Researching the global middle-classes in a mobile modernity poses unsettling questions for those committed to ethnographic approaches to understanding social realities. Reporting on a project which we describe as “ethnography at a distance” (Forsey et al., 2015), we take up a challenge to pay greater attention to “the educational choices and choice making contexts of a burgeoning, mobile, post-national middle class who operate on a global scale” (Ball&Nikita 2014.). Our “site” of interrogation issues from a long-lasting thread from an online forum located in a website catering for “the English speaking crowd in Germany” (www.toytown Germany). Our focus is on a single thread titled “International Schools in Berlin” (ISiB) which opened with a question seeking advice on schooling in the city. The relatively contained spaces of interaction marked by the ISiB thread allow us to shift the scope from the local to the global spheres and back again. The globally mobile parents writing into the thread, who are part of the increasingly significant skilled migrant diaspora, express various concerns about the educational needs of their children, from language acquisition, to keeping up with educational requirements for university in their home country, to desires that their children be exposed to a broad range of cultural influences. The analysis of the data reveals the concentration of the discourse on two contrasting schools. John F. Kennedy School stands for an American way of schooling in the midst of Berlin, one that carries the promise to a temporary migrant of a relatively seamless return home, or of preparing their child for university in the USA. Nelson Mandela School in contrast is appreciated for its “multi-cultural” commitments, characterised by one interlocutor as the real “Berlin experience”. Nelson Mandela school carries the promise of a cosmopolitan educational experience, allowing students to find their way as global citizens. This multi-cultural commitment offers another solution to the tension felt between global mobility and the need to localise when it comes to schooling. Using the questions posed, the responses they elicit and the debates they open up, we analyse what these representatives of the global middle classes seek from formal education and what this tells us about school choice as a global phenomenon. We will consider the changing role of schools as agents of credentialization and socialization at a time of increasingly variable mobilities, and the implications for centres that are, or are fast becoming, global cities.

Ball, S., and Nikita, D. 2014 The global middle class and school choice: a cosmopolitan sociology, Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 7(3):81-93. Forsey, M., Breidenstein, G., Roch, A., and Krueger, O. (2015) Ethnography at a Distance: Globally Mobile Parents Choosing International Schools in Berlin, International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education