It is Monday morning in the Old City of Jerusalem and a history lesson is underway in a classroom at the Armenian School. Raising her voice above the cacophony of drums, trumpets, and Hebrew chants of “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The Nation of Israel Lives”) outsideaccompanying a Bar Mitzvah procession en route to the Western Wall, the teacher, a Jewish-Canadian Israeli citizen, instructs the students in English to take out their books. Whispering to his neighbor in Arabic, a student without Israeli citizenship places the International GCSE textbook, published in the United Kingdom, on his desk. The cover of the textbook, entitled A Divided Union: Civil Rights in the USA, features an iconic black-and-white photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, with the American flag flapping in the background. In this era of globalization and denationalization of education processes (Resnik, 2012), global flows of peoples, images, technologies, capital, and ideologies (Appadurai, 1996) have the potential to bring a British-designed curriculum on African American civil rights into the hands of local Christian students taught by a Jewish immigrant in an Armenian diaspora school in the contested city of Jerusalem. 

As the example of Jerusalem’s Armenian School illustrates, international education has rapidly infiltrated local educational markets in recent decades. Despite its initial popularity among itinerant expatriates, today's local middle-class families also seek English-language curricula, which provide children with perceived economic advantage through the accrual of international (Resnik, 2018) or cosmopolitan capital (Igarashi & Saito, 2014). Internationalization in education also strives toward education for global citizenship (Ortloff et al., 2012). Given the exclusion of non-Jewish identities in the Israeli curriculum, as minority youth seek alternative ways of collective belonging (Pinson, 2008), a global citizenship education has the potential to offer a sense of belonging to a global society which may compensate for the lack of recognition within the Israeli national narrative (Goren et al., 2019). However, prevailing notions of global citizenship championed through international education typically privilege Western knowledge, narratives, and conceptions of identity (Andreotti, 2011). In an effort to decolonize international education, we must contemplate emic perspectives on how global citizenship discourses unfold within specific local contexts and in those international schools serving marginalized groups, in particular. Is international education a panacea poised to provide equity for local minorities, or does it continue to serve hegemonic interests?

This ethnographic study grapples with the multiple citizenship discourses circulating within Jerusalem’s Armenian School, where the convergence of the global and local sheds light on the predicament of an ethno-religious minority within a divided society. Staring into the face of Dr. King on the textbook cover, are students inspired to believe that the moral arc of the universe will indeed bend toward justice for their embattled minority in Jerusalem? Or does the American flag beckon them to embark on cosmopolitan journeys abroad? And how do practices of long-distance nationalism simultaneously forge diasporic citizenships tied to an Armenian transnation? Amid colonial encounters, ethnonational narratives, diasporic transnationalism, and local conflict, what is the value of an international education for this marginalized ethno-religious community and what types of citizenships are developed through its use? Conducted from the perspective of a teacher-ethnographer, the current research draws upon a theoretical framework rooted in the concept of “acts of citizenship” (Isin & Nielsen, 2008). Considering how performances and enactments forge new sites and scales of citizenships transcending traditional legal, political, and social models of citizenships as status, this paper explores how Jerusalem’s Armenian youth negotiate citizenships on local, global, and transnational scales.

Based on extensive fieldwork conducted over six years (2015-2021), this paper draws on a variety of ethnographic methods: participant observation, intensive interviewing, and content analysis of the school’s Facebook page. Participant observation focused on school-wide ceremonies and events (e.g., assemblies, holiday celebrations, etc.), given that public commemorations are rife with cultural codes and symbols (Handelman, 1998) whose stored meanings reflect social organization and worldview (Geertz, 1973). Participant observation permits the collection of holistic data about the attitudes, perspectives, and motivations of key actors, and enables an understanding of how citizenship practices adapted to the sociopolitical context are enacted in the school. Rather than relying on standard conceptions of global citizenship, this ethnographic case study draws on emic discourses, permitting a reconsideration of the assumptions regarding the goals of international education programs. Intensive interviews were conducted with ten school faculty and ten recent graduates. Beyond the collection of basic biographical information, faculty were asked questions about the mission of the school, the school population, and the use of the international curriculum in order to understand how the school shapes local and global youth identities. Alumni interviews aimed to understand the link between the graduates’ phenomenology of identity and citizenship and those discourses present within the school. A consideration of both faculty and alumni perspectives is essential to understand the degree to which institutional and community expectations regarding citizenship and identity formation are reflected in students’ lived experiences. Finally, an evaluation of the school’s presence on social media was used to complement participant observation and interviews. Facebook posts can be evaluated as a type of ethnographic data, whose textual and visual analysis can uncover social patterns (Dalsgaard, 2016) which can be used to investigate identity and citizenship discourses within the school community. Adapting the methodology of Miller and Sinanan (2017), a sample of texts, images, and videos posted to the school Facebook page over the course of the academic year was examined to identify genres and repetitions. Applying grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), data analysis entailed coding and categorizing key concepts and themes within the data, uncovering recurring patterns and relationships between categories, and developing theory rooted in these patterns and relationships about the use of international education by marginalized communities and its impact on citizenship practices.

The case study of Jerusalem’s Armenian School reveals how international education can function as a “neutral” alternative for religious minorities living in a contentious sociopolitical environment in which local citizenship is contested and sense of belonging uncertain. Adoption of a globally oriented curriculum functions to maintain the Armenian minority’s impartiality in the midst of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict as youth negotiate citizenships on local, global, and transnational scales. The British curriculum endows students with international capital in the form of globally recognized credentials, English-language skills, and familiarity with Western cultures. On the one hand, the international curriculum may facilitate mobility for marginalized students by enabling cosmopolitan journeys abroad, yet it may pose challenges for those graduates who remain in Israel. The privileging of the English language comes at the expense of proficiency in local languages (Arabic and Hebrew), and at the same time, the Eurocentric curriculum fails to impart a solid grasp of local civics, history, or geopolitics. A transformative global citizenship education theoretically has the power to help students develop skills needed to promote social justice (Banks, 2008), yet such skills do not appear to transfer easily from Western contexts to the situation of the Armenian minority in Jerusalem. Considering this socialization of Jerusalem’s Armenian youth within a marginalized and precariously positioned community, students lack the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) needed to enact local citizenships via traditional means. Rather, local acts of citizenship — such as protesting Israel’s non-recognition of the Armenian Genocide and supplying of arms to Azerbaijan, the Armenian adversary in recent conflict — are bound up with the global and transnational as students are prepared to serve as international ambassadors for the Armenian cause. Ultimately, local citizenship practices engendering global and transnational orientations may be understood as a strategy for the minority’s survival in hostile surroundings.

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