Paul Tarc – författare

With the intensification of globalization, there is a growing consensus that «international education has come of age». This book examines how the changing conditions of the present have given rise to an altered set of meanings and uses for international education, using the International Baccalaureate (IB) as its focal point. Currently adopted in over 2,500 private and state-run schools in 134 countries around the world, the IB has far surpassed the expectations of its founders, who struggled under considerable challenges in the 1960s to develop an internationally recognized diploma for university entrance. From its beginnings to its current prominence, the history of the IB richly illuminates the shifting meanings, uses, challenges, and progressive openings of international education in a global age. Documenting the ideals, goals, and complications faced by the IB movement, this book will be relevant to individuals interested in the IB in particular, as well as to those interested in the broader areas of global studies, progressive pedagogy, educational change, and globalization.

This book illuminates the changing landscape and expediency of international education in global times. Within this larger picture, the book focuses on the educational effects of international encounters, experiences and lessons – the complex processes of learning and subject formation in play during and after one's international/intercultural experience. These complex processes, hinged on past and present self-other relations, are illustrated by employing the parable of «The Elephant and the Blind Men.» In contrast to more narrow, developmentalist conceptions of intercultural learning, Paul Tarc attends to each of the linguistic, existential, structural, and psychical dimensions of difficulty constituting learning across difference. Becoming aware of, and reflexive to, these dimensions of difficulty and their implications for one’s own learning and resistance to learning, represents the domain of cosmopolitan literacy. The key intervention of this book is to re-conceive pedagogical processes and aims of international education as fostering such cosmopolitan literacy. Graduate courses on international education, study abroad, global citizenship education, and preservice education courses focusing on international education and teaching internationally could be primary candidates for this text.