Canada’s new branding effort: “Education in/au Canada”

An international “brand” for Canadian education was recently launched, marking the latest national government’s effort to gain market share in the global education sector. Similar in motivation to recent campaigns developed by other countries such as the Netherlands, Malaysia and New Zealand, Canada’s new brand represents one pillar of the federal government’s strategy to recruit greater numbers of international students to Canadian institutions and to promote Canadian education overseas in the increasingly competitive international education marketplace.

According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), there were over 156,000 international students in Canada in 2007, which translates to roughly 5% of total foreign student numbers (see the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2008 for up-to-date comparative data). In comparison, the US, UK and Australia together receive 45% of all global flows.

Canada’s new logo (pictured to the left) is a jaunty red maple leaf with the bilingual caption “IMAGINE: Education in/au Canada.” According to the CMEC, it is intended to complement existing provincial and institutional efforts by establishing a more easily recognizable national umbrella image, particularly for use in recruitment fairs and exhibitions. Unlike many countries focusing on the university-level market, Canada’s new logo is intended to be used by all levels of education, from primary through to further and higher education.

The fact that Canada has pursued an education brand is noteworthy as it signals a new, perhaps unprecedented, form of collaboration across the different levels of government in relation to international education. As Glen Jones explained in another GlobalHigherEd entry, education remains an issue of provincial and territorial jurisdiction in Canada, meaning that international education policies have generally remained decentralized and uncoordinated. This new brand, however, was developed through collaboration by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s (DFAIT) Edu-Canada Initiative, the provincial and territorial ministries of education and the CMEC, as well as several stakeholder and sectoral representatives. And while provincial responsibility for education is not at question, this multi-scalar and multi-sectoral initiative represents a new structural response to concerns of competitiveness in the international education industry and for the potential labour force gains that foreign students who choose to remain in Canada, post-graduation, represent.

Kate Geddie

Ministers of Education and fora for thinking beyond the nation

One of the features of the globalization of higher education and research is the bringing together of ministers of education from various countries to think beyond the nation at regional, inter-regional, and global scales, as well as in a comparative sense. Thus we are seeing the nation-state creating internal competencies for statecraft via extra-territorial fora.

This is, of course, nothing new in some ways: ministries of trade and industry, or ministries of immigration, have done this for decades. But this is really the first era when ministers of education have become much more involved in strategizing about how to adjust education systems, especially the higher education and research elements, so as to engage with broader shifts in economy and society.

Here are links to some recent meetings, with associated reports:

• APEC Education Ministerial Meeting (AEMM), 11-12 June 2008
  (pictured above)
• Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) Biennale on Education in Africa, 5-9 May 2008
• ASEM Conference of Ministers for Education, 5-6 May 2008
• Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Council Conference, 13-14 March 2008
• Meeting of Ministers of Education under the auspices of the Inter-American Council on Integral Development of the Organization of American States, 12–14 November 2007
• Bologna Process Ministerial Conference, 17-18 May 2007
• Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers (CCEM), 11 to 14 December 2006

Let me know if you know of any more that I should include – I am happy to add them to the list above.

Scaling up need not only work at the regional or interregional scale. In Latin America, for example, five higher education ministers from Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua, Venezuela signed the Cochabamba Declaration to further ALBA – the “Bolivarian Alternative for the peoples of Our America”, a regional intergration initiative that is anti-capitalist in nature, for the most part.

Or in Canada, the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada (CMEC), made up on all provincial ministers of education (as education, including higher education, is a provincial responsibility), frames its international activities along a variety of other regional, interregional, and multilateral axes:

CMEC’s international activities have traditionally involved three major international organizations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Commonwealth. While other partnerships have been formed with the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Education Forum, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Summit of the Americas process, both OECD and UNESCO, as well as the Commonwealth, continue to play a prominent role.

Assessments of the efficacy of such fora in facilitating new ways of thinking, innovative forms of statecraft, and extended networks of support, are lacking.  Yet it is clear that some, such as the biannual Bologna Process summit (the London 2007 event is pictured to the left), are effective in facilitating action.

In conclusion, we are seeing, via the lens of such fora:

1. Enhanced extra-territorial agendas and networks being built up by ministries that have not traditionally been so interested, nor obligated, in thinking beyond the nation, nor even beyond the province/state scale, in some countries.
2. Meeting agendas and joint concluding statements that are framed around adjusting education systems to mediate and especially advance economic interdependence.
3. Evidence of the enhanced intertwining of higher education with regional and interregional R&D strategies (especially with respect to science and technology).
4. The desire to continue advancing longstanding social and cultural agendas (given the core nation-building function of higher education), though these socio-cultural agendas brush up against economic and international migration dynamics.
5. The inclusion of some associated voices in the ministerial-centred deliberations, and the exclusion, by design or accident, of others that have clearly not started to think beyond the nation. On this point I see the voices of some students (e.g., the European Students’ Union) included, but faculty voices (via associations, unions, etc), are remarkably absent.

In the end, it is uncertain how far these initiatives will go. The addition of new mandates is perhaps to be expected in these globalizing times, but the challenges of thinking beyond the nation for the nation (and the region) is not a simple one to face, conceptually nor organizationally. This said, these are noteworthy events, and well worth engaging with on a number of levels.

Kris Olds