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The past decade has witnessed the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments around the world, around the claims that globalization is an ideology that has undermined the sovereignty of nation-states and created conditions that have produced wide-ranging social inequalities. And yet there seems little prospect of turning back from the facts of global interconnectivity. In this paper, I suggest that it is in this contradictory space that the work of educators is now located. Such a space has given rise to a range of perplexing ethical challenges that are not only political but also pedagogic. Politically, these challenges relate to the need to forge ethical communities that can generate collective action in the face of growing levels of global interconnectivity, on the one hand, and the popular appeal of nationalism, on the other. Pedagogically, these challenges demand approaches that assist students to make a better sense of the contradictory world in which they now live and learn, and develop a practice of ethics that foregrounds difference, complexity, contingency and uncertainty.

This article examines the ways in which the International Baccalaureate’s Learner Profile is interpreted and enacted in three different national settings. Using the data collected from a comparative study of the Learner Profile in nine International Baccalaureate schools in India, Hong Kong, and Australia, the article problematizes the widely held belief that understandings of the key attributes of the Learner Profile are nationally inflected. It suggests, instead, that these schools relate to their localities in a range of complex and multifaceted ways, and that the differences between individual schools within the same country are often more significant than differences between nations when it comes to putting the Learner Profile into practice. The article introduces the idea of “transnational learning spaces” to describe a range of common features across these schools, including highly culturally diverse and globally mobile student populations and a shared disposition toward cosmopolitanism.

For them the talk of global interconnectivity is both remote and highly abstract. The social processes that many globalization theorists describe have little sense to them. But should this really be the case? Just because they are not globally networked, can we assume that global processes do not also affect them? Is it possible for the life style and options of those who do not travel to remain unaffected by those who do? Is it possible for the social constitution of their communities to remain unaltered? Can we even imagine places beyond the reach of the global media, and the new institutions of global exchange? Let me explain what I mean here with an example.

This paper examines the policy notion of multiculturalism, and suggests that it is no longer adequate for understanding contemporary forms of interculturality that span across the globe, and are deeply affected by the processes of cultural globalization. Cultural identities can no longer be assumed as static and nation-bound, and are created instead in deterritorialized spaces, characteristics of our cosmopolitan futures. It argues that the goal of the internationalization of curriculum must involve pedagogic strategies through which students can interrogate these spaces, and seek to recreate them.