International Students in the Time of COVID-19

International education and the international student experience worldwide have been fractured due to the COVID0-19 global pandemic. This special issue brings together papers from around the world which not only critically examine the impact a global crisis has on policies, procedures, operations and people around international education but also the unprecedented effects these have on international students themselves. This special issue moreover opens discussion on the future direction of international education policy and practice in order to create the best international student experience possible.

International Organizations and Education in the Islamic World

In Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-78885-8_7, David Krogmann looks at IOs and education in the Islamic World. The analysis presented here revolves around two main questions: First, which organizations with predominantly Muslim member states are active in the field of international education policy, and how, if at all, do they cooperate with each other? Second, which education leitmotifs do these organizations promote, and what kind of discourse do they construct around education policy? The analysis finds that Muslim education IOs, namely, ICESCO, ABEGS, and ALECSO, participate in a distinct discourse that revolves around the synthesis of traditional values drawn from Islamic philosophy and the demands of a modern global labor market.

International education policymaking: A case study of Ontario’s Trillium Scholarship Program

This paper explores Ontario’s international education policy landscape through illuminating the discursive struggles to define international student funding policies, in particular the international doctoral students’ Trillium Scholarship. Adopting Hajer’s (1993, 2006) Discourse Coalition Framework, the study engages with three research questions: What paved the way to this funding policy? Who were the actors engaged in this policy landscape? How has the argumentation over this policy influenced the international education policy context in Ontario? Argumentative discourse analysis was used to analyze three data sources: news articles, policy documents, and interviews. Two storylines were identified: international student funding is desirable and beneficial to Ontario versus Ontario first. Whereas the first storyline achieved hegemony, the second succeeded in bringing discourses of protectionism to the forefront influencing the government’s future engagement with international student funding. The paper ends with three observations on Ontario’s international education policy landscape. This study contributes to our understanding of how international student funding can be highly political and influenced by non-education policy spaces and discourses.

Interpreting public policy dilemmas: discourse analytical insights

This article explains the value of discourse analysis for interpreting the construction and resolution of policy dilemmas in the field of international education. Its case material is drawn from official documents relating to international education policy, published by global bodies such as the United Nations and World Bank from 2000 to 2018, explored with two purposes in mind. The first is empirical, the analysis revealing how a dominant ‘liberal’ model governing international education was discursively constructed as a grand narrative about the purpose and intended outcomes in international education. This is achieved by applying an interpretive discourse analytical approach, customised for this particular policy puzzle, to the international education corpus. The article’s second purpose is methodological, to reflect on the various criticisms and supposed limitations of using discourse analysis as a tool of public policy analysis. This part of the article argues that the discourse approach can equip analysts with a reliable tool-kit for carrying out research into the subtle and often unrecognised ways in which ideas and beliefs inform global education policy practices. A systematic discourse analysis reveals the tensions and sometimes conflicting meanings that elite decision-makers possess about international education. Ultimately, it is argued that the discourse approach can offer both empirical insights and a range of policy recommendations from a discourse analysis that destabilises the dominant ‘liberal’ narrative about international education in the relevant documents.

Transformation Educational Goals into Performance Indicators in Lithuanian and International Education Policy

This article deals with the problem of the multiplicity of educational goals and their reduction into measurable indicators. The paper debates whether an increasingly predominant student performance-centered approach, which is mainly limited to PISA findings, is a manifestation of a changing global educational paradigm; what concept of educational purposes prevails in today’s world; wh

Global citizenship education: A new ‘moral pedagogy’ for the 21st century?

In the past two decades global citizenship education (GCE) has become established in national and international education policy. This article focuses on the emergence of GCE in the educational discourse of the Province of Trento in northern Italy and outlines how policymakers and teachers construct GCE as a pedagogical framework for schooling in the 21st century. Combining the perspectives that emerge from the scholarly literature with the findings of a qualitative study based on Constructivist and Informed Grounded Theory, the article proposes a typology of GCE ideal-types. The typology illustrates two ‘mainstream ideal-types’ of GCE (neo-liberal human capitalism and cosmopolitan humanism) and two ‘critical ideal-types’ (social-justice activism and critical counter practice). In the province studied, the dominant perspective is cosmopolitan humanism. GCE is essentially conceptualised as a ‘new moral pedagogy’ that reflects adherence and commitment to a universal moral structure based on humanistic cosmopolitan values. The author believes that critical GCE perspectives in line with social-justice activism and critical counter practice should find expression in both policies, curricula and practices. However, this is recognised as a challenge which could be partially addressed through teacher education and an alliance between academia and practice.