Abstract
In recent years much has been written about ‘global citizens’, as the products of ‘international education’. Here are two books which both examine these questions in the light of research in 2011-12, but which start from different positions and make very different contributions to our understanding. What do their titles tell us? Often the main title is an eye-catcher, and the subtitle explains what to expect. ‘Student identity formation’ (Bagnall) is an ambitious topic which leads us to expect an examination of the central process as well as the development which may result, while the politics of belonging at an international school (Tanu) suggests the social processes and patterns within a school community, an area which has not been a major focus in the literature to date. They differ in aim, theoretical standpoint, discourse, and contribution.
Although these books are written in different discourses they are both interrogating the value added by international education. Bagnall’s slim book reports on an etic survey of students’ self-images; Tanu’s takes twice the length to record a year-long ethnological exploration of one school community using emic methods. Ironically, the idealised product of international education which Bagnall speculates may emerge is far from the actuality revealed by Tanu’s study; it is not the world-wise leader of our progressivist imaginings but the wealthy Anglophone cosmopolitan, who can negotiate a comfortable place in a range of major cities. Recent writing has characterised the natural environment of what Sklair calls ‘the transnational capitalist class’ (Sklair, 2001) as the WEIRD countries: Western, English-speaking, industrialised, rich, democratic. It is these who seem likely to inherit the Earth.
In many ways the methods are diametrically opposite. Bagnall’s exercise framed questions without questioning conventional terminology, an etic investigation in seven schools by three researchers, which duly generated answers. Tanu spent a year immersed in an emic study, questioning the conventional paradigm of expatriation, from which important new dimensions for research have emerged. The difference was precisely what Michael Allan, who sadly died early in 2018, expressed: ‘Artefacts and texts for analysis do not have any independent objective meaning or nature; they have only the interpretations that the various actors place upon them. It is these interpretations that ethnomethodology tries to discover and the task of the researcher is to provide the rich, thick description that shares insights with the readers of research and also enables them to gauge its transferability and plausibility.’ (Allan, 2015, p.146)
At one level the difference is of language. Bagnall’s account is pleasantly approachable, employing what he calls ‘a literary informal style of writing’ (p.34), often citing popular media as well as primary and secondary academic sources. To his credit Bagnall cites the landmark article by Brubaker and Cooper titled ‘Beyond identity’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000), a touchstone which should be read by any author proposing to use the word; unfortunately he does not apply that article’s more serious strictures in his book. Among other admonitions Brubaker and Cooper make a distinction between the language of practice and the language of analysis, the first widely understood as the ‘common-sense’ of practitioners but ill-defined, the second typical of academic discourse but rigorous enough to facilitate analysis and critique. One mode disseminates knowledge while the other can generate it.
Bagnall’s book is a comfortable read, but frequently leaves assumptions undefined and outcomes opaque to analysis. The style is reminiscent of a conscientious undergraduate essay, directing the reader towards useful sources and quoting from them at length. It is a little alarming to find the account of identity relying on extensive passages from Erikson’s work of the 1960s, though there is also some more recent literature up to 2012, the date of the article out of which this book has grown (Bagnall, 2012). Participants in Bagnall’s research were at seven different schools, selected in different ways, and interviewed by three researchers on questions which some were shown in advance; how may they have understood the terms? The importance of clear definition is shown by a survey commissioned by the BBC from GlobeScan on perceptions of national or global identity. It recorded in 2016 that in Nigeria 73% of respondents felt they identified with global rather than national citizenship, in Russia 24%, and in Germany 40% (GlobeScan, 2017), but what does this tell us? Neither ‘national’ nor ‘global’ has universally agreed meaning or significance. And I would stress that there is a further important parameter which is seldom considered: does it matter enough to them to affect their behaviour?
Bagnall offers a useful autobiographical passage illustrating his background and position. It is good to recognise the personal specificity which is brought to the project, but beyond a claim to taking a constructivist position there is a general lack of clarity on the theoretical standpoint he has adopted. The original survey arose from speculation as to whether international education is producing a new kind of global citizen. To explore this question the author used a structured questionnaire as a basis for conversations which he recorded, transcribed and analysed, with a total of 82 student participants. Questionnaires are in the nature of an opinion poll. An expressed view triggered by a question is a speech act, rather than a revealed truth. The generalisability of the views collected depends upon the extent to which all parties have shared understandings of the terms. Uher has recently published some striking evaluations of the variability of professional researchers’ judgements on routine tasks of classification, showing at best 70% and at worst 54% agreement (Uher and Visalberghi, 2016). Even accrediting bodies such as the Council of International Schools merely ask schools to formulate ‘international-mindedness’ in their chosen locally-appropriate terms, so we cannot assume universal understandings in this area.
