The ‘international school movement’ can be seen as a particular manifestation of the influence of globalisation on education. The growth of international schools is apparent when comparing current figures with those from a decade previously - the International School Consultancy Group currently lists 7,324 English instruction schools on its database, with estimates of 2,300 schools 10 years earlier (Dearden, 2015). Whilst there is no straightforward definition of an international school in this context, what is clear is that economic and cultural globalisation have both encouraged, and been supported by, a growing international schools ‘industry’.
Much of the history of the international schools movement has been rooted in the Anglophone nations and Europe, but with recent growth being most conspicuous in South East Asia. However, more recently, growth has been noticeable in Central and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
This paper is concerned with the development of international schools in the context of two MENA regions, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The specific concern is how international schools, with their particular ethos and philosophies, connect their ‘global curricula’ with their local contexts, and more precisely how international schools navigate the requirements of local state bodies to meet curriculum requirements such as those relating to the Arabic language and the teaching of Islamic religious and civic values.
That there are tensions when apparently ‘international’ curricula are enacted in contexts quite different to those in which they were conceived is widely acknowledged. For example, in the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) publication ‘East is East, West is West’ (Walker, 2010) the author counsels against over-simplification and stereotyping, but argues IB has a difficulty in adequately reflecting the rich intellectual tradition of East Asia. In Towards a continuum of international education (IBO, 2008)the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) recognises that a key challenge to its programmes is that they ‘have grown from a western humanist tradition, [and now] the influence of non-western cultures on all … programmes is becoming increasingly important’ (IBO, 2008. p. 2).
This paper focuses on the experience of IBO schools in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and seeks to understand how individual IB schools in the two cities seek to align the values and frameworks of the IB Middle Years Programme with the values of Islam and the expectations of the local community with regard to Islamic education (including statutory requirements). The potential lack of ‘fit’ between international schools and local contexts within the UAE is identified as contributing to an ‘intellectual imperialism’ (Samier, in The National, 2013a) , and others have argued that the influence of international schools is leading to a weakening of Emirati identity (Farouki, in The National, 2013b).
The study utilises a framework for analysis developed by the International School Leadership Development Network (Barnett and Stevenson, in press and Barnett and Stevenson, forthcoming). This identifies a number of factors at the macro, meso and micro levels that shape practices in schools. At the macro level these factors include national policy mandates, whilst locally factors might include the nature of the local school ‘market’ and the profile of the school population (both within the school, and in the community local to the school). The study therefore explores how IB schools in Dubai and Abu Dhabi enact the IB curriculum, and how their actions are shaped by contextual factors at macro, meso and micro levels. The study approaches curriculum ‘delivery’ as an exercise in policy enactment (Ball et al, 2012) seeing curriculum as simultaneously internal school level policy, and the product of wider policy frameworks at a regional and national level.
