Social class and the construction of international mindedness: A comparative study of International Baccalaureate schools in Ecuador

Introduction

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is an educational foundation established in 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland. It first emerged in response to a growing demand by an internationally mobile student population for a high school diploma that had currency across multiple higher education settings, particularly in North America and Europe. During its early years, the IB mostly catered to fee-paying international schools (Hill, 2002). More recently, however, the foundation has made a deliberate effort to move ‘away from its ‘international school movement’ base towards more involvement with national schooling’ (Bunnell, 2011, p. 170). In addition to expanding the IB’s geographic reach, these efforts have gradually led to a change in its student population, especially since national school systems have begun turning to the IB as a means of improving the quality of public education and of providing an educational alternative for gifted children. While the IB originally catered to international schools that levied what some would consider prohibitive tuition fees, more recently approximately 56% of IB schools are publicly funded (IB, 2017), many of them serving low-income students (Conner, 2008).

This growing spread in geographic and student diversity has spurred a great deal of scholarly interest in understanding how context mediates the construction of international mindedness (IM), a central tenet of the IB’s philosophy of education. The IB defines IM as ‘an attitude of openness to, and curiosity about, the world and different cultures. It is concerned with developing a deep understanding of the complexity, diversity and motives that underpin human actions and interactions’ (IB, 2009, p. 4). An admittedly flexible concept envisioned as ‘being nuanced or adapted to suit a cultural setting’ (p. 5), IM is often associated with matters related to multilingualism, intercultural understanding, and global engagement (Singh and Qi, 2013).

In response to IM’s undergirding flexibility, numerous studies have attempted to discern the different iterations of the concept while also endeavoring to establish a common ground for best practices. Although this body of research does include considerable contextual breadth, it has primarily focused on how a school’s cultural surroundings and institutional practices inform both the construction of IM and its employment as a pedagogical practice. Despite the IB’s growing presence in low-income spaces, matters related to social class have largely been neglected.

The goal of this article is to address this gap by examining how students inhabiting distinctive social spaces and experiencing markedly different material realities define, value and problematize the concept of IM. In order to foreground ‘social class’ as my main analytical lens I drew on Bourdieu (1987, 1990, 1996), paying special attention to the concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘social space’. Through this framing I examined the manner in which students’ social class backgrounds informed how IM was conceived and its perceived value as a personal disposition. The decision to include social class as my main analytical lens was not only an attempt to better reflect the growing diversity of students currently enrolled in an IB program, but also a critical step in ensuring that the concept of IM has relevance for all students, including those in marginalized positions.

To examine the intersection between students’ social class backgrounds and constructions of IM, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study of two IB schools in Ecuador; a low-income public school and an exclusive private school. Through this comparative study I found that while students from distinct social backgrounds provided similar overarching definitions of what IM entails, they differed on what they considered to be both the value and potential pitfalls of embodying the concept as a personal disposition. These differences emerged primarily as a result of how students related to their immediate surroundings and the assumptions they held about their future lives. Focusing on constructions of ‘place’ and ‘imagined futures’ provides an important and often ignored insight into how students are relating to the concept of IM, and further affirms why matters related to social class deserve a greater degree of scholarly attention. Before detailing the methodological considerations and the findings, I will provide a brief overview of the historical events that directly inform the IB’s role in Ecuadorian education, as well as reviewing existing literature on the concept of IM. Together, these two sections are intended to provide context and clarity to the article.

Ecuadorian public education: struggles and new directions

The current state of Ecuador’s public schools is a direct byproduct of both a decade-long financial crisis and recent efforts to ameliorate the ensuing effects it has had on education. The Ecuadorian financial crisis was the result of a cascading series of events that included plunging oil prices, political instability, and a liberalized financial system that had limited regulatory power. The crisis reached its apex in 1999, a year in which the country’s economy contracted by 7.3 percent of GDP and poverty rates skyrocketed to 40 percent (Jokisch and Pribilsky, 2002). With the country on the precipice of collapse, the national government implemented a number of policies aimed at mitigating the effects of the crisis, such as slowing the rates of inflation by substituting the country’s currency with the US dollar. Additionally, austerity measures were imposed which included sharp cutbacks in government spending on education. For instance, while in 1981 government spending on education was 5.4 percent of GDP, by the year 2000 it had decreased to 1.8 percent (Isch, 2011).

