Internationalization Motivations and Strategies of Israeli Educational Administration Programs

Contemporary Educational Administration Programs

According to Goldring and Schuermann (2009), school leaders today “face a daunting array of challenges and are called upon a breath of knowledge and skills to provide effective leadership to the students, teachers, and communities whom they serve” (p. 9). School administrators are required to lead the staff and students, interact with local and national governmental requirements and supervisors, and manage public relations, finance, academic performance, cultural and strategic planning, and relations with the external community within the increasingly global world (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004).

Educational Administration preparation programs have existed for nearly 100 years (Murphy, 1998); since their earliest days, such programs have been criticized, and calls were voiced to shift their focus altogether (Buskey & Polizzi, 2012; Oplatka, 2009). The past two decades are characterized by an increasing global acceptance of the important role that capable leadership plays in educational reform and school improvement. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) highlighted the role of schools’ leadership in students’ achievements, while global comparisons and thus global standards have begun controlling national policy making in the past years. In conjunction, however, contradicting trends of decentralization and autonomy granting to schools have emerged in some domains at least (Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002). As global economic integration continues to grow, education holds the key to competitiveness on national as well as on individual levels. According to Bush (2012), “[b]ecause of the devolved nature of leadership in many education systems, these pressures are exerted on site-based leaders, notably school principals, who have to deal with increasing complexity and unremitting change” (p. 665). Consequently, policy makers internationally have actively sought out means of strengthening the capacity of school-level leadership, with a particular focus on the design of more effective administrator preparation and development programs.

Following increasing recognition of the significance of effective leadership and management for successful school and student outcomes on global measures, governments and academics have become urgently involved in attempting to understand the type of preparation and development required to promote effective school leadership (Bush, 2008). Despite the comprehensive literature on principal preparation (Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, Meyerson, Orr, & Cohen, 2007; Davis & Darling-Hammond, 2012; Levine, 2005; Murphy, 1992) and widely acknowledged prominence of global, intercultural, and international dimensions in such programs, the research on internationalization in educational administration degree programs in particular is relatively scarce (Quezada, 2010). This study will partially fill in this gap by examining the perceptions regarding internationalization within the faculty leadership of educational administration programs in various higher education institutions in Israel. Understanding the ways in which such program managers think about internationalization is important as it may influence how future school principals will perceive of and thus also engage in the process of internationalization and, specifically, how they will act in this regard as increasingly autonomic school leaders (Agnew, 2013).

Internationalization in Higher Education

According to the Fourth Global Survey of the International Association of Universities (IAU; Egron-Polak & Hudson, 2014), 53% of the universities worldwide have an institutional internationalization policy/strategy, 16% state that internationalization is integrated in the overall strategy of the institution, and 22% are preparing an internationalization strategy. Internationalization over the past years has transformed from a reactive issue to a proactive, strategic one, from added value to mainstream; as such, its focus, scope, and content evolved substantially (de Wit, 2010). In most countries, internationalization has become an increasingly important aspect of higher education and continues to move from the margins to the center of the academic enterprise. Individual universities, however, vary in their cross-border activities, as well as in their capacity to manage global pressures and forces and to transform these into advantages (Marginson & Sawir, 2006; Stromquist, 2007).

