Internationalization Motivations and Strategies of Israeli Educational Administration Programs

Internationalization became a mainstreamed goal of almost every higher education institution, and institutions are expected to proactively implement this process. Although as an academic discipline, education is considered to be one of the most context-related and locally oriented ones, it had not avoided pressures to internationalize. Within the flurry of research on internationalization, a paucity of information exists on the perceptions of academic leadership regarding internationalization within academic educational administration programs, which are preparing future schools’ leadership, who may in turn act as catalysts or inhibitors of internationalization at schools. This study aims to fill this gap with a comprehensive, in-depth, interview-based analysis of the views and opinions of educational administration program directors within diverse contextual settings in the Israeli higher education system, including the large research universities and colleges in the Jewish and Palestinian-Arab sectors, with both secular and religious inclinations. We identified three major discrete themes in the perceptions of educational administrative directors regarding internationalization: (a) the program’s purpose, (b) internationalization’s relations with the institutions’ goals, and (c) internationalization’s meaning. This study sheds light on the motivations for and obstacles facing internationalization from the underresearched perspective of educational administration degree program directors operating within the complex tension of the global–local nexus in education systems.