Decreased government spending on education had two notable and long-term effects. First, the quality of public schooling dramatically declined, with students consistently displaying deficient mathematical and language skills. In 1996, for example, Ecuadorian fourth graders were ranked the lowest in both subject areas within the Latin American region (Resnik, 2014). The low quality of education in Ecuadorian public schools compelled urban middle-class parents to move their children to private institutions, leading to an even sharper divide between the country’s elite and the primarily poor remainder of the population (Arcos, 2008). Tamayo (2014) claims that in the absence of an active middle-class, public education became ‘politically orphaned’ (p. 13), leading to a complete neglect of public schools.

As the financial crisis subsided, education became a focal point for both policymaking and state investment. Under Rafael Correa’s administration (2007-2017), numerous reforms were implemented aimed at improving the quality of the country’s public schools. Initiatives to bolster educational quality included the creation of a national evaluation system, a proposed curriculum reform, increased teacher wages and plans to boost government spending on education to 6% of GDP (Isch, 2011). In addition to proposing new initiatives, Correa’s administration also sought to expand existing policies that were viewed as being effective in improving the country’s public schools. This included broadening a small-scale initiative known as the Inserción de Bachillerato Internacional en colegios fiscales del Ecuador into a nation-wide movement. Signed by Correa’s presidential predecessor, the initiative introduced the pre-university IB Diploma Programme (DP) into 17 public schools throughout the country. Enthused by the program’s potential, Correa’s administration decided to gradually introduce the IB DP into many of the country’s approximately 1400 public secondary schools (Barnett et al., 2013). As at January 2020 there were 270 public and private schools in Ecuador offering one or more of the IB programmes, meaning that Ecuador only trailed the United States and Canada in terms of the number of IB schools in the country.

According to commonly employed metrics, the policies implemented by Correa’s administration have had a positive overall effect on the country’s public education. Enrollment rates, for example, grew between 2005 and 2016 from 53 to 87 percent. Furthermore, recent scores from the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) placed Ecuador on par with Brazil and Peru, countries it previously trailed by a considerable margin (Schneider et al., 2019). Despite these improvements, the public and private divide in schooling is still present more recently, with 27% of students still enrolled in private institutions (World Bank, 2017). Similar to trends across the continent, the public-private divide in Ecuador reflects a highly stratified education system based almost entirely on students’ socio-economic backgrounds (Murillo and Garrido, 2017).

International Mindedness: Framings and Tensions

When the IB was first established it consisted of a comprehensive education program catering for students in the last two years of their high school education. As demand for an internationally accredited diploma gradually increased, the foundation began to reconsider both its role and purpose in education. This led to the decision to broaden the IB’s educational provision to include students in lower grade levels. The result was the addition of the Middle Years Programme (MYP) in 1994, the Primary Years Programme (PYP) in 1997 and, most recently, the Career-Related Programme in 2006 (IBO, 2020). The IB’s original programme focusing on the last two years of high school was known as the Diploma Programme (DP). These different programs were envisioned as a continuum; however, schools are allowed to implement each independently (IB, 2020).

While each program contains subtle differences in structure and emphasis, they are philosophically aligned and share a similar approach in teaching. Central to all is the aim to promote the concept of international mindedness (IM). Although framed as a guiding principle that enables cross-program coherence, IM is a contentious concept underscored by numerous interpretations and competing definitions. Castro et al. (2015) note that ambiguity provides schools and their numerous constituents with the necessary agency to construct conceptual understandings in a manner that is responsive to their own national and political contexts. Yet, vagueness also promotes the risk that IM may become a ‘conceptual dumping ground for an extremely wide variety of activities and features’ (Skey, 2013, p. 238; see also Cause, 2011)

In light of this ambiguity, numerous scholars have engaged with research aimed at discerning how IM is being both understood and employed in a wide variety of contexts (Alfrod et al., 2013; Belal, 2017; Doherty and Shield, 2012; Loh, 2012; Poonoosamy, 2016; Barratt Hacking et al, 2018). In large, these studies highlight the numerous considerations and challenges schools and teachers face in their efforts to recontextualize IM and incorporate it as a guiding pedagogical practice suitable for local usage. Tamatea’s (2008) study of international schools in Malaysia and Brunei, for instance, highlighted how inter-ethnic and inter-racial relationships mediated teachers’ engagement with the IB’s curricular content, including notions of IM. Meanwhile, Lai et al. (2014) found that an examination-oriented educational culture prevalent in IB schools in Hong Kong constrained teachers’ engagements with the concept.

