“Tropicalizing the IB”: Central American educators’ resistance at a Costa Rican International Baccalaureate school

• In Event: Race, Indigeneity and Resistance

Proposal

The recent growth of international schools and global citizenship education raises questions about what “international” and “global” education mean in theory and practice. While proponents of global citizenship education aim to enhance students’ international and intercultural understanding (Hacking et al. 2018), critics point to philosophies and practices often rooted in Westerncentrism (Poonoosamy 2010). More broadly, international and global citizenship education programs have been critiqued for being Western neoliberal commodities for export to the Global South where “globalization has become a new wave of imperialism” (Dei 2019, p. 51). In Latin America, Western-centric international education programs can be viewed as extensions of colonial histories where Northern institutions define issues and prescribe solutions under universalist declarations of rationality and progress (Escobar 2011). As a result, many students and teachers in and from Latin America must succumb to international educational programs if they wish to acquire the necessary academic legitimacy and global cultural capital to become part of transnational middle and elite classes (Bunnell 2010; Gardner-McTaggart 2016).

Within this context, our paper examines how a group of educators at a globally-renowned international school in Costa Rica critique and resist the protocol of the International Baccalaureate (IB). The school uniquely embraces the challenge of maintaining IB affiliation while simultaneously offering an international education from a Latin American standpoint to a student body with over sixty nationalities. We draw on data from an ongoing, long-term ethnographic project to show how Costa Rican educators critique the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000) that organizes material and epistemic hierarchies in the school community. Interviews, focus groups, and observations of everyday practices lend insight into the ways these educators negotiated competing demands for externally prescribed IB-codified knowledge and connection to place and local communities. We argue that the intersection of epistemology and the politics of location—referred to as the “locus of enunciation” (Mignolo 1999)—explicitly guide how these educators work around and against Westerncentrism to foreground local Costa Rican and regional Latin American knowledges. These “epistemologies of the South” (Sousa Santos 2015) shape educators' attempts to decolonize IB service learning, IB World History, and school-led community events. We call for more critical examinations of “international” and “global citizenship” education and argue that schools and programs must move past token notions of diversity and multiculturalism to examine the historical and geopolitical power structures that govern the globalizing world. Moreover, we posit that thoughtfully and deliberately positioning Southern knowledge and actors as constitutive of the “international,” rather than pre-modern or peripheral, is imperative to any sort of critical transformation of international and global citizenship education.

Authors

• Kyle Kopsick, University of Colorado Boulder

• Andrea Dyrness, University of Colorado, Boulder