A Critical Policy Analysis of Internationalization in Postsecondary Education : An Ontario Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a case study approach, I investigate a very timely and significant policy issue regarding postsecondary education. While internationalization seems to be ubiquitous in universities’ policy rhetoric and statements in the Canadian context, specifically in Ontario, it is unclear what values drive internationalization and how they influence policies and initiatives at a public university in Ontario. Relying on Easton’s approach of policy as the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ and drawing on critical policy analysis, I perceive policy as ‘the practice of values’. The critical policy approach and the centrality of values in analysis require a consideration be given not only to what values are represented, but to understanding whose values are represented and whose voices are missing in internationalization activities and related policy statements.\nBy interrogating policy perceptions conveyed through interviews with university administrators and faculty, and reflected in policy statements and administration rhetoric, this study found the emergence and presence of two major discourses of values driving internationalization policies: liberal-academic and neoliberal-instrumental. The liberal-academic discourse is constituted by two sets of values: educational/academic and multicultural/humanitarian. The neoliberal-instrumental discourse is also comprised of two other sets: market-based and competition-based values. Moreover, the findings support there is a significant gap between the meaning of internationalization in theory and its perception in practice. From a critical point of view, internationalization is rhetorically (in theory) acknowledged as ideological components, and literally (in practice) recognized as different realistic components with some pragmatic rationales. Additionally, although participants from different administrative positions and faculties share the same values regarding the necessity of internationalization, there are significant differences between their perceptions and attitudes about the meanings, rationales, and agendas of internationalization.\nThe study shows the gradual extension of commercial logic and market values that historically have been absent from traditional university policies in Ontario to educational initiatives and academic values. The study recommends internationalization initiatives require harmony and a dynamic balance between the two identified discourses of values. There is, therefore, an imperative need to maintain balance in the global market of internationalization and to protect academic and humanitarian values and rationales of postsecondary education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".