This paper explores the elusive notion of the ‘Global Graduate’ (GG) in ‘Critical Times’ in a context where the role of the university is in flux and opportunities and prospects for the GG are shifting. Contextual factors include temporalities in universities related to knowledges and knowledge production and impacts of interculturality, neoliberal policy and HE marketisation. How students understand and experience the production of the GG has been widely documented. Less well explored is how academics understand and experience their role in promoting the GG during these critical times of COVID19. Growing concerns around these issues and the implications for academics in the field of teacher education were the impetus for the study presented in this paper. 

Universities deliver internationalised curricula and conduct globally focused programs designed to foster global competencies such as mobility, global mindedness, intercultural competence, and global citizenship. These include language programs, short-term international immersive experiences, international volunteering or service-learning initiatives, student exchange and overseas study programs such as the European Erasmus program, and international internships undertaken during study. Within teacher education, they also include international teaching practicums that invite pre-service teachers to develop their skills in a range of overseas destinations and to develop ‘a global mindset’ (Neilsen & Weinmann, 2019, p. 1) that will equip them to respond to the complexities of the ‘globalised classroom’ (Neilsen & Weinmann, 2019, p. 771).

The neoliberal agenda in HE emerges as a key theme to contextualise those factors which influence and shape global education systems, including through education governance, knowledge production, creation and framing of GGs and academic and student experiences (Blackmore, 2021; Bunn, Bennett, & Burke, 2018; Cheng & Holton, 2019; Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020; Lingard & Thompson, 2017). For example, Cobb & Couch’s (2018) analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Global Competence Framework found that this OECD framework universalizes skills, values, and knowledge to please the globalized labour market, which has been legitimized by the PISA’s Global Competence assessment. In doing so the OECD exercises ‘symbolic control’ over the global pedagogic space. Part of this ‘symbolic control’ is about the relationship between national contexts and broader geopolitical and geo-economic practices which help to reframe the purpose of higher education from producing national citizens to making ‘postnational globally savvy citizens of the world’ (Cheng & Holton, 2019, p. 615).

The unfolding, critical impact of COVID19, pressed ideas and images of the GG. From an initial desktop audit of Australian and NZ university web sites, which searched for those universities which identified ‘global’ or ‘global graduate’ in their marketing, there appeared to be an unclear picture of what meaning GG held during COVID19 for universities and academics. For example, marketized HE generates different constructions and positionings in relation to the ‘global’. How academics, in the field of teacher education, view the notion of the GG and the ‘global space’ to be occupied in the future by their current students, warranted exploration in critical times.  We explored these variable relationships using theoretical frameworks of temporalities and identities to analyse big ‘D’ discourses and figured worlds of ‘university’ and ‘teacher’ that participants invoked. 

Research questions included: 

1. What kinds of identities are being enacted/ what kind of identity is the speaker seeking recognition for?
2. What kinds of knowledges ‘count’ and how are they related to Discourses and identities?

Despite the data being located in Australia, this paper proposes how temporalities and identities within Higher Education markets is likely to change, having international implications for the role of the 'university', the 'academic' and the graduates they produce.  

There were four (4) phases in the analytic process for the study. In Phase 1, NVIVO version 12 was used to manage the generation of initial topics and broad themes, following the reflexive process of becoming familiar with the data, labelling (coding) data and generating initial themes (Braun, Clarke, Hayfield, & Terry, 2019). These were derived from inductive coding as well as six themes: space, time, academic roles, academic identities, GG as economic actor and GG as moral and civic actor, drawn from the initial literature review, which offered an overview of recent social science literature on time and temporalities in higher education. This included the role of global neoliberalism in shaping how time is conceptualised, structured, and experienced in higher education. Further, themes were derived from literatures which included the drive to standardise and marketise education to meet the needs of the global labour market, and the ways that the ‘knowledge economy’ influences what knowledge is produced and how it is valued. During this phase we also identified two additional key themes: Teacher education accountabilities, futures orientation and teaching modalities and knowledges and knowledge production. Phase 2 involved exploration of relationships across topics and themes to delineate and define initial themes (Braun et al, 2019.) This phase of thematic analysis was an iterative process where we reviewed how data extracts were coded and revised coding based on logic and coherence to streamline where codes overlapped. Data were re-coded to differentiate codes, for example, keeping academic roles and academic identities as separate themes, although there were clear overlaps with other themes such as ‘Time’. During this phase we also began big ‘D’ discourse analysis (DA). The initial DA explored how key themes were enacted in identity construction and any relationships with knowledges, knowledge production and accountabilities. Phase 3 included alignment of DA with themes from the interview data which was then mapped back to the literature review using Miro software. Inter-coder checking and discussions between the authors of this paper progressed the refinement of themes based on the visual layering of a MIRO digital map of literatures. Phase 4 involved writing up a narrative account of TA and DA and cross-checking full transcripts for context.

This study has used DA to show that the three identified Discourses of marketization, managerialism and the professional educator will continue to be potent influencers in HE. These Discourses may variously affect how university marketing and academics construct ‘global’ and the graduates they produce. This study found that the GG is closely linked to key themes of critical time and temporalities in HE and therefore concludes that how universities re-construct ‘global’ to potential customers beyond the pandemic will rely on which figured world(s) of the ‘university’ they draw on.

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