According to Jane Knight (2008), “[i]nternationalization is a term that means different things to different people” (p. 28), and yet, the definition of internationalization as “the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of post-secondary education” (Knight, 2004, p. 25) has gained universal acceptance. Increasingly, leaders of higher education institutions are striving to internationalize their institutions for economic, political, academic, and sociocultural rationales (de Wit, 2002), while governments also invest increased resources in this process. This growing interest has translated into the active development of policies, programs, and infrastructure at institutional, local, and national levels, and has produced a call to internationalize traditionally locally oriented faculties such as education (Buczynski, Lattimer, Inoue, & Alexandrowicz, 2010; Yemini, Nissan, & Shavit, 2014). The pressures on graduate schools of education to internationalize not only comprise part of the global internationalization trends in higher education but are also characterized by unique field-specific influences. Such influences include the presumed role of future schools leaders in the proliferation or certain global values, including global justice and environmental responsibility, yet they also include potentially contradicting pressures to maintain the national (local) agenda, which occasionally threatens the above-mentioned globally oriented issues (Gobek, 2003, as cited in Roberts, 2007). Simultaneously, additional agents and trends that are external to national education systems also affect this process. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the United Nations, the OECD, and the World Bank are promoting global educational agendas that reflect educational discourses regarding human capital, economic development, and multiculturalism. Information and communication technology is speeding the global flow of information and creating a library of world knowledge that influences the way we educate and manage our schools. Global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in particular those concerned with human rights and environmentalism, are also trying to influence the globally oriented dimension of school curricula worldwide (Spring, 2008). In addition, bottom–up pressures to internationalize are also apparent with academics promoting transnational research and to lesser extent teaching cooperation and adopting advanced technological solutions that facilitate internationalization through individual agency of interested academics (Yemini, 2014b). Those pressures coexist with long-standing locally oriented priorities on which national education systems were founded since the establishment of the modern nation states.

In this work, we refer to internationalization as a phenomenon common to both the higher education and the school system due to the common nature of this process in these different levels of the education system (as per Yemini, 2014a; Yemini, 2015). In short, an increasing proportion of school graduates are entering the higher education system, with university admission rates standing around 50% in developed countries (Yemini, Holzmann, Fadila et al, 2014 ). Thus, school graduates immediately continue their process of education and are confronted by the same challenges and opportunities that they faced in high school. Hence, as the same population is being studied, the same methodology and discourse should investigate this process. Second, as globalization is more common and apparent in schools and universities, the forces that influence the education system as a whole are similar and should be treated in the same ways. Last, due to flexible learning possibilities emerging such as e-learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and lifelong learning, the barrier between formal schooling and the higher education system is lower than ever before; thus, research should adopt a convergent lens of observation and investigation to better conceptualize comprehensive phenomena. Hence, we investigate perceptions regarding internationalization within educational administration programs at universities and colleges due to the impact of these perceptions on future school leaders’ preparation and eventual practices. Indeed, higher education institutions serve not only as a site of internationalization but also as loci for diffusion of such internationalization further into other parts of the education system. Moreover, the differences found within the different educational administration programs we studied provide novel insights within the discourse of internationalization regarding the development of educational administration programs.

The Global–Local Nexus in Education

Since the appearance of the modern nation-state, education systems worldwide have served as a nation-building apparatus and national consciousness facilitators. Dale and Robertson (2003) note that “[f]ormal education is the most commonly found institution and most commonly shared experience of all in the contemporary world” (p. 7). With the emergence of globalization in recent decades, concepts of cosmopolitanism and internationalization play larger roles in education policy and school curricula, and thus also in teachers’ education programs (Yemini, Yardeni-Kuperberg, Natur, 2015). However, as studies noting differences between local and global dimensions in education systems indicate (i.e., Anderson-Levitt, 2003), educational globalization does not automatically imply or require uniformity among all schools and all school leaders; rather, many influences affect the motivations regarding and implementation of internationalization. Steiner-Khamsi (2004) further notes that “[e]ducational transfer from one context to another not only occurs for different reasons, but also plays out differently” (p. 202).

Contemporary education systems confront an institutional contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Nationalism prioritizes the “nation” over other categories, thus legitimizing education policies, school curricula, and reforms that are consistent with its logic. By contrast, cosmopolitanism prioritizes the “world” and transnational or transcultural categories, thereby legitimizing discourses and practices that transcend the nation. Mapping the dynamics of educational internationalization—the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in different institutions—helps clarify the motivation underlying many content-oriented educational reforms (Yemini, Nissan, & Shavit, 2014).