Rather than stressing the conditions that inhibit the concept’s use, Barratt Hacking et al (2018) conducted a study of nine IB schools which were purposefully selected due to their promising practices with IM. While each school presented nuanced differences in how they understood and operationalized the concept, they shared a common understanding that IM is a relational disposition, consisting of ‘learning to understand and respect [other people’s] point of view even if we do not agree with them’ (p. 9). Besides, all schools stressed the importance of conceiving IM as an embedded philosophy present in all school-based practices, rather than solely viewing it as a required classroom activity.

Framing IM as a relational disposition is an important first step in establishing a shared language and a concrete framework for future engagement with the concept. A common critique, however, is that these emerging understandings fail to differentiate IM adequately from other well-established ideologies such as multiculturalism and interculturalism. Through an analysis of the existing literature, Savva and Stanfield (2018) found that although closely related, dominant definitions of IM include important points of departure primarily related to the concept’s origin and intended audience. Unlike the original focus of multiculturalism and interculturalism on diversity within national boundaries, IM’s emergence within international schools allowed it to function outside the purview of a single national entity. The concept’s close association to international schools also had important implications as to who was expected to embody IM as a personal disposition. Whereas multiculturalism foregrounded some sort of inclusion process for marginalized communities, IM was for the most part ‘designed to serve otherwise privileged children across the globe’ (p. 185).

The concept’s origin, as Savva and Stanfield (2018) note, is inextricably linked to international schools that mostly cater to an affluent student population. Since its inception, the IB has expanded to now include a greater diversity of schools and students. While the current literature has demonstrated that context does inform the meanings and values ascribed to IM, matters related to social class have been largely neglected. This oversight is in part due to the difficulty of establishing the clear divide needed for comparative work that employs social class as its main analytical lens. As multiple studies have noted (Dickson et al., 2017; Doherty et al., 2012; Perna et al., 2014), low-income students are still highly under-represented, despite the IB’s growth in public schools. The presence of the IB in Ecuadorian public schools, coupled with the pronounced social stratification in the country’s education system, provides an interesting context for the examination of the intersection of social class and the concept of IM.

Methodology

The methodological considerations undergirding this study are directly informed by how I am construing the concept of social class. Heavily influenced by the work of Bourdieu (1987, 1990), I am employing a cultural view of social class which considers the symbolic and identity-forming implications of material inequality. Through this conceptualization, I attempt to move away from an economistic understanding restricted to matters of income and occupation, to consider how social class is imbued by everyday social processes, or what Weis and Dolby (2012) refer to as ‘practices of living’.

Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus provides an important entry point into culturalist understanding of social class. Habitus is roughly defined as the formative relationship between individuals and the socio-cultural environment they are part of. It is premised on the belief that the cognitive templates and corporal dispositions individuals embody over time are largely unconscious and a byproduct of a situated form of habit and habituation. A focus on the situatedness of habit suggests that an individual’s habitus emerges as a result of a shared form of experience, meaning that different social groups tend to abide by similar dispositional characteristics (see Waters, 2007). Through the concept of habitus, my goal is to examine the systems of meaning and ways of being that inform engagement with the concept of IM of individuals of different social class backgrounds. To engage effectively with this goal, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study focusing on the lived experiences and understandings of IB DP students; some enrolled in an exclusive private school and others in a low-income public school.

It is important to stress that while social class is being discussed here as a discrete phenomenon, as a concept it must be conceived as emerging from a complex historical process which includes racial, gendered and colonial dimensions. However, heeding Willis’ (2004) advice that ‘unless there is a moment in our analysis that separates larger forces and relations, we are in danger of presenting a depthless view of the world’ (p. 171), I will not attempt to discern these different dimensions and their implications for social class in the context of Ecuador. The goal here is not to provide a definitive answer to the mediating influence of social class on IM, but rather to use the sites of study to highlight the import of the concept and its relevance for future research for both the IB specifically and for international education more broadly.

