Internationalization Policies of Public Schooling and Neoliberal Discourses: A Stephen Ball Informed Analysis

Abstract

This article examines the neoliberal underpinnings of current internationalization policies of public schooling in Canadian contexts. It goes beyond the existing institutional practices and approaches to internationalize K–12 public schooling and focuses more on the federal and provincial international education policies and strategies that govern the institutional practices. The article pays more attention to the neoliberal developmental contexts of these governmental policies. It employs Stephen Ball’s writings, particularly his views of policy as text and policy as discourse, to analyze the ways in which global neoliberalism and its public discourses on public education marketization, privatization, and expansion of policy communities relate to the development of current internationalization policies of K–12 public schooling as texts and as discourses in Canada. The analysis suggests that the global neoliberal ideology and its public discourses are the contexts that promote and legitimize the development of current market-oriented internationalization policy texts and discourses. These neoliberal discourses view public education as an internationally tradable commodity that the private sector may provide for international students and contribute to its policy development. In that context, current international education policies pay more attention to the recruitment of fee-paying K–12 international students with an increased role for the private sector in this process.