NARRATIVES OF INTERCULTURAL AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION: ASPIRATIONAL VALUES AND ECONOMIC IMPERATIVES
NARRATIVES OF INTERCULTURAL AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION: ASPIRATIONAL VALUES AND ECONOMIC IMPERATIVES

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the linked but separate notions of interculturalism, internationalism and internationalization, and their formulations in education policies and programs. The tensions between two aspects of international education, the aspirational and the economic are explored. Aspirational values often shape behavior, and may be expressed as aspirational ethics – values and ethics which go beyond the minimal requirements of standards, credentials, certifications, codes of ethics and of law. Such values are linked with philosophical notions of the good life, with citizenship and moral cosmopolitanism. To indicate something of the multiple layers and organizations that are involved in international education and that adopt notions of interculturalism in their aims or mission statements, several exemplars of internationalized education policies and programs that explicitly express intercultural aspirational values – the International Baccalaureate and exemplars from UK, Ireland and USA are presented. However, in the current globalized world dominated by neoliberal political economy, international education is increasingly being formulated as a marketable commodity, as export education earning considerable revenue, as a strippeddown educational model that pays scant attention to interculturalism values, often merely using it as window dressing to market internationalized education courses in what becomes little more than a form of neo-colonialism.

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