International education and schooling is a new burgeoning area of research and global citizenship education(GCE) is one of the key markers in schools’ response towards providing an internationally minded curriculum. This study is located within the domains of ‘comparative education’ and ‘international education' which, to date, have elicited researchers’ interest in these two fields because of the growth of international schools globally and the existence of schools that fall under the “umbrella term” (Hayden, 2006; Hayden & Thompson, 2016) of international schools. It has been reported by ISC Research (Keeling, 2015), that 8000 ‘English-medium international schools’ exist globally, catering to 4.26 million students (Hayden & Thompson, 2016). This is a 200% increase since 2000 (Brummitt & Keeling, 2013, p. 27).

It is believed that embedded within such a curriculum is a distinctive set of knowledge and skills, relevant to both the global and national landscapes (Joseph, 2012). For schools in Europe, which are facing mass migration, one of the key challenges is catering to such a diversified population and allowing for different groups to co-exist harmoniously with a common sense of identity. Historically that project has focused on multiculturalism. It now focuses on GCE. Adoption of an internationally minded curriculum is aligned with the practices of international schools and providers, which have faced myriad issues catering to diverse school populations (Hayden & Thompson, 2016). As a result, numerous schools in the United Kingdom, United States (US), Australia & Singapore, have crafted school mission statements that cite the use of ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘global citizenship’ and have moved towards adopting a more internationally minded curriculum (Schattle, 2008).

This particular study focuses on schools’ response to the ‘demands of a twenty-first century global knowledge society’ (Fielding & Vidovich, 2016, p.3). Specifically, this paper focuses on a comparative analysis of GCE in two schools, one international school in Singapore and an independent school in Australia and how these two schools have engaged in the process of internationalization of their education through the adoption of international education models within the two schools, generating insights from the International Primary Curriculum and the IB (PYP) Programme.

Central to this research is the examination of educational policies, which address GCE  in each of the two schools. The presentation explores how these policies have taken shape in these two institutions within differing political, economic and social contexts, and how they have been institutionalised or otherwise in the two research schools. The key focus is examining the interplay between the global and national, which both schools have acknowledged in their design of the curricula. It is integral to note that globalization differs within different communities around the world with a unique and multifaceted interplay of global and national factors (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010) termed as a ‘global-local nexus’ (Edwards and Usher, 2008, p 22).

The study is framed against the theory of post-multiculturalism and Vertovec’s (2007) notion of super-diversity, a state of existence that defines the heightened level of diverse cultural complexity that the world and nations are currently experiencing. Drawing on various theoretical resources on global education, global citizenship education, international education, as well as the post multicultural reality of diversity and inclusiveness, this research seeks to examine the extent to which ‘international-mindedness’ is embedded into the practices and culture of the two research schools.

 From the concepts delineated above, the study examines the processes involved in internationalizing education within three main domains: (a) curriculum and pedagogy (b) school culture and (c) intercultural relationships.  It examines the impact of global and national interplay within the curricula and the cultures of the two case study schools.

The study adopts a qualitative approach to construct the two case studies. As the study explores the case study schools’ international-mindedness focus and examines their respective school cultures that frame the general practices aligned to global citizenship education, a case-oriented approach was appropriate and allowed for an interpretive analysis. For this study of global citizenship education in two schools in two different national contexts, a collective case study approach has been used, which involves ‘studying multiple cases simultaneously or sequentially in an attempt to generate a broader appreciation of a particular issue’ (Crowe et al., 2011, p. 2). For this particular study, the design type has been adapted from Yin’s (2014) model of a single case design and a multiple case design. My approach might be seen then as a hybrid one. With a multiple case design, I have two separate cases, situated within two different contexts - the global citizenship practices in an elementary international school in Singapore and an elementary independent (non- government) school in Australia, both of which are located within the global citizenship educational landscape and within the broader global education policy field (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011). Cross-case analysis was conducted to sieve out similarities and differences in the way the schools are advocating global citizenship education. Emergent meta- level conceptual themes around policy for `global citizenship education' and ‘internationalization’ of the curriculum are discussed: enablers and constraints; and the relevance of distinctions between global citizenship and global education are also addressed. Qualitative data from interview transcripts, document analysis, website analysis as well as field notes were analysed both inductively and deductively, teasing out the key themes from interviews, various documents such as policy papers, curriculum materials, syllabuses, the websites and other forms of documents that shed more light on the issues presented. The analysis of each case study began with a brief overview of the global citizenship education policies in the two schools and of their international curricula models, followed by a separate interpretation and juxtaposition of interview data (Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2014).