Indeed, schools presently face contradicting pressures for internationalization on one hand and nationalism on another, which those in managerial positions must balance. Notably, as school management becomes increasingly decentralized, school leaders attain increasing autonomy to implement internationalization (Yemini & Fulop, 2014). Moreover, as higher education institutions are increasingly internationalized, school principals become more likely than they once were to have been exposed to international, intercultural, and global issues during their own academic studies (Yemini, Yardeni-Kuperberg et al., 2015). Thus, the likelihood that school leadership will be familiar with, motivated toward, and interested in internationalization is growing, as is this leadership’s capacity to implement international activities at schools.

The analysis of the Israeli context, especially Israeli educational administration programs as facilitators of future school leaderships’ outlooks, is therefore instructive, as the Israeli education system faces particularly strong pressures in both nationalizing and internationalizing directions simultaneously (Ichilov, 2005; Shenkar & Shenkar, 2011). In addition, the lack of governmental (and other) regulation regarding internationalization in formal educational systems (Yemini & Fulop, 2014) imparts future school leaders with ample agency in this field.

The Israeli Higher Education System

The Israeli higher education system has grown dramatically since the early 1990s: from 70,000 students two decades ago to more than 300,000 in 2014, and from just 7 universities and a handful of colleges in the 1990s to 66 institutions spread nationwide today. Until the 1980s, the postsecondary education system in Israel was divided into two different branches: academic and nonacademic institutions. The academic branch consisted of the seven research universities while the nonacademic branch consisted of other academies, such as teachers’ training seminars. Israeli research universities are widely perceived as divided into two types of institutions comprised of three “elite” and three “target” ¹ universities; the “target” institutions are newer (established in the 1970s) and less selective in their admissions policies and reputation (Davidovitch & Iram, 2009; Shwed & Shavit, 2006; Yogev, 2007).

Teacher education in Israel was originally divided between university faculties—schools or departments of education, which train high school teachers—and the teachers’ colleges, which are sponsored by the Ministry of Education and are responsible for training kindergarten, elementary, and junior high school teachers. The original division between these institutions, from the early statehood years, designated the teachers’ colleges as postsecondary, nonacademic institutions. However, their academic standing has changed since the 1980s, in accordance with the decision of the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) to expand the higher education system by upgrading existing nonacademic colleges and accrediting new private and public colleges. Subsequently, the teacher colleges have undergone an “academization” process, based on CHE approval of their upgraded curricula leading toward the BEd and later MEd degrees, as well as their accreditation as academic colleges of education (Yogev & Yogev, 2006).

Israeli teachers’ colleges specifically are further divided into different sectors to meet the differing needs of Israel’s diverse population. Particular teachers’ colleges target religious or nonreligious Jews, while others are designated for future teachers for the Palestinian-Arab community, offering degree tracks in Arabic. Notably, in Israeli research universities and secular colleges, the student and faculty populations are usually diverse, with students from the full spectrum of Israeli society, including Palestinian-Arab and religious Jewish students as well. In religious Jewish and Palestinian-Arab colleges, in contrast, the population is usually homogeneous, comprised of only students from that particular stream.

In our previous studies (Cohen, Yemini, & Sadeh, 2014; Yemini, Holzmann, de Wit, Sadeh, Stavans, & Fadila, 2015), we investigated the motivations of Israeli college presidents to internationalize. One of the most interesting findings of our study is the way in which second-tier higher education institutions exploit internationalization to elevate their institutions’ status and expand in their study programs. As in other countries like Norway (Kyvik, 2002) or the Netherlands (Jones & de Wit, 2012), we found that structural reforms in the Israeli higher education system tend to foster an “upward drift,” with second-tier institutions trying to gain the first-tier status. As globalization brought about international options for second-tier institutions, their directors seem to be exploiting the opportunities inherent in the international dimension to upgrade their status. In another study (Yemini, Holzmann, Fadilla et al., 2014), we showed that institutional efforts to internationalize influence students’ perceptions of internationalization. Excluding the above detailed attempts and numerous other studies (Guri-Rosenblit, 1999; Menahem, 2008), research on internationalization of higher education in Israel had not received significant academic attention despite increasing resources dedicated to internationalization by leadership in universities and in several private colleges (Yemini, 2014b). In this current study, we aim to further explore the motivations to internationalize, expanding our scope of inquiry to include the leaders of educational administration programs both at teachers’ colleges and at research universities. We include in our study a Palestinian-Arab teachers’ college, as well as two religious Jewish teachers’ colleges, to better understand the contextual factors within the complex and diverse Israeli educational settings.

