Transnational Education

Transnational education is a complex phenomenon with far-reaching implications for the nature and structure of education internationally. While transnational education offers prospects for governments to develop human capital and for individuals to acquire essential skills and qualifications, it also perpetuates the dominance of the Western education model. This chapter contends that the potential advantages of Australian transnational vocational education must be considered against the risks of marginalising other knowledge forms and impeding the capacity of developing countries to establish their own curriculum and education systems. This chapter explores the feasibility of Australia’s uniform approach to providing transnational vocational education through the imposition of a national curriculum model and its associated quality assurance system. A critical review of the literature challenges the achievability and desirability of this standardised approach. However, current research is insufficient to draw definitive conclusions on the quality, relevance and sustainability of Australian transnational vocational education. Furthermore, this chapter identifies a need to determine the level of curriculum adaptations teachers are enacting offshore to make the worth of Australian qualifications obtained in different countries transparent. The chapter concludes with a rationale for the inquiry and how the two principal guiding questions have emerged from this exploration.