Author: Susan Richards
Richards, Susan, 2025 Problematising IB Primary Schools’ responses during the first year of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Flinders University, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
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The International Baccalaureate Office (IBO) is one actor in the transnational governance of education, operating within local and global contexts. It became a legitimate field of education (Jaafar et al., 2021) in tandem with the increased globalisation of education throughout the twentieth century. A strong relationship between the experience of International Baccalaureate (IB) school communities and the ideological, instrumental, and practical elements of the IBO (Hill, 2002) has remained a defining characteristic of the IBO since its foundation. IB schools offer a vision of education grounded in the IB mission but interpreted at the local level. Each IB school is shaped by local and global power relations and loosely connected to the wider IB community.
My doctoral research investigates how IB schools responded to the declaration of a global pandemic and school closures. It links policies and practices of the IBO with the accounts of three Primary Years Programme (PYP) coordinators about emergency remote teaching and learning. Using policy statements, curriculum guidance, narratives from semi-structured interviews, and a post-structural research design (Bacchi, 2016a), the thesis explores the “regime[s] of truth” (Foucault in Lorenzini, 2015, p. 3) in three IB primary schools in Melbourne Australia, to identify the conditions of emergence of digital IB education and the effect on IB students, teachers, and parents when schools moved fully online.
Each of the three schools interpreted the mandates and policies differently. One school focused on the learning community, developing children into action-oriented inquirers and parents as supportive community members. Another combined the advice of a technology edupreneur with IB’s construction of technology as a tool for effective learning, training teachers to be programmers, positioning students as app testers and parents as teaching assistants. The third school focused on experiential learning in nature, rejecting technology in the development of the ‘eco-child’.
I argue that teachers led IB teaching and learning during the pandemic and that the IBO temporarily changed its governance relations with schools. The thesis brought to the fore IBO’s human-centred perspective on digital education. It also opened the possibility of multiple digital IB educations, ranging from technocentric behaviourist teaching methods to explorations of post humanist approaches to learning.
Keywords: International Baccalaurete, IBPYP, COVD-19, technology and learning, problematisation, discourse analysis, policy analysis
Subject: Education thesis
Thesis type: Professional Doctorate
Completed: 2025
School: College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Supervisor: Ben Wadham