Participants

We selected to interview 12 senior academics in leading positions at various educational administration programs. Table 1 summarizes these programs’ and their institutions’ characteristics. As the Israeli higher education system and particularly its research universities sector is relatively small, we selected not to publish additional details regarding participants, so as to maintain confidentiality and avoid recognition. The interviewed institutions selected for the sample are broadly diverse in student body size, location (central or peripheral), inclination (research or teaching), and educational stream (Jewish secular, Jewish religious, and Palestinian-Arab) within public and private settings, to enable analysis that will lead to conclusions applicable to educational administration programs across the entire spectrum of the Israeli higher education system.

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Table 1.

Institutions’ and Programs’ Characteristics.

	Type of institution	Location	Public/private
1	Elite Research University	Center	Public
2	Elite Research University	Center	Public
3	Target Research University	Periphery	Public
4	Target Research University	Periphery	Public
5	Secular Teachers’ College	Periphery	Public
6	Secular Teachers’ College	Periphery	Public
7	Secular Teachers’ College	Center	Public
8	Secular Teachers’ College	Center	Private
9	Secular Teachers’ College	Center	Public
10	Jewish Religious Teachers’ College	Center	Public
11	Jewish Religious Teachers’ College	Periphery	Public
12	Palestinian-Arab College	Periphery	Public

Procedure

The second author conducted in-depth, face-to-face, semistructured interviews with the selected department heads over the period of 8 months from October 2013 to May 2014. Prior to that, in the recruitment phase, each interviewee was contacted by email and asked to participate. All those approached agreed, and the interviews were scheduled by email or by phone. Each interview took place at the department heads’ respective offices, and lasted between 90 and 120 min. Several participants were interviewed twice to refine points that arose during the interviews or afterward. Interview questions focused on participant’s descriptions and perceptions of internationalization, their experiences in international education, and the extent to which they perceive of internationalization as important to their students and to their campus. All interviews were audiotaped using a digital voice recorder and were transcribed by the second author. The data were fully analyzed following each interview, and additions and changes to the initial questions were made between interviews based on the information solicited.

Analysis

The interview data analysis followed the four stages that Marshall and Rossman (2010) suggested. ² This analysis aimed at identifying central themes in the data by searching for recurrent experiences, feelings, and attitudes, so as to codify, reduce, and connect different categories into central themes. The coding was guided by the principles of comparative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), including the comparison of any coded element in terms of emergent categories and subcategories leading to the identification of patterns.

In analyzing the interviews, we looked specifically for convergence across participants’ reports (Creswell, 2012). The emerging issues were then assembled as several major themes regarding the department heads’ motivation and views.

The Purpose of the Program

The first theme that emerged from the data is the interviewed program directors’ respective perceptions of the purpose of their programs. In line with the continued debate over the alleged dysfunction of educational administration degree programs (Bridges, 2012), we were intrigued to find a wide spectrum of opinions regarding the “true” meaning and purpose of the programs. All participants agreed that accountability, information technology, and broader changes in management and organization have fundamentally changed school leadership and that responses to such eminent changes should be incorporated into educational administration degree programs. All participants noted their willingness to deliver programs that will prepare the graduates for the “real world,” but their perception of the current reality and thus the desired program components varied tremendously, reflecting a spectrum from totally local to almost entirely global inclinations. Indeed, program directors from two established research universities presented much more global views than other interviewees did; for example,

I would like [the students] to study more theory and more scientific methodology, to reflect the requirements of today’s real workplace. As the details and the circumstances change all the time, we need to teach people how to think. I believe that this is the true nature of the program. The program is globally oriented in that sense.