Social class and understandings of ‘place’

Place is much more than the bounded physical landscape in which life unfolds. It is also how a particular location is imagined, experienced and understood by the people who inhabit it (Hammad, 2011). Weiner (2002) notes that in contemporary anthropology there are two competing accounts of human relations to notions of place. The first emphasizes the centrality of place in individuals’ social and cultural lives. The other highlights the transience and rootlessness that is increasingly becoming a defining feature of individuals and communities around the world. Students’ narratives in this study provide evidence of both, showcasing both attachment and estrangement. These differences in description and ascribed meaning were directly informed by students’ social class backgrounds. While UECT students demonstrated a deep affinity to their localities, St Thomas students largely expressed both unease and a lack of interest in engaging with their immediate surroundings.

One defining difference between St Thomas and UECT students’ narratives was the importance given to public spaces. UECT students described public spaces as being central to their daily lives and leisure. Roberto, an IB student and avid soccer fan who lived in the outskirts of the city, highlighted the importance of public parks and community organized events in his family’s weekend activities. He stated, ‘Well, I play soccer in the ‘ligas barriales’. Sometimes my father also plays. These are leagues of the different families of my neighborhood, so I play in a team with my uncles and cousins’. St Thomas students, on the other hand, noted that issues of safety often limited their mobility, restricting their access to private spaces inhabited by people who shared their same social characteristics. Paola, the daughter of a well-known public figure, observed:

We live in a bubble and our parents protect us. And we are in a place where we don’t take buses. Probably like 70% of the school doesn’t know how to take a bus. We don’t take taxis . . . we have drivers, or our parents come. And I think that closes us [off from] the reality we live in.

The school shared similar concerns about security, evidenced by the high walls, barbed wire fence, and the numerous security guards who roamed the campus perimeter.

St Thomas students routinely described their social lives as being ‘in a bubble’ and ‘separated from the rest of the country’. Some lamented this reality, noting that it inhibited their ability to truly cultivate a sense of belonging to the social environment that surrounds them. The majority, however, did not view this form of separation as being problematic. Students expressed a greater affinity to distant locations that were constructed through an amalgamation of images drawn mostly from international travel and media consumption. Mario, one of the school’s most academically promising students, noted that ‘a lot of people here are really into American culture, me as well, me included. There are some people that do it out of, I don’t know [pause] I think they actually feel like they are American’. As will be discussed shortly, these affinities directly informed students’ aspirations and how they imagined their future lives.

UECT students were acutely aware that their experiences were notably different from their private school counterparts. They perceived private school students as living a distinctly different social reality, often portraying it as being disassociated from Ecuadorian values and norms. Juan José, a former student and current teacher, described private school students as being ‘children of the elite that are always looking north (in reference to the United States)’. In a longer exchange, Macarena, a quiet and studious student who always sat in the front row, highlighted the differences between her public-school peers and their private school counterparts:

I believe that private schools, since they are supposed to be of a higher class, they forget about Ecuador and its traditions. We have more roots in what really is Ecuador. And we know, so to speak, the local eateries, the places of Ecuador. Knowing where to eat, the simple fact of eating street food or eating in the corner shop as we call it here. On the other hand, private school students only go to refined restaurants or restaurants from other countries. They eat sushi, so to speak.

The idea that public school students had ‘more roots’ in Ecuador was acknowledged by students from both schools and explicitly evidenced during classroom observations. UECT students actively attempted to forge connections between the internationally-focused course content and the historical process and current events that were unfolding in the country. For instance, during an English class, students were asked to debate the advantages and disadvantages of being a third culture kid (TCK) – a concept they had recently learned. In the midst of the discussion one student noted ‘I think we are TCK, since we are a mixture of native with other cultures and countries’. This comment led to an active conversation about what it means to be Ecuadorian and whether the students’ own identities could be constructed through a TCK framework.

Students often established these connections through their own initiatives. Teachers, however, played an important role in facilitating these types of discussion. When I inquired about what seemed to be a deliberate effort to link the course content to Ecuadorian politics and current events, Juan José provided the following explanation:

Here we try to make these connections with the themes we engage with. We connect, for example, the civil rights in the United States, right? in the 1960s with the struggle of the peasants [in Ecuador]. Our references, our grounding is always here.