In the area of internationalisation of education, schools are caught within conflicting push and pull between global and national. As a result, educators and policy makers need to “navigate global-local dynamics to engage with an internationalisation that is context-specific and that empowers all students, to engage with new learning challenges in a globalising era” (Fielding & Vidovich, 2016, p. 12). Findings indicate that both schools have responded to the concept of GCE through their fusion of the global and the national influences in realizing the schools’ approaches to GCE. This had a formidable impact within the context of the school itself such as school culture and school curriculum and resources and determined how schools engage with GCE in their quest towards internationalisation (Fielding & Vidovich, 2016). The main findings also suggest that the “local and national are actually nested within the local, global, transnational and global spaces” (Rizvi, & Lingard, 2010, p.67). There is evidence of ‘‘deparochialization’’ of education within the Singapore school, which according to Koh (2007) reaches “ beyond the local, the national, the region to the global, and demands deep connectedness with the local” (p. 189). Teachers have also gone through the ‘deparochialization’ process, having the “capacity to shunt between the local and the global, to explicate and engage with the broad flows of knowledge and information, technologies and populations” (p.136). However, the Australian school context depicts the struggle in breaking free from national contexts. This “inward-outward interlink” has either resulted in a superficial approach of merging national and global, or a deeper engagement and being enriched as a result of increased links globally (Vongalis-Macrow, 2014). A key outcome of this study is the conceptualization of a conceptual model to better understand the institutionalization of GCE and how this is played out in schools.

Amin, A. (2012). Land of strangers. Cambridge: Polity. Brummitt, N., & Keeling, A. (2013). Charting the growth of international schools. International Education and Schools: Moving Beyond the First, 40, 25-36. Crowe, S., Cresswell, K., Robertson, A., Huby, G., Avery, A., & Sheikh, A. (2011). The case study approach. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 11(1), 100. Edwards, R., & Usher, R. (2007). Globalisation & pedagogy: Space, place and identity: Routledge. Fielding, M., & Vidovich, L. (2016). Internationalisation in practice in Australian independent secondary schools: a global-local nexus?. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1-15. Gilroy, P. (2004). After empire: Melancholia or convivial culture? London: Routledge. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. (2016). International schools: Current issues and future prospects. United Kingdom: Symposium books. Joseph, C. (2012). Internationalizing the curriculum: Pedagogy for social justice. Current Sociology, 60(2), 239-257. doi: 10.1177/0011392111429225 Keeling, A. (2015). International school market expands to 8000 schools. Relocatemagazine.com Lingard, B., & Rawolle, S. (2010). Globalization and the rescaling of education politics and policy: implications for comparative education. New thinking in comparative education: honouring Robert Cowen, 33-52. Phillips, D., & Schweisfurth, M. (2014). Comparative and international education: An introduction to theory, method, and practice. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. New York, NY; London eBook: Routledge. Schattle, H. (2008). Education for global citizenship: Illustrations of ideological pluralism and adaptation. Journal of Political Ideologies, 13(1), 73-94. doi: 10.1080/13569310701822263 Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024-1054. doi: 10.1080/01419870701599465 Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon;New York;: Routledge. Yin, R. K. (2014). Case study research: design and methods. Los Angeles: SAGE.