Special Issue: International Education in the Asia-Pacific Region Introduction by the Guest Editors

This special issue of the AJE is focused on international education, globalisation and identities in schooling and higher education in the nations of the Asia-Pacific. Two of the papers concern international education in Australia and the others discuss aspects of education in Malaysia, Singapore, China and Korea. A common theme of all the papers is the transformative character of global shifts as they are played out at the levels of nation, locality and individual. It becomes increasingly obvious to us that not only are individual identities changeable, we live in a world of 'plural affiliations' (Sen, 1999) in which the nation is only one claim on identity, and national identity too is contested and is open to change. The nation is an imagined community fostered by human practice, rather than a timeless truth, the inheritance of ancestry and geography, as once we thought. The openness of identities in education becomes more obvious when we consider cross-border aspects such as what happens to students who enroll in a foreign country, and what happens to the institutions that educate them; and what happens to research in a country where scholars used to work mainly in the national language but now work in English as part of the global research system. But intensified changes are happening within national education systems as well as in the growing volume of traffic between them. Globalisation is not just something coming into nations and into classrooms from outside. It is inside as well. Globalisation and education Following Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, & Perraton (1999, p. 2) we can define 'globalisation' simply as the widening, deepening and speeding up of all forms of worldwide interconnectedness. However there is no single de-territorialised process of globalisation that affects all nations, all institutions and every student in the same way (Sidhu, 2004). 'Educational changes in response to globalisation share certain defining parameters but still vary greatly across regions, nations and localities' (Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002, p. 6). Here it is important to emphasise, against notions of globalisation as a pre-given structural force originating in the economy or elsewhere that is somehow independent of human agency, that there are no global transformations, no global flows of effect, that are independent of human subjects. Globalisation in education involves not just transformations of economic and cultural circumstances but transformations in people themselves. Global convergence and encounters with difference bring transformations in people's living practices, their imaginations (Appadurai, 1996) and the discourses and languages within which their sociability is practised. This is true of all walks of life, but particularly true of education, a sector marked by extensive and intensive global networking (especially at the post-school stage), and global influences in government educational policy and institution-level notions of good practice. This transformative capacity means that globalisation has an immense, continuing and open-ended educational potential: both the potential to educate and self-educate, and the potential to transform our longstanding educational institutions and habits inherited from the past. We find that, in education, globalisation becomes manifest in changing classroom practices in schools, vocational education and training (VET) institutions and universities; changing administrative perspectives; the international marketing of programs, which can introduce tensions between educational and business goals; and especially in the complex processes of people themselves living in more than one cultural/educational zone. Further, people are active agents not only in changing in response to the shifting global environment ('other-determined' transformation) but changing in ways they choose for themselves ('inner-determined' transformation) and these outer and inner elements have an almost infinite potential for permutation. …