Meanwhile, St Thomas students did not attempt to make this type of connection. For example, history students also spent three weeks learning about the civil rights movement in the United States. Not once was there an effort to draw comparisons between what was being learned and the ongoing and contentious civil rights movements occurring in Ecuador. When asked about this trend, students often attributed it to a prevailing lack of interest and general ignorance of both Ecuadorian history and politics. Esteban, a high achieving student interested in studying mechanical engineering, stated ‘People in this school seem to think they are separate from the rest of the country. Most of us don’t really know much about the provinces or the other cities. So, we don’t really focus that much on Ecuador’. When asked about the absence of Ecuador in classroom discussions Robert, an IB Language teacher, confessed that teachers were also partially to blame. He stated, ‘Sometimes we neglect certain social issues going on in the country. And they may actually have a better awareness or knowledge, for instance, of African Americans than Afro Ecuadorians’.

Student aspirations and imagined futures

Through their access to diverse cultural repertoires, St Thomas students created new symbolic modes of belonging and affiliation. These constructions affirmed a desire for membership of distant communities and framed their present circumstances as either unwanted or insufficient. Students’ understandings of ‘place’ had important ramifications for their future aspirations. Students were determined to leave Ecuador upon graduating, hoping to gain access to communities that better aligned to their personal goals and needs. This connection between understandings of place and future aspirations was exemplified by Stefanie’s description of her recent experience in a youth conference abroad. She noted that ‘People were so open, they were so, I don’t know, friendly. None of them were part of [this] social bubble, it was refreshing. And then coming back here, it was like ‘nope, I have to get out’’.

It is worth highlighting that St Thomas students did not only aspire for a life elsewhere; they expressed an unwavering certainty that these aspirations would indeed be realised. While students provided very rudimentary sketches of how they perceived their future lives, they all expected to enroll in a university abroad upon graduating from high school. Some students even signaled the possibility of remaining abroad permanently. Esteban exemplified this stance, stating ‘I am going to school in the US . . . I don’t know if I am coming to work here or if I will stay there but [I] think that I would generally do better there’.

St Thomas played an important role in both cementing the desire to study abroad and enabling its possibility. Along with hosting numerous college fairs each year, the school employed two full-time college counselors who focused exclusively on helping students navigate the application process for universities in the United States and Canada. The college counselors began working with students and their parents as early as the 9^th grade, providing ample information and guidance on what experiences students should seek in order to become competitive applicants. By the time students were ready to apply, many were steadfast on leaving, and did not even consider Ecuadorian universities as a viable alternative. Alejandro, a shy student heavily involved in the Model United Nations program, was one of many students who reflected this stance. He noted, ‘I have not even worried about seeing universities here . . . like knowing what universities here require and all that kind of stuff. I just focus on international universities’.

UECT students shared a similar goal of pursuing higher education abroad. Unlike their St Thomas peers, they did not receive any college counseling, nor did their families have the financial means to pay the high tuition costs international universities usually require. Students mostly relied on their own initiative in the effort to engage with the intricacies of the application process. Many students turned to Facebook and other social media platforms in their efforts to learn about foreign institutions and find funding opportunities. These conditions greatly informed how study abroad was conceived within UECT. Students framed it as an unlikely dream and were cognizant that other options - including local universities, apprenticeships and military service - had to be considered. This stance was best exemplified by Roberto who, after stating that he wished to study abroad, added the caveat ‘maybe my expectations are too high’.

More importantly, enrolling in a university abroad was largely equated with affording students the opportunity to pursue areas of study which were perceived as being either unavailable or underdeveloped in Ecuador. While explaining her desire to study abroad, Macarena noted:

The majors here in Ecuador are not specialized in what I want. I want to study abroad because their universities have specialties, business universities, economics universities, and they only focus on the topic and the major that I want to pursue because that is useful for my future.

Maria provided a very similar view of study abroad. The eldest of seven children, much of her free time was spent caring for her younger siblings. Through this experience she became interested in pursuing a career as a children’s book illustrator. When discussing her future aspirations, she noted ‘It’s that art is a major that doesn’t have much traction here in Ecuador. So, studying arts abroad, if one really works hard, I believe it’s a big opportunity’. These portrayals signaled that unlike their private school counterparts, UECT students did not aspire to pursue a life abroad or gain access to a new community. The desire to enroll in a foreign university seemed to be professionally driven, focusing solely on the career benefits an international education could provide.

