Portrayal of Offshore Schools on Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and British Columbia Provincial Government Websites

Abstract

Seven Canadian provinces authorize offshore schools where students in other countries can study the provincial curriculum and earn a high school diploma outside of Canada. Offshore schools are a form of international school that have emerged mostly in Asia, Africa, and South America in the first two decades of the twenty-first century (Cosco, 2011; Schuetze, 2008; Wang, 2017). Unlike traditional international schools that cater to globally mobile expatriate families (Bunnell et a., 2016), offshore schools recruit domestic students to study a foreign curriculum while still residing in their home country (Schuetze, 2008; Wang, 2017). In this paper, I examine discourses on the websites of three provincial governments — British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia — that describe their offshore or international programs which teach their public curricula to non-Canadian students in other countries. I chose the provinces of British Columbia (BC), New Brunswick (NB), and Nova Scotia (NS) because they have the most substantive and growing offshore school programs and their websites provide more description and explanation compared to others. My research question is: How do provincial government websites construct and portray offshore/international schools and students? Because BC and NB use the term offshore school, and NS uses international school, this article will use offshore/international school to refer to the type of school in general, and either offshore or international when referring to the individual schools or systems particular to each province. The following paragraphs review the literature followed by an explanation of my methodology. This is followed by my two related findings from this study which are the neoliberal discourses in the rationales and the omission of Indigenous perspectives on each provincial government website. While the schools are rationalized as vehicles for immigration, international readers of these websites are not informed that these provinces are situated on Indigenous territories. The paper concludes with a discussion of these findings.