Questions on students’ feeling of ‘belonging’ tackle a familiar issue, looking at factors of family, history and schools which contribute to feelings of home and belonging. This follows a superficial overview of national and international schools as they were at the time of the work, but lacking space for a proper discussion it might have been safer simply to give an arbitrary definition for the purposes of the current project. The chapter on factors of family and national background contains extensive and absorbing excerpts from conversations with participants. These transcripts show children beginning to make sense of their situation and taking some responsibility for their future. A significant element emerging is the part played by the person’s interaction with host or home communities, in part mediated through language facility. Language is mentioned very briefly. The interviews appear to have all been conducted in English, but since this was second language to many participants its validity may be qualified. Questions about current, past and imagined future friendship groups span a number of issues. Increasingly the electronic social media are revolutionising the social expectations of the millennials, so this must be a speculative topic. The questions ‘where do you picture yourself in five years, ten years, or at your burial’ generate a few sample quotations, but the issue needs more space to develop a significant picture, and even that can only be transient.
The final chapter, seeking to summarise findings on the nature of global identity and belonging, makes an effort to explore understandings of ‘identity’. Though it has previously been used in a largely essentialist way, Bagnall reaches towards a more process-based exposition in terms of belonging: ‘“Identity” refers to the ways in which people link their complex ranges of belonging into an ‘ideal-type’ situation in which all the multiple differences are incorporated into a collective identity, which can be seen as a proxy of infinitely complicated belongings’. It would have been helpful to have developed this theoretical perception more fully, at the outset. The account closes with figures showing how many of the students identified as ‘national citizens’, ‘global citizens’ or ‘unsure’, but given the uncertainty of interpretations and the small size and diversity of the sample, these figures are of limited significance. However, qualitatively the questionnaire which generated these interviews explores a very substantial area for research, and it would be helpful to associate possible input factors with outcomes, given more systematic data and space for reflection. What this book undoubtedly does offer is a rich collection of conversations with students experiencing international education, together with some stimulating triggers for discussion at undergraduate level, where I think this book will be found useful.
There are signs of hasty production. Summaries of chapters are sometimes cut and pasted from the text into a closing paragraph. A few idiosyncrasies of language might have been more rigorously edited. Fact-checking could have been more thorough. The ‘European Community’ was renamed the European Union in 2009, ‘International Baccalaureate Office’ was an early name for what is now the ‘International Baccalaureate’. The ECIS (European Council of International Schools) and its offshoot (not successor) the Council of International Schools are confused, as are the Aga Khan Schools and Aga Khan Academies. The United World Colleges are inaccurately described as all being for 16-20 year olds, Erikson’s foundational book (1968) is incorrectly titled ‘Identity: youth and crises’, and the Baha’i religion is misspelled. Most important is the lack of clarity over meanings attached to terms such as ‘international education’ and ‘global identity’ which are fundamental to the study.
The pace of the book is methodical and thorough. Following an admiring Foreword from Fazal Rizvi, the 18-page preface is an enlightening and necessary account of the author’s own heritage, life and intellectual development, establishing her authority as a quadrilingual emic researcher in several of the student communities. The introduction to the book proper discusses in detail the nature and role of the ‘Third Culture Kid’ paradigm. She states it as the paradigm which initially engaged her in a personal quest to understand her own experience, but which she progressively came to see as one of many possibilities. Original concepts are introduced: ‘transnational youth’ as those children belonging to or experiencing a pluricultural community, a category defined by input factors rather than any supposed outcomes of their development; ‘cosmopolitan’ is applied rather broadly to a range of non-national situations, and is a starting point for more precise definitions: ‘To be clear: this book is not offering a newer, better form of cosmopolitanism or an ideal way of engaging across difference. Rather, it suggests that we study the cosmopolitanism of being international not as a moral, philosophical ideal, but as an empirical, sociological phenomenon’ (p. 21).
The investigation itself is a total immersion over a calendar year. On the basis of looks and stature she was assumed by many Asian students to be one of them, as indeed she had been some 15 years earlier in the other international schools which inspired her curiosity. The conversations are analysed in sophisticated terms, of the nature of the dominant habitus, its relation to postcolonial paradigms, and the mapping of the discursive groups in which this is generated and reproduced. The location, in Jakarta, is interesting; the school has a significant population of local elite families, a pattern which now greatly outnumbers the archetypal model of Western families on non-Western postings.
The empirical approach is applied throughout. The researcher’s communal position allows her to critique not only the national (or more often transnational) groups, but also the various groups within the teaching staff and administration. This illuminates rarely perceived implicit values which permeate the school under study, and many – perhaps all – others of its kind: ‘[R]esearch conducted outside of the discipline of anthropology has tended to reproduce the moral value that society has attached to the notion of being international in their scholarly work rather than interrogating it against its sociohistorical context’ (p.23). It is precisely this objectivity and the methodology that facilitates it which make this book so original.
