From Argentina to Zimbabwe: Exploring the global appeal of the International Baccalaureate

Abstract

This paper presents the third stage of a larger research project examining perceptions of the International Baccalaureate (IB) to better understand its growing influence on education systems around the world. The first two stages involved a synchronic and diachronic analysis of IB discourse in a 27 million word specialized corpus of global press articles, created as an unsolicited window into public opinion (Mautner, 2008). The present study uses the same corpus to explore how the IB is represented in different countries, what values and attitudes may be associated with it, and how it interacts with other global education actors. Bottom up and top down methods from corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) were used to analyze 34,104 newspaper articles from 56 countries. Frequency, collocation and concordance analyses revealed four dominant discourses of deficiency connected to national education systems in countries across the ideological spectrum that helped to legitimize the inclusion of private actors in the provision of education. Results also showed unique discourses associated with the IB in North America, thereby highlighting the key role that this region plays in the IB world.