On the contrary, the directors of target universities, as well as Jewish secular and religious Jewish academic colleges, presented their rationalization for locally oriented programs. Nevertheless, most of the interviewees acknowledged the need to be connected to the global body of knowledge. One program director claimed, “You can’t be global, because in the schools our graduates will run, they will encounter a local reality. They need to study about our society and challenges.” Yet, the same interviewee also stated,

I want the graduate here to be proactive . . . if he needs to find a solution, I want him to actively search for it, to look for materials even in English, not to be dependent on someone to translate for him. In that sense, he must be globally oriented.

The local dimension was more prominent in Jewish religious colleges where the program directors interviewed noted practically no internationally oriented activities or goals. When asked whether part of the program should be delivered in English, one of these departmental leaders replied, “Why should I teach in English? American students are not obligated to study in French, for example. Why should we teach in another language? We need to prepare our students for their local leadership positions.”

In comparison, a program director at one of the research universities answered the same question to the complete contrary: “All the materials are in English. The research is international, we publish in international journals for an international audience, and of course, the students are part of that.” This same interviewee continued, “Since 60,000 students from all over the world are studying in our classroom through Coursera, ³ we probably are global . . . we can’t be local, because the very essence of our job is universal.”

Hess and Kelly (2005) claim that in recent years, degree programs for future school leaderships have been in need of reform and change. New initiatives and programs in this field have opened worldwide, with the aim of effectively addressing the challenges raised by the globalized and dynamic present reality. Seemingly, educational administration degree programs have adopted diverse aims within the global–local nexus, largely dependent on their contextual realities. Thus, somewhat predictably, we found that directors of research-oriented faculties presented more globally oriented views on the nature of their programs, while program directors at local institutions that focus mainly on teaching presented a clear local orientation.

The Programs’ Relations With the Institutions’ Goals

Worldwide, universities are increasingly internationalizing their curricula, syllabi, activities, student body, and staff (Leask, 2013). Researchers, policy makers, and experts in wide-ranging fields have called on institutions of higher education to produce students who can apply their intercultural knowledge as both global citizens and professionals. Indeed, universities’ international activities have dramatically expanded in volume, scope, and complexity during the past decades. In the past, Israeli colleges operated at the margins of the higher education system and, like community colleges in the United States, were viewed as the “poor cousin” of elite private colleges and research universities (Twombly & Townsend, 2008). Recently, however, with the increasing demand for higher education, the globalized economy, and changing political forces, Israeli colleges are starting to position themselves on the same educational arena as universities and are exploiting the international dimension to gain prestige and funds—and mostly to develop a research agenda that was lacking in their original mission (Yemini, Holzmann, de Wit et al., 2015). Within this movement toward internationalization, educational administration programs face contradicting pressures that their directors perceive as deriving from an increasingly localized discipline, on one hand, and the pressures to internationalize that are apparent in most of the institutions, on the other hand. As one program director explained,

This is different from physics. In the sciences, the research is global. For me, I can conduct comparative studies: all the data is available now for free on the OECD website . . . . But if you are not “living” the society, you won’t be able to truly understand the results . . . so you need to teach the context . . . the national, local context.

Another program leader noted that “[t]he future school leadership must first understand Israel’s social structure, its communities. This discourse needs to be more local than the one in engineering [for example].”

The isomorphism of the program’s internationalism with broader institutional goals is reflected in the following university program director’s statement:

In recent years, the institution has been pressuring us to internationalize . . . . The university demands that some courses be delivered in English . . . usually by native speakers . . . . The university benefits from our internationalization efforts. It becomes more competitively positioned. Sometimes, however, it is better for our students to study more local subjects because of the nature of the field.

