Abstract
Lesley Stagg’s International Mindedness provides the international community of students, parents, and educators with a much longed-for effort to come to grips with the meaning of having a truly global mindset. Beyond these three interest groups, it is also particularly worth reading, analyzing, and implementing by the other stakeholders of the international education community, especially those involved with the administration of international schools who are locally, regionally, or nationally responsible for curriculum development, the positioning of their schools in the community, and the particular ‘brand’ they wish to represent and set off from their competitors in the educational marketplace.
Organized around 13 chapters by altogether 15 contributors, the reader can expect from this book just what the title says; that is, a collection of multidimensional ‘perspectives’, which can be taken as an invitation to take part in the endeavor to put the pieces of the puzzle together and to construct one’s own answer and definition of what constitutes true ‘international mindedness’.
What readers should, however, not expect is a straightforward and definitive treatment, itemized list of criteria, or even just a complex yet at the same time comprehensive answer of what ‘international mindedness’ means. The book’s honest limitation right in the subtitle is appropriate given that the topic is inherently difficult to come to grips with: it is at the same time worldwide in scope (‘international’) and utterly complex (‘mindedness’). Having said that, the reader is immediately welcomed to share the contributors’ efforts to lay a solid and varied foundation of the topic.
The book strings its 13 chapters together without being sub-structured into parts or sections. At first sight, this seems to leave the reader at a loss, not only compared with the widespread practice of breaking up content in such a way but also because of the eclectic spread of the chapter contents (as described below). However, this lack of a superimposed structure makes increasing sense during the reading of the chapters. It begins to transpire that it is probably all but impossible to separate the mesh of personal, institutional, and programmatic strands that run through most of the chapters, which in turn poignantly reflects the reality not only of the field of international education but especially of the topic of international mindedness.
Yet, two strands seem to crystallize implicitly for this reviewer: these are, on the one hand, the institutional dimension and, on the other, the individual dimension of international mindedness. Probably due to the fact that most of the contributors are both active practitioners in secondary educational institutions and researching and publishing academics, there seem to be a larger number of chapters, and within the chapters a larger part of reflections, dedicated to the institutional dimension.
The result is an apparently arbitrary and subjective division of the book into two groups of chapters that are themselves not connected in any chronological order, but for which an order has been synthesized (see below). For easier orientation and to show their spread within the book, the following descriptions of contributions, picked for their embodiment of the book’s structural parts, are indicated with their chapter number upon first mention.
To begin then with the institutionally oriented chapters of international mindedness, these seem to center around four main programmatic aspects of international education, namely: International Schools, International Baccalaureate (IB) Programs, IB Learner Profile, and the International Curriculum.
In relation to international schools, Chris Bayliss’ chapter 4 reminds us of the importance of sowing the seeds of international mindedness in the early years of childhood by making the child aware of all the cultural components that the school and life around it have to offer. At the level of Key Stage 2 students (ages 7–11 years), Richard Bristowe’s chapter 5 concentrates on geographical and project-oriented avenues of raising pupils’ awareness of global issues. Emma Hall’s chapter 8 can be seen as implicitly linking and comparing Bayliss’ and Bristowe’s foci (on cultural elements and worldwide locales, respectively), based on her teaching experiences in three very distinct cultural regions of the world.
Catherine Lockhart’s chapter 6 then specifies several of those authors’ thoughts by focusing on developmental stages and on educational suggestions, organized also according to several regions of the world, that aim at implementing international mindedness in the classroom setting as well as in the teaching of specific subject areas. Graham Ranger’s chapter 10 brings into relief a national focus with his personal observations and experiences within Indian school, faculty, curriculum, and IB Diploma Programs. The IB Program aspect is then taken up again extensively and in detail by Hall.
Walter Plotkin’s chapter 1 could be seen as drawing together the institutional and personal dimensions when providing his own understanding of the answer to the question ‘What is the [IB] Learner Profile?’ Finally, rounding up the personal dimension on issues of the international and specifically the IB curriculum, the contributions by Hall and Ranger, as well as Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson’s chapter 11, thoughtfully cover a wide arena of geographical and learner stage considerations.
Viewed through the lens of this way of structuring the book’s chapters, the stage is then set, and the spotlight is then given to chapters dedicated to the personal dimension of international mindedness. Its contributors, especially Hayden and Thompson, immediately and clearly express their awareness and conviction that ‘ideological aims … cannot be easily separated from their pragmatic counterparts’. They then address the personal (including what they name the ‘ideological’) dimension of international mindedness around the following aspects and thoughts.
Plotkin is mindful of the importance of creative and artistic elements as hallmarks of a truly global education, both inside as well as outside institutional boundaries, by linking ‘open-mindedness’ to ‘open-heartedness’. Isobel Morgado and Ormond Fannon’s chapters 2 and 9, respectively, substantiate this emotional aspect with respect to education in the humanities and in the arts.
Moving from the personal to a political level, Bayliss and Bristowe, as well as Duwyn in chapter 12, go one step further by stipulating education that enables and prepares for a form of global citizenship. In a similar way to Plotkin, they re-connect the personal dimension of the earlier geographical and institutional considerations, which but confirms Hayden and Thompson’s assertion of their inseparability. Hayden and Thompson themselves then deepen the personal dimension with a plea to promote and sensitize learners to intercultural understanding, a concept which they, together with Duwyn, specify with the need to further learners’ linguistic and culture-specific skills.
Finally, and again in tune with their assessment of the close enmeshment of the personal and the institutional dimensions, Hayden and Thompson maintain that terminologically a range of historical and current concept definitions of international mindedness could co-exist. Together with Ranger, they also open the reader’s mind to the possibility of locating these dimensions less in polar opposition, but rather of imagining them as dynamic degrees, or flexible adaptations on movable continua of scales.
Overall, the reader is left with the impression that Lesley Stagg’s book is the first and fundamental step on the way to un-root and then disentangle the multiple and complex strands and ramifications of international mindedness as one of the most recent and crucial dimensions of international education. To use the image of international education’s gift of ‘portable roots’, the reader can share the feeling that those roots have not only been thoroughly analyzed from the perspective of international mindedness but have also gained strength and transferability in the process.
The book’s claimed ‘global perspectives’ thus come across as a genuine offer to share a variety of viewpoints with the reader. Just to underline this assessment with one personal piece of evidence, the book has inspired this reviewer, immediately after its first reading, to contribute to the topic with two conference papers analyzing the personal dimension of international mindedness through the lens of cultural–linguistic autobiographies. From this personal standpoint, the book not only inspires reflection about global, academic, and practical perspectives of international mindedness but also quite effectively spurs the reader to personal educational action and advancement.