What is international education?

The phrase 'international education' indicates that notwithstanding its transnational potential, education has historically been situated as a national project. In most nation-states one of the primary goals of education is to manufacture the imagined communities that constitute modern nations. The capacity of education to network different identities has been mobilised to create singular national identities. Learning about national heroes, singing national anthems, memorising national political structures, preparing for work in a national economy and studying the virtues and responsibilities of citizenship (however this is defined and lived) are integral components of the experience of education, particularly schooling. 

While these national structures and practices are hardly under imminent threat of disappearing, significant global changes in the past decade signal that the national character of educational systems is affected by global flows. Increasingly, people, ideas, images, finance and technologies move across national borders. Education is itself one of the primary conduits of these global flows: at the same time, these global flows create in education a new potential. Education is both a 'cause' and an 'effect' of globalisation; deeply affected by cross-border mobility and the rise of rapid communication systems able to sustain complex data transfers and new forms of collaboration, including teaching and learning. 

International education investigates and problematises the implications of these global flows for a wide range of policies and activities, related broadly to the field of education as an institutional practice. International education is concerned with flows of people, ideas and things, and with the imagination, which is a potent and material social force in and of itself. While international education takes in educational movement between nations in the form of student and staff exchange, study abroad programs, and on-shore and off-shore delivery of degrees to 'international students', it is not narrowly confined to this realm. Instead it forces us to reconsider the philosophical underpinnings of education as a national practice. In a world in which place remains important, but movement between places is the norm rather than the exception, neither geographical boundaries nor the history of those boundaries can bind identity. Diverse selves within and across nations are brought to the fore. The purpose and trajectory of education is thrown into question, as the notion of 'citizenship' (in the sense of citizenship bound to a particular nation-state), and its connection to the practices of education, is displaced. If the focus of national education was, among other objectives, the creation of the national citizen, then international education is concerned with analysing and ultimately moving this narrow notion of self based on national citizenship to a more global notion of self, built on and through multiple points of affiliation.

Multiple cross-border engagements in education create the potential for richer encounters with 'difference', even while global flows are also associated with tendencies to convergence and sameness. These flows are also uneven: Anglo-American institutions play a strong and often dominant role in educational markets, language, communications, curricula and pedagogies, though the cultural character of these Anglo-American institutions, too, becomes more fluid.

In a global world the mono-lingual and mono-cultural self grounded in fixed and singular identity will be at increasing disadvantage. In this respect international education facilitates the practice of 'cultural' complexity and difference; though not all international education is 'cross-cultural' in character, and the trans-cultural aspects of international education are equally important. International education is affected by tensions in the encounter between cultural diversity and common educational practices. It seeks to develop in students the capacity to understand and negotiate identity in a global setting, where national differences remain salient but are inflected by many other elements.