While the stated mission of the highly respected school is to develop ‘global citizens’ whose loyalty is to the whole of humankind rather than any specific nation, Tanu demonstrates another process dominating students’ behaviour at high school age. There are echoes here of Ogbu’s Cultural-Ecological Theory, which represented immigrant student motivation in terms of contextual forces on the individual and the positions and attitudes taken up by the specific immigrant community in response (Ogbu, 1981). These students are indeed seeking social transition, but in this case within the spectrum of social hierarchy which they see as available to join. The sequence of the hierarchy differs for different social groups. The institution promotes a Western model of ‘internationalism’, based on English language, distance from the ‘local’, ‘Westernised’ behaviour, and mixing with racially different people – but this is only one possibility. Language, however, is more than a norm. It unites those who share it and separates them from those who do not, and is one of the media in which social positions are generated. The administration and teachers normally are Anglophones with limited language range. They create an ‘international’ imaginary in which they themselves are situated, constructing the norms of ‘good internationalism’ as extensions of their Anglophone world, yet excluding Indonesians who have more languages than most native Anglophones.
Membership of any social group is seen as accomplished by accumulation of cultural capital, the values and abilities of a community. The case is strongly made that international schools as they exist at present promote a form of internationalism which reproduces the values of Western capitalism in the process of requiring them as entry qualifications for Western higher education and employment. A consequence of the primacy of Western values is the attitude of the recognised ‘international’ student towards the non-Western nations: Orientalism, exoticism, post-colonial confidence all imply a lower estimation of the value of the host country. Cultural capital is delivered by the school, expected by the parents, and clearly visible to the students who do not have it. Yet the school and the dominant community are unaware of their struggles, or of the possibility of alternative cosmopolitanisms. Wealth should give choice, but the career choices that the privileged make – using English, going to More Developed Countries (MDCs) for universities and work – seem to be automatic rather than options, while those outside strive to adapt.
‘Hanging out’, socialisation in self-selected groups, is revealingly examined. It is ironic that it was precisely the need for a recognising group that sparked the TCK movement, yet a universalist presumption has prevented any recognition that there could be other ways of being cosmopolitan. If all are judged on one scale, differences can only indicate superior or inferior position, a perception revealed by claims that something is ‘the best in the world’. A chapter explores examples of invisible diversity, absent from the literature because it is the experience of the voiceless, yet powerfully felt by students. While administrators readily use the passport as a categorical signifier, within any group – nation or language, class or gender – the members can feel sub-groups. I would add a point which is seldom made, that expatriation, especially if repeated, reduces the number of salient attachments which the child retains, altering the proportions of their social world. If the only people who are consistently close and involved are the nuclear family, the intensity of emotional attachment to other social contacts who might be social models is narrowed and weakened. ‘Belonging’ will simply have a different meaning, whether applied to place or community. Diasporic groups would be interesting to study in these terms.
The chapter on race and romance touches on a delicate area, and as might be expected leaves much unsaid. Nevertheless it supports the findings of other explorations, and confirms the sense that adolescence is the time of recognition of national identity and increasing self-segregation, as Minoura (1992) has suggested. This might be because the consequences of nationality such as access to developed countries, or national service, are becoming more immediate issues, or perhaps because sensitivity to cultural tuning (Bourdieu’s ‘miraculous encounters’, as the author notes) is maturing (Bourdieu, 1990). Since many students are of mixed race, superficial indicators of appearance may not be decisive indicators of social grouping. ‘International’ institutions such as Model United Nations or International Days may comfort some but challenge others, offering only the taxonomy of the UN in which to find a home. Tanu shows how in practice students may position themselves variously according to the political opportunities currently available to them. Regardless of the categories imposed in etic research, the lived reality offers options which grant comfort in an uncertain context. For some the co-national group, the despair of many international school teachers, is their refuge; for others a supranational group accessible through language, sport, or other competences may be the accepting community. This range of possibilities is not accessible to researchers through the conventional etic taxonomies of groups.
The concluding chapter is a short and articulate reiteration of the role of internationalism in the discourse of international schools, drawn from work in one school but recognisable in many others. The implicit message in several thousand school mission statements is that they offer access to Sklair’s ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Sklair, 2001), and this is what most families are seeking. It is not explicit in the rhetoric, but it is the felt reality for students. This finding may be uncomfortable for us researchers from the dominant global community, but if we find the analysis convincing – and I for one do – then it opens our eyes to an exciting field of research. Though the method is restricted to older students, it uses a model closer to the actuality of students’ experience than formerly. Given the structures that have been recognised, and the power relations that are evident, the field is open for investigation using sociological, anthropological, and perhaps psychological methods. As Allan concluded: ‘The significance of developing a deep understanding of schools and their social organizations is that only by doing so can research reliably inform the policies and practices of international education.’ (2015 p.156). This ground-breaking book offers a foundation for studies in the new generation of international schools.