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The purpose of this paper is to explore how elite International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) schools in China function as a channel for international student mobility to leading universities around the world.

To achieve this, the authors conducted a mixed-methods study combining quantitative analysis of 1,622 students’ university destinations and qualitative analysis of interview data from five high performing and high tuition fee IBDP schools in China.

Results indicate that the IBDP in China can be conducive to a form of “elite international student mobility” for some students with 30 percent of participants attending one of the top 50 ranked universities globally. As an explanation, interview data points to the strong reputation of the program, the provision of structured opportunities for students to demonstrate “additional skills,” and the abundant resources of elite schools.

The authors provide a critical discussion about the implications of the IBDP’s function for “elite international student mobility” in connection with social contexts surrounding these international International Baccalaureate schools in China. In so doing, the discussion tackles two issues from a critical perspective: the role elite international schools in accelerating educational inequalities and challenges to authentic learning experience when elite schools play the “university admissions game.”

International mindedness (IM) is a core element of International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. Implementation of IM varies with the type of international school and where the IB school is situated. This article seeks to understand the tensions that three teachers experienced while teaching the IB Diploma Program history curriculum.

For this study, three IB teachers examined their experiences teaching the history curriculum. This article offers relevant research on the difficulties in implementing IM and the following tensions: (1) situating the IB curriculum; (2) with hegemonic privilege and (3) in high-stakes testing.

IM can be integrated into the history curriculum to make the history curriculum relevant for the global community. While each interviewee enjoys teaching in the IB program and believes the IB history curriculum offers opportunity for IM, they also feel the history curriculum would benefit from modification. Each interviewee's points of view bring a relevancy and an authenticity for why tensions exist when teaching IB diploma history.

There is a gap of research in how and to what extent teachers implement IM into the IB high school history curriculum. Further, teachers' views regarding the IB history curriculum and whether the history curriculum facilitates one's teaching IM is largely anecdotal. Thus, this study is unique in its offering three interviews by IB high school history teachers on IM and the tensions they feel when teaching about and attempting to implement IM.

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2008. The IBO published a strategic plan in 2004 calling for a shift towards directed growth of the three IB programmes, and greater access. The purpose of this paper is to show how the Middle East region offers a microcosm of the huge challenge facing the IBO in meeting its desired aims.

This paper presents the current situation regarding the IB in the Middle East region as defined by the International Air Transport Association standards organization. This involves a total of 16 countries.

The Middle East involves a relatively small area of IB activity in relation to the total number of “international schools” in the region. There is currently 48 schools offering 60 programmes, and comprising 2 percent of IB schools worldwide. Dubai in particular has seemingly much potential for future growth. No school offers the continuum of IB programmes.

This paper offers a regional insight into the challenge facing the IB in meeting its desired goals. It will allow for the success of the IB strategic plan to be assessed more fully in the year 2014.

The nature and development of the IB in the Middle East has received very little attention by the scholarly community in spite of 40 years of involvement. This is the first paper to offer a resource for evaluating the future success of the IB strategic plan.

This paper was written in response to the tendency for the international education literature to position the international teacher in essentialist and western-centric terms. The international school landscape has changed significantly in the last 20 years, leading to the rise of type C non-traditional international schools, which requires a reconceptualisation of the international teacher. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a Chinese English teacher (Daisy) in an internationalised school in Shanghai constructed her identity as an international teacher.

This paper drew upon concepts from the teacher identity literature in order to construct a comparative conceptual framework comprised of personal, professional and cross-cultural domains of experience. Commensurate with this framework, in-depth phenomenological interviewing and member-checking were utilised in order to gain access to the participant’s lived experiences. Member-checking and data analysis became a dialogic and recursive process in which rapport was continually maintained and strengthened through the sharing of raw and analysed data, with additional comments and suggestions being fed back into an emerging interpretation in order to generate more data and enhance validity.

The findings highlighted how Daisy was active in not only constructing her identity as an international educator but also mobilising this identity to challenge the western-centric nature of international education. The findings also revealed moments of discursive dissonance. Daisy simultaneously constructed an identity as an “internationalising” teacher, but was also constructed as an international teacher through a discourse that presented international education as constructivist, and therefore western-centric, in nature. Implications and recommendations are made for practice and research based on these findings.

This paper offers an alternative perspective on the international teacher experience, which continues to be western-centric in focus, by exploring the development of an international teacher identity from a Chinese perspective.

This study aims to interrogate and expand on the flexible citizenship framework by illuminating students' emergent identities and imagined future mobilities in China's expanding international school sector.

In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with international school students and their parents in Shenzhen, covering their motivations for overseas higher education, experience with international schooling, self-perceived identities and imagined futures.

The participants aspired to overseas higher education for both symbolic capital attainment and embodied cultural cultivation to thrive in a globalised world. They expressed confidence that international schooling experiences prepared students for mobility to Western higher education and cultivated globally-oriented identities while not undermining their Chinese roots. They imagined their futures in terms of considerable flexibility, with a rising China viewed as an attractive and feasible option for career development.

This research provides an enriched understanding of a new generation of globally mobile Chinese students. The participants held distinctively different outlooks, aspirations and attitudes than depicted in the flexible citizenship framework, which emphasised a one-dimensional and instrumentalist portrayal of Chinese international students. This study discusses cross-generational changes in the desire for overseas education and a global-national outlook among young people in the context of significant social transformations in urban China.

The originality of this study is in expanding the flexible citizenship framework with reference to the emergent identities and pathways of students in the international schooling sector in China.