Analysing biographies in transnational educational spaces: transitions to higher education of alumni from an IB school in Lisbon

ABSTRACT

Taking the example of educational biographies of alumni of an IB World School in the Lisbon region, the article aims to explore the potential of the concept of transnational educational spaces for biographical research. We focus on the biographical stage of transition to higher education as a crucial phase of students’ biographies where we can observe constructions, reconfigurations and passages between (transnational) spaces. Our results show a bias to the British system at the transition to higher education, which also has implications for regarding the IB schools as transnational educational spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Biographical research
• transition
• transnational educational space
• international education
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the students for their availability for the biographical interviews and also the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) for financing this postdoctoral research. We also thank David Tucker for proofreading this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the first phase of the research project (2016–2018), titled ‘The internationalisation of elite education in Portugal. A qualitative study on international schools in Greater Lisbon’ (financed by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [FCT], research grant number: SFRH/BPD/112406/2015), we carried out case studies in three international schools with a different profile (interviews with school principals, group discussions with students and teachers, participated observation of school cultural events, document analysis, etc.) in order to reconstruct elements of the school’s identity. During the second phase (2019–2022), biographical interviews with some of alumni (n = 16) who participated in the first one, seven of them from the IB World School, were conducted, to provide an in-depth exploration of their life narratives after they completed upper-secondary education. Since in the present article we analyse the specific case of IB schools, we focused our empirical analysis on these seven biographical interviews.

2 The names of institutions and persons used in the study are fictitious.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under grant number SFRH/BPD/112406/2015. The proofreading of this paper was also provided by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the funding of the R&D Unit UIDB/03126/2020.