International Baccalaureate teacher training in Japanese higher education

Thesis

In 2013 the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) and Japanese Ministry of Education, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) jointly established a consortium to promote International Baccalaureate (IB) education in Japan. The collaboration reflects the IBO’s ambition to expand and integrate its internationalist programmes into national education systems, while, for the Japanese Government, it marks yet another project seeking to cultivate a nationalist ‘global’ workforce. This thesis explores a range of resulting internationalist and globalist narratives emerging through the prisms of ideology, pedagogy, and language. The rollout of a majority Japanese-mediated Dual-Language Diploma Programme, seeking to increase linguistic accessibility while boosting students’ English proficiency, has contributed to the significant expansion of IB World Schools (i.e., IBO-licensed schools) in Japan, from 16 in 2013 to 106 in April 2023. A resulting lack of teachers familiar with MEXT’s article-1 education guidelines who can also deliver IB counterparts in Japanese, has contributed to the introduction of IB Educator Certificate (IBEC) teacher training programmes across several Japanese universities. This research, conducted digitally during COVID-19, is an ethnography of one such IBEC programme. It also includes comparative ethnographic work with the IBO’s IBEC representatives across the Asia-Pacific region, and other Japanese universities. Gathered through a year of participant observation alongside 46 extensive semi-structured interviews and 93 survey respondents, actors articulate multiple, and often contradictory agendas in the name of the international and global. A diverse range of agents – from transnational organizations, national governments, and universities to individual officials, facilitators, and students – amplify and contest these discourses while inventing new alternatives. I find these processes of advocacy, acceptance, and resistance to be ways of negotiating with more prevalent top-down notions of international and global education.

Authors: Shah, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-rje9w8b0b
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: ideology; internationalism; whiteness; language; imperialism; top-down politics; digital ethnography; teacher training; Japan; nationalism; neoliberalization; identity; Asia-Pacific; colonialism; pedagogy; International Baccalaureate (ib); globalism; higher education
• Subjects: Education; Anthropology