International Schools and De-globalisation: Exploring the tensions during the Covid-19 crisis

This paper explores the thesis of de-globalisation in relation to international education. Through interrogating accounts of international school leadership during the Covid-19 crisis, the tension between international expectations and localised realities is charted, with four central tenets of internationalism undermined by the pandemic experience. It is argued that the Covid-19 crisis, ostensibly a single global event, resulted in the fractalisation of international education; the conceptualisation of unified internationalism was undermined by the inherently localised material effects of the pandemic. In place of an internationalism that is unified, transcendent, inclusive and connected, international school leaders’ accounts of leading through the pandemic focused on their sense that their schools were fractured, rooted, privileged and isolated. It is suggested that this international crisis demonstrates the precarious nature of the respatialising of the global that is intrinsic to international schooling.