Creating a 21st century opportunity
The outgoing director general shares his vision
How will the IB reconcile its aims in a 21st century world, where education in many countries is blighted by conflict and adversity, or has to come secondary to the basic needs of nutrition and shelter?
In this context, those governments who can afford to have begun addressing wider social problems through education, by means such as experimenting with new learning systems and broadening it to include non-academic topics.
However, the IB hasn’t allowed pursuit of its core determination—to develop young people who can create a better world through intercultural understanding and respect—to obscure its spirit of rigour and critical enquiry. It’s this rich and distinctive mix of a clear mission and commitment to subject-based teaching that’s brought the IB programmes worldwide attention.
Given this appreciation of the IB’s commitment to quality, the potential for expansion is easy to see. As IB Director General Emeritus George Walker points out, a number of exciting initiatives are in various stages of development.
The first involves a persistent prejudice about the IB—“With the Diploma Programme, we’ve always been accused of being elitist,” says the outgoing director general from his office in Geneva. “In one important sense, that’s always going to be the case. The Diploma Programme has unashamedly been designed as a preparation for university study, so by definition it will exclude a number of students. But the Middle Years Programme and the Primary Years Programme are seen as all-embracing. That’s a dilemma we have to live with.”
However, the world increasingly requires vocational options to be included in the education of 13-to-19-year-olds, something the IB has taken into account. “Some people feel that there are some characteristics of the Diploma Programme that exclude people who could benefit from it,” George explains. “One way we’re addressing this is in the notion of a diploma that’s more oriented towards people who see their first step after school as employment training rather than academic continuation.”
The IB is already working with a college in Finland and two in Quebec on a pilot project to evaluate how more vocationally oriented courses might work. “Designing a new course would be hugely expensive and we’d be exploring an area in which we don’t have much expertise,” says George. “So we’re looking at existing colleges that want to make their provision more internationally oriented. We want them to tell us which parts of the Diploma Programme they could use to create an international version of what they’re doing. Once these criteria are established, a huge number of colleges will be interested.”
Another area being looked at is how to transcend the limitations of teaching within schools. “At the moment, if you want to do the Diploma Programme, you have to go to an IB World School,” says George, “and though the number is growing, it’s a drop in the ocean. It also represents 20th, rather than 21st century learning. You have to attend a building to go to school and that rules out huge numbers of people. So we’re looking at what we’re calling the IB Open International College. We’re building on experience, slowly developing distance learning in teaching the IB Diploma Programme via our Finland pilot project and a pilot involving four schools in the USA and Latin America, with standard level economics from the Diploma Programme being studied online.”
This model could help provide an answer to the conundrum of how to improve access to the IB programmes across social and global divides. “We’re shaping up to have a much greater involvement in distance teaching and e-learning,” says George. “Firstly, the proposal is that the IB will not be the providers, but will authorize others. Secondly, we’ll be inviting existing schools to develop a sense of community which students can feel part of without being physically present.”
The third major area under investigation is language. “At the moment we only offer the Diploma Programme in Spanish, French and English, so this is the third area under consideration,” says the director general emeritus. “In a recent pilot we translated a number of subjects into German and are now examining them in German, enabling students to obtain a bilingual German diploma. This experiment will be carefully evaluated and will help us to develop a model that could help to break down those high walls of language.”
As George Walker hands over to new Director General Jeffrey Beard this month, he does so assured that more students than ever will benefit from the IB’s dynamism and the enthusiasm and integrity of its teachers. As he said at the Nordic Schools Conference: “The IB can only do so much, and within each element of the curriculum it will be the teachers and administrators who have an overwhelming influence.”
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"We will have much greater involvement in distance teaching and e-learning."