Students’ understandings and appraisals of international mindedness

Understandings of place and imagined futures are important domains through which IM is conceptualized and embodied. On a surface level these different understandings were not manifest, as students from both schools provided very similar constructions of IM. In large, the concept was portrayed as a relational disposition underscored by a desire to learn from and relate respectfully to people with different opinions and cultural norms. Andrea (a student from UECT) described it as having ‘the ability to have different perspectives about things. That we are able to be open people, and not only open but tolerant’. Similarly, Esteban defined it as ‘people’s mindsets tend to be closed to something that they know. IM is about knowing the world more holistically and to view it as a place where many cultures can interact together and coexist’.

When probed about the value of embodying IM as a personal disposition, students provided notably different responses. St Thomas students discussed the importance of the concept for their perceived futures. Given the certainty of study abroad, students routinely portrayed IM as a needed disposition for their eventual cultural adaptation. The concept’s value, however, was not restricted to study abroad. It was also premised on the belief that global forms of engagement would be a central and inevitable part of the students’ personal and professional futures, regardless of where they would eventually live. As Julia noted, ‘International mindedness prepares you for the world . . . It’s like having a little bit of everything, because in the end you are going to encounter a little bit of everything in life’. Being ready for life’s inevitabilities was viewed as both personally important and imperative for academic and professional success.

Without exception, St Thomas students provided positive appraisals of IM, portraying it as crucial for their inevitable experiences abroad and future professional success. Neglected in these portrayals was a discussion of how the concept could inform their own understandings of, and relationship to, their immediate surroundings. In contrast to this outward-looking focus, UECT students made direct references to their immediate surroundings when discussing both the benefits and potential pitfalls of the concept. In this case, IM was a disposition that allowed students to bridge their own experiences and understandings to those occurring elsewhere. Luis, the son of a police officer who enjoyed fixing cars, argued that IM allowed students ‘to connect our circumstances, to circumstances created, for example, in the United States, in China. To connect our politics to their politics and try to create an international bridge between everyone’. Building on this idea, Jessenia added that creating an international bridge consisted not only of learning about other cultures, but also of being able to teach about one’s own. She stated ‘We have to be open to learn about other cultures, respect [them], and also teach other people [our culture] too’. Undergirding these statements was a recurring theme amongst UECT students that understanding one’s immediate surroundings and developing a locally informed identity was a necessary precursor to becoming internationally minded.

Most students discussed IM through a lens of reciprocity which entailed both learning and teaching. This framing enabled a number of critiques which challenged both the premise and feasibility of the concept. Alejandra, a thoughtful and highly esteemed student, provided an elaborate response, stressing how issues of power and inequality ultimately preclude true reciprocity. In a longer exchange, she stated:

We can’t talk about international mindedness when borders continue closed, when human mobility is not a right, when segregation in a city like [our own] remains so pronounced. I think also that the term ‘international’ is misguided. Many times, when people talk about ‘international’, international agreements, international universities, only one power is involved and that makes it international.

Even if issues of power and inequality were ignored, Alejandra still questioned IM’s feasibility. She argued ‘we are 16-year-old kids and we have yet to live the national mindedness to be able to talk about international mindedness’. José Antonio, a student who enjoyed playing basketball, also questioned the concept’s ‘international’ descriptor, noting that it failed to acknowledge existing power differentials. Rather than rejecting the overarching premise of the concept, he suggested reframing it to more closely align to notions of open-mindedness. He reasoned ‘to me international mindedness is not necessarily international but about having the ability to understand that my position is not the only one. Or that there is not always a true or false. . . there are always more people with more theories’.

Discussion and Conclusion

This exploratory study examined how students’ social class backgrounds informed the construction and appraisal of IM. In the context of this study, material inequality directly informed the imaginative resources students drew on while envisioning their futures and constructing their desired communities. St Thomas students depicted a future and a sense of belonging that was unyoked from a specific notion of place. Through an amalgamation of images acquired primarily through travel experiences and media consumption, they created a sense of a desired elsewhere, distant from where they were. In contrast to this form of imaginative deterritorialization, UECT students demonstrated a greater affinity to their immediate surroundings, which were viewed as unique but inscribed by global processes and concerns. Although many students dreamed of studying abroad, they did not envision their lives unfolding elsewhere.

