ABSTRACT
Before it is possible to discuss aspects of teaching and learning in international schools, it is important to come to a shared understanding of the context.
There have been a number of different typologies over the years that have attempted to facilitate an understanding of the very different international schools around the world (Leach 1969; Terwilliger 1972; Ponisch 1987; Matthews 1988; Hill 2002, 2006a). These have used various criteria in order to categorise the different types of school ranging from their curriculum (national or international), their purpose and reason for being (ideological or market-driven), their student population (multinational or predominantly one nationality), their faculty (multinational or not), their history (national schools overseas). Although these may be useful, as Pearce points out ‘defining international schools is difficult, contentious and probably pointless . . . They cannot always be classified by the names they adopt and are best treated as a broad continuum’ (Pearce 1994: 8). Hayden (2006) comes to a similar conclusion in advising that they are seen as a ‘spectrum’ ‘with the ideological at one end and the market-driven at the other’ (Hayden 2006: 16). For the purpose of this discussion, a broad understanding is adopted that includes quite a varied type of school ranging from the most ideological at one end (such as the United World Colleges (Peterson 1987)) to the for-profit schools at the market-driven end of the spectrum that often offer a national curriculum and are usually English-speaking medium. Jonietz (Jonietz and Harris 1991) rather naively claimed that international schools were alike in their ‘international goals, and their multicultural, multinational and multilingual populations’. I would like to suggest that they may be alike in their multi - cultural, multilingual and multinational populations but these schools do not necessarily share international goals, unless they are towards the ideological end of the spectrum. They do often share multilingual and multicultural student populations (although there can be no assumptions about the predominant percentage from any one nationality) and this alone will have an impact on the teaching and learning that goes on within them. Another factor that is often taken for granted is that they are usually English medium. Although
there are bilingual international schools in a number of countries (and of course the multilingual European schools) the majority of international schools are English medium and this has an impact on the faculty recruited and the nature of the teaching and learning that takes place (Hayden 2006).
