Ten years after the first global rankings appeared, it is clear that they have had an extraordinary impact on higher education. While there are fundamental questions about whether rankings measure either quality or what's meaningful, they have succeeded in exposing higher education to international comparison. More so, because of the…

Global university rankings have portrayed European higher education institutions in varying lights, leading to intense reflection on the figures on the EU and national levels alike. The rankings have helped to construct a policy problem of "European higher education", framing higher education as an element of competitiveness in a global…

The evolving narrative on internationalisation in higher education is complex and multi-layered. This overview explores the evolution of thinking about internationalisation among different stakeholder groups in universities. It parses out eight coexisting layers that progress from concerns based largely upon institutional survival and competition…

The recent critical turn toward post-secularism, particularly on behalf of theorists working from the perspective of Christian societies, has highlighted the difficulty of approaching the history of the Middle East through the binary of religion and secularism. This article argues that such terms are of little explanatory value in and of…

Recently there has been a shift in the discourses of university policy from internationalisation towards the contested concept of global citizenship. This paper explores ways of challenging the current interpretation of international education policy through the concept of global citizenship drawing on the discussion forums of two cohorts of…

Although not new, the concept of internationalisation, the inclusion of intercultural perspectives and the development of cross-cultural understanding, has gained particular currency and support across the United Kingdom (UK) higher education sector over the last decade. However, within the academic literature, as well as within institutional…

This essay endeavours to reframe current discussion of the relationship of religion to education by highlighting an often seriously neglected element of contemporary educational thought: the changing, post-secular understanding of childhood in the globalised age. Drawing upon recent ethnographies of childhood, and an older anthropological…

Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of "scaling up". This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement "what works" across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu's notions of…

This article begins by observing how education is currently appreciated primarily for its utility value, a view informed by utilitarianism and neoclassical economic theory. A critique of that framing is offered and an alternative way of valuing education informed by a Capabilities Approach is presented. In doing so, I also observe that while key…

This study explores the view that student engagement with one another is critical in the internationalisation mission. Although universities make powerful claims regarding their international mission and goals, international and home students report isolation from one another. Whilst the literature is rich in its discussion of policy,…

This paper investigates mindfulness as a case study of a "subjective turn" in education reflecting a postsecular age. The practice of mindfulness originates in an ancient Buddhist teaching prescribed as part of the path to enlightenment. In spite of its origins, it is becoming widespread within diverse secularly conceived social and…

Developing graduates as global citizens is a central aim of the internationalised university of the 21st century. International student mobility premised on notions of cosmopolitanism is regarded as a key component of the student learning experience. Yet there is little evidence to suggest the benefits of international mobility for intercultural…

Social emotional learning (SEL) is common in preschools and schools both in Europe and North America today. Programmes for socio-emotional training and the rise of what is labelled therapeutic education have dramatically increased during the first decade of the millennium. In this article, a manual-based programme used for SEL in a Swedish school…

Ability grouping in schools and classrooms constitutes something of a policy hiatus in the Australian context, in contrast to the conspicuous visibility of equity and quality as explicit policy goals. This article examines what I am calling the dialectics -- i.e. moments of negation that allow for creation -- and dilemmas inhering in the complex…

The central thesis of this article is that conceptualizations of accountability systems need to be more encompassing to accommodate the current diversity of school choice. This article examines an emerging type of school that specializes in advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curriculum for gifted and academically…