The manner in which students related to their immediate surroundings and imagined their future lives had important implications for their engagement with the concept of IM. Students enrolled in St Thomas, for instance, endorsed the concept, viewing it as a crucial disposition in their inevitable efforts to undergo cultural adaptation and gain access to distant - and often unknown - communities. Meanwhile, UECT students framed IM through a reciprocal lens, entailing both learning about other cultures and teaching about their own. Luis’s metaphor of the bridge concisely encapsulates this framing, suggesting that IM should ideally be viewed as a form of exchange. Unlike St Thomas students’ strictly positive portrayals, UECT students questioned the concept’s feasibility, noting how power asymmetries may inhibit reciprocity.

While these findings are premised on the socio-cultural arrangements of two schools, they do provide insights that can potentially be extended to other contexts. Most importantly, by juxtaposing the tensions in UECT students’ understanding of IM with St Thomas students’ seamless engagement with the concept, a number of questions centered on relevance can be raised. For instance, does the concept’s ‘international’ descriptor presume certain lived experiences and aspirational goals that are often only enabled through privilege? As UECT students suggested in their critiques, the term ‘international’ is imbued with power differentials ultimately validating certain voices and experiences while silencing others. If this critique is taken seriously, then there should be a real concern that IM and its potential derivations may become dissonant to students who for a variety of reasons, including their social class backgrounds, may be positioned on the margins.

IM is construed as a purposefully open concept that allows schools and their numerous constituents the necessary agency to create contextually appropriate definitions and interpretations of meaning. The term ‘international’ may, however, limit the agency certain populations have in creating contextually-appropriate meanings and finding personal relevance. As a result of this insight, and contrary to ongoing arguments that IM needs additional specificity, I suggest further conceptual broadening in the effort to promote a greater degree of inclusion. The goal of this broadening is to maintain the concept’s original intent, while removing the obstacles that are perceived as prioritizing certain lived experiences.

Drawing on Appiah’s (2006) work, I recommend a shift from IM to the concept of ‘habits of co-existence’. While this shift may be perceived as a matter of semantics, it does provide two important benefits. First, co-existence is geographically unspecified, permitting and equally validating deliberations that scale from the immediate to the global. As Appiah argues, co-existence does not necessarily require the crossing of international boundaries, and nor does it search for consensus, where existing power asymmetries could arguably be most salient. Rather it is the outcome of a disposition that encourages ‘curiosity, relationality, mutuality and sharing, and works to diminish us and them distinctions and highlight our existence as being-with-many’ (Watson, 2018, p. 219). Second, habits suggest a form of routine practice, providing a greater degree of actionability than the term ‘mindedness’. In addition to actionability, it strips an existing sense of ‘exalted attainment’ that undergirds IM, by emphasizing the very quotidian nature of the endeavor. Although these proposed changes may ultimately be cosmetic, they are an attempt to rectify an existing issue and acknowledge the dissonance certain student populations may experience when engaging with the ‘international’ emphasis of the concept.

The findings presented here and accompanying discussion are based on a study that has a number of limitations. Most glaring is the fact that although ethnographic in approach, the presented data draws heavily on interviews and in-school observations. A greater depth in detail regarding students’ lives outside school could have provided an important layer of insight as well as an additional source for triangulation. Despite these shortcomings, the overarching findings provide interesting pathways for future inquiry. They highlight the need to actively consider how students’ social class backgrounds mediate their experiences with the IB and their engagement with IM. Furthermore, and irrespective of social class, it showcases the importance of considering the role of students’ understanding of place and imagined futures for the construction and appraisal of the concept.

This study also highlights the usefulness of thinking through Bourdieu’s work. Concepts such as habitus enable an approach which strives to be dialectical, considering the mutually constitutive relationship between students’ agency and the institutional and social structures in which they are located. In the case of this study, it allowed a deliberation which foregrounded students’ meaning-making processes, but also considered the constitutive role of their institutional experiences, material realities and broader social position. A dialectical approach which strives to address both objective structure and subjective experiences can be extremely generative for future studies on IM specifically, and international education more broadly. One benefit of this approach is that it decenters the institution as the locus of meaning for IM, and emphasizes a relational approach between students, teachers, institutions and society.