Background of the study on international schools and United World Colleges …

1.2.1 International schools

Since World War II, a trend of internationalization has turned up in the field of education, along with the process of economic and cultural globalization and regionalization. An international interdependence system is gradually being formed.

However, internationalization in the field of education is not as same as that in the

economic sphere, nor the same as in the social and political spheres. It has its own unique needs, structure and content. International Schools, who are very active in the internationalization of education, have far-reaching impact on today's world.

It is commonly noted that a large number of international schools originally came up in 1950s (Jonietz, 1991), with the direct motivation in expatriate communities of providing their children with more competitive and modern education which local schools might not be able to offer, often because of language or university preparation incompatibilities (Hayden and Thompson, 2008).

Nonetheless, International Schools have been a well kept secret as Hayden and Thompson (2008) explain: They are few in number, constituting a barely significant proportion of schools. Many people don’t know about them, and little research has been conducted in their regard. Yet they often train elite members of a country, and as such can’t leave planners and policy makers indifferent.

Although the validity of the judgment “elite training” is open to question, no country can ever remain indifferent towards the rapid development of International schools, since there is an increasing demand for English, the widely acknowledged international language, from the migratory parents, mobile families and even local people when they have realized the benefits to be gained by their children through obtaining this linguistic capital. In this regard, international schools are likely to play a more important role than ever before.

Many employees from multinational companies or organizations have to move around the world in different locations to do their business for a short term. They often prefer to have their children accompanying them. This leads to a demand of such schools.

Most expatriate parents or local families who send their children to such schools, do so for pragmatic reasons, which also becomes a demand for education as an

5

international commodity.

As Hayden and Thompson (2008) noted, along with the development of international schools, there appears to be more concerns about the need to foster “international mindedness” in young people, which includes a desire for world peace, breaking down of barriers arising from prejudice and ignorance. Therefore, more international schools have put environmental awareness, social responsibility, and world citizenship on their agenda, which leads to an ideological impetus behind the development of some forms of international schools.

International schools are quite diverse in terms of forms. There are, nevertheless, according to Hayden and Thompson (2008) a number of features which make them distinctive from national schools. These include the following:

●Curriculum: they invariably offer a curriculum that differs from what prevails in the host country in which the school is located.

●Students: their students are frequently non-nationals of the host country (though more recently, increasing numbers of such schools in some countries are catering largely for children of affluent host country families).

●Teachers and administrators: they tend, in many cases, to be staffed by relatively large numbers of expatriate teachers and administrators.

●Management, leadership and governance: their status within the local context, the curriculum offered and the nature of their student and teacher populations raise particular issues for management, leadership and governance.

International schools, in a broad sense, exist mainly in secondary education, and express a value orientation of pursuing a global perspective of international understanding and dedication to world peace. Such schools provide a wide range of courses, with bilingual or multilingual teaching as their feature, aiming to serve the worldwide flow of personnel and to train the students with necessary language skills, knowledge, capability and positive attitude to meet the challenges of globalization.

1.2.2 United world Colleges

The United World Colleges (UWC) stand a bit out from most other international schools. Some may argue they are as not really international schools at all, because they are not established to meet the needs of expatriate families. Instead, the mission of UWC is to bring young people from all over the world together to build a community of peace and international understanding, aiming to share diverse cultures other than one’s own, breaking down the barriers arising from prejudice and indifference.¹

One of the distinctive features claimed by UWC movement is to embrace multicultural students’ body from nearly a hundred nations. Unlike the other international schools in a general sense, UWC colleges as a group, creates its own mission and values, and each UWC specifically, works out different strategies in light of its own characteristic.

The Red Cross Nordic United World College (RCNUWC) is one of the thirteen UWCs. It is located on the remote shores of Flekke in the municipality of Fjaler, western coastal Norway. RCNUWC undertakes the mission and the value of UWC movement; meanwhile it has developed its own characteristics and specialties. More details will be discussed in the following chapter.