by, a totally different form, depending on which part of the animal has been touched – the tail, the ear, the trunk and so on. One’s perception of reality depends on which part of reality one is in touch with, and one is usually convinced of the rightness of that perception compared with rival proposals.
Two obvious lessons suggest themselves: move to several parts of the animal and be open to the suggestions of others. But Tarc takes the parable further: each blind man is using culturally inflected language, perhaps inaccessible to the others, to describe his part of the animal; his description will be influenced by similar previous engagements, unique to that person; the engagement of one blind man with another in an attempt to resolve their differences rarely takes place on a level playing field. Gradually, Tarc builds up a set of barriers to learning across difference: the inability of most people to move freely across national borders, language differences, economic poverty, English as the dominant language, the concentration of the means of representing the world into a few, economically powerful hands and the tendency of the media industry to consolidate national cohesiveness. He concludes: So I would at least suggest that ‘seeing through another’s eyes’ is both impossible and ubiquitous; constitutive of our initial relations with our significant others, it remains a lifelong struggle to bear and to learn from radical difference.
The next two chapters, ‘It changed my life! Lessons from Study Abroad’ and ‘Lessons from Overseas Teaching’, examine the experiences respectively of those who have spent structured time, or have taught in a school, in the global South. The transformative international experience is becoming a significant element of many programmes at undergraduate as well as school level (Roberts, 2009), despite the lack of empirical evidence to support its benefits. A detailed case study of an American student who had the temerity to question the value of her semester’s experience in Nepal (at least in terms of its transformative outcomes) is summed up: American students who travel abroad cannot expect to transcend historical, political, social and global systems of power in order to become cross-culturally immersed ‘global citizens’. We can, however, be asked to become internationally conscious and self aware American citizens who are responsible for thinking about those critical issues.
The experiences of the author and his five selected Canadian international school teachers confirm the atoll-like isolation (Allen, 2002) of many international schools producing new juxtapositions of poverty and wealth. The frank observations of these participants have produced a rich resource for those considering an international experience. Transformative it may turn out to be, but quite possibly not in the manner intended.
In the final chapter, Tarc introduces the adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ as preferable to ‘international’ or ‘intercultural’, arguing that it represents an orientation to be outward-looking, interested in engaging and learning from others both inside and outside of one’s local or country, and reflexively aware of how one is situated within these webs of relations.
This brief review cannot do justice to the arguments in favour of cosmopolitan learning and cosmopolitan literacies, but the complexity of Tarc’s writing does not encourage the reader. Let me give one example where he considers three levels of knowledge to be engaged in by learners in contexts of international education: ‘First, there is the more traditional learning about other societies and cultures’ (that’s fine). ‘Second there can be explicit discussion about the difficulties of engaging knowledge as presented in Chapter 2’ (no problem: I remember the excellent Chapter 2). ‘Third there can be the coming to know aspects of one’s interpretive register by becoming attuned to one’s own affective responses signaling inner desires and psychical dynamics shaping and sometimes shutting down meaning making’ (after several readings, I still do not fully understand what that sentence means).
Paul Tarc has written an important book, of potential interest to a wide range of participants in international education. In many ways, it is a rather sombre book, different from the up-beat, self-congratulatory tone sometimes adopted by publications in this field. Nor is it an easy book to read. The effort, however, is certainly worthwhile.