What Counts as “Educated Citizens”: Discussing How Whiteness Is Represented by British Columbia Offshore Schools in Non-Western Contexts

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality of Knowledge, Whiteness, and Curricular Change (Table 6)

Abstract

The expansion of Western offshore schools has made the trend of international student mobility to the global north more salient. Nevertheless, depicting education at offshore schools as globally respected, enabling students from non-Western contexts to become “educated citizens” can reinforce colonial patterns. Through colonial discourse analysis, this study illuminates the obscured cultural hegemony and racial hierarchy by analyzing discourses that privilege whiteness on BC offshore schools’ websites. Drawing on whiteness studies, this study argues how whiteness maintains its hegemony and privilege through internet-based representations on a global scale. By suggesting how these representations convey the idea of precarity, this study finds that discourses framed by BC offshore schools shape people’s aspirations of whiteness and encourages ongoing investment in Western education.

Author

• Zhenyang Xu, Michigan State University