Indeed, researchers have recently noted isomorphic pressures toward internationalization as a growing phenomenon in both schooling and higher education (Wiseman, Astiz, Fabrega, & Baker, 2011). Moreover, we found competition on the basis of internationalization in the relations between the colleges and the universities. One of the university programs directors explained that “[s]tudents who come here are looking for the status. Being in our institution means studying with the most well-known researchers in the world . . . otherwise, they can go to one of the colleges.”

The same interviewee also observed the institutional impact on faculty activities, noting the occasional conflict between teaching and research aims:

If promotions were made according to strictly global standards, you wouldn’t waste your time publishing your work in Hebrew . . . . research is our main goal and teaching is our secondary one. Sometimes, these two are not truly connected.

Indeed, a program director at a Jewish secular college agreed, addressing the impact of the teaching versus research division on internationalism within his program:

The CHE decided that the universities conduct research and the colleges be engaged in teaching, so for us it is much more complicated to be connected with the global world. The teaching load is too high . . . we lack the resources.

Interestingly, our findings in this regard from the Jewish religious and Palestinian-Arab colleges are surprising, as program directors from these sectors expressed different experiences than what would be expected from the university–college duality discussed above. Indeed, religious Jewish colleges completely omitted the international dimension from their agenda. Hence, program directors from religious colleges expressed no interest in developing internationalism to become more university-like and compete with the universities—a trend identified among colleges in general (Jones & de Wit, 2012). At the same time, educational administration departments at religious Jewish colleges were de facto found to be more internationally active than their counterparts at other colleges, based on their own unique motivation of developing and maintaining contacts with communities of the Jewish Diaspora abroad. Hence, interviewees noted the existence of joint programs, scholarships, and student mobility schemes. In this sense, the educational administration programs were tightly aligned with their colleges’ goals:

The institution serves a religious Jewish population and is obligated a to specific type of leadership . . . We want our program to be unique in that sense . . . the institution applies no international pressures; on the contrary, there are absolutely no resources to develop internationalism . . . . Our students don’t seek internationalism. This is not one of their criteria in choosing our college.

In contrast, the Palestinian-Arab educational administration program director presented an extremely globally oriented vision of both the program and the institution:

We can’t be content as peripheral Arab [minority] colleges, among the colleges that are peripheral to the universities, in this peripheral country. We must look abroad and compete globally. We are trying constantly to send students abroad and to bring guest lecturers.

Ironically, perhaps, this vision of reaching abroad seems relatively attainable for Palestinian-Arab colleges compared with Jewish colleges, given the unique characteristics of these colleges’ faculty members. The same program director proceeded to explain,

You know that it is not easy for Palestinian-Arabs to study in Israel. Thus, we have some outstanding faculty members who went to U.S. for their Ph.D.s and are coming back after years abroad. They are different people now; cosmopolitan by nature . . . . This transforms the program and the students.

The Meaning of Internationalization

A decade ago, Jane Knight provided a commonly applied definition of internationalization of higher education—namely, “the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of post-secondary education” (Knight, 2004, p. 11). Over the years, however, the concept of internationalization has expanded and became rather broad and diverse. Indeed, as demonstrated above, different people and circumstances foster different conceptualization of this definition. In our study, when asked to refer to internationalization in the educational administration programs they head, the program directors we interviewed emphasized several different concepts. For example, whereas directors from programs at research universities refer to international academic collaborations and opportunities, professionals operating within institutions with religious Jewish inclinations typically understand internationalism to relate to contacts with Jewish communities abroad and students from culturally diverse Jewish communities within Israel. This latter conception elucidates the following explanation the director of a program at a Jewish religious college provided:

Since the population here is very diverse, we are trying to develop the intercultural dimension. I reckon we are pretty much internationalized in that sense . . . . Some [alumni] work with Jewish communities abroad . . . . but I am not responsible for that.

Other program heads from research universities and the Palestinian-Arab college, in contrast, understood global and international dimensions as more prominent than the intercultural characteristics of internationalization. As one interviewee stated, “[o]ur graduates work in a global world. The knowledge today is global, so we need them to be experienced and qualified. The [work] environment is in constant change.”