A critical reconceptualization of the International Baccalaureate as a potential force for democratisation in global-heritage schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper aims to make a conceptual contribution to the role of the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) in regard to global education within state global heritage (multicultural) schools – using England as a representative example – in an age characterised by epistemological, historical and cultural securitisation. This paper recruits ideas and concepts taken from Lefebvre and Bourdieu in a discussion focussed on the IBO’s potential role in resistance to the dominant neoliberal imaginary and cultural securitisation. However, in order to be a force for democratisation, the IBO must itself democratise through a reconceptualisation of the school spaces it operates in/produces. It will also involve a process of reassessing its notion/positioning of what constitutes symbolic (and therefore valuable) cultural capital. This will mean untethering global education from the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. This paper highlights the possibility of a new space for global education, operationalised by moving beyond the ‘IB school’ to the potential of the more informal IB supported school. It is argued here that the IBO has the potential to galvanise a new wave of inclusive global education.