Freshed

Today we look at entrepreneurship education in Tanzania. You might be asking yourself, “Hey, didn’t FreshEd recently discuss entrepreneurship education in Rwanda?” You’re right. We did. Obviously, the idea of entrepreneurship education is a global phenomenon, found in many different countries. As such, we need to understand what it is in each local context, who is promoting, how it is spreading, and what it means for education and society. My guest today is Joan DeJaeghere. She has a new book out called Educating Entrepreneurial Citizens: Neoliberalism and youth livelihoods in Tanzania. For Joan, entrepreneurship education cannot be separated from neoliberalism, the contemporary form of capitalism that emerged in the 1970s. Her book explores the multiple and contradictory purposes and effects of entrepreneurship education aimed at addressing youth unemployment and alleviating poverty in Tanzania. Joan DeJaeghere is a Professor of Comparative and International Development Education in the Department of

How is education studied around the world? Are there different knowledge traditions to the study of education? Have there been changes over time? And what has been the impact of globalization? My guests today, John Furlong and Geoff Whitty, have embarked on a collaborative research project that sought to understand how the study of education was configured in different countries. The project has resulted in a co-edited volume entitled Knowledge and the Study of Education: an international exploration, which was published by Symposium Books in June. John Furlong is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oxford and Geoff Whitty holds a Global Innovation Chair for Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle in Australia and a Research Professorship in Education at Bath Spa University in the UK.

What are the hard questions in education today? My guest is Pasi Sahlberg. When he was teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he edited a book with his students on some of the biggest and hardest questions facing education today. In our conversation, Pasi speaks about the class, the book, and the importance of writing op-eds. He even offers some advice for US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Many listeners have probably heard of Pasi Sahlberg. Some might even consider him an educational change maker. I ask Pasi if he sees himself as a change maker. Stay tuned to hear his answer! Pasi Sahlberg is a global educational advisor. His latest co-edited book is entitled Hard Questions on Global Educational Change: Policies, practices, and the future of education which was published by Teachers College Press earlier this year.

Textbooks are perhaps the most recognizable part of school systems. You go to school; you learn from a textbook. But what’s inside that textbook your reading? Who wrote it? How are controversial issues dealt with? And how have textbooks changed over time and compare across country? My guest today, Jim Williams, has edited or co-edited three volumes on textbooks. The many chapters across the volumes looked at textbooks around the world. The first volume looked at textbooks and national-governments. The second volume explored the issue of identity. And the last zoomed in on textbooks in post-conflict settings. Jim William is the UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development and Professor of International Education & International Affairs at the George Washington University. While on sabbatical in Tokyo, Jim was kind enough to stop by my office where we recorded this interview.

Today we talk about intercultural competencies. These are the attitudes, skills, and knowledge that enable people to see from different perspectives, helping us get along together as humans. These competencies seem particularly relevant in our current political climate. My guest is Darla Deardorff. She has spent the past decade thinking about intercultural competencies. What are? Can scholars agree on a common framework? And is it possible to measure them? For Darla, intercultural competencies are as vital as math and science for education. Darla Deardorff is the Executive Director of the Association of International Education Administrators at Duke University. Her latest co-edited book, Intercultural Competence in Higher Education: International Approaches, assessment, application, was published by Routledge in June.

Have you ever thought about how polarized some debates in education are? Think about it. Whole language versus phonics. Direct versus indirect instruction. Public versus private schools. My guest today, Professor Yong Zhao, says that these polarized debates result, in part, from research studies that only look at effects – or side effects – of educational interventions. Rarely do studies acknowledge what works and what doesn’t. Yong Zhao, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, argues that educational research should learn from medical science.

We hear about educational privatization a lot these days. My Twitter feed is filled with countless stories about how Betsy DeVos is going to privatize education in America or how Bridge International has privatized education in some African countries. Even the first three episodes of FreshEd way back in 2015 looked at how privatization has gone global. But do you really know how it’s happening, how privatization as an educational policy is moving around the world? And what effect is it having on governments? The process of national and local governments enacting policies that advance private interests in education is rather complex and often opaque to the general public. My guest today, Stephen Ball, has written a series of books looking at educational privatization. In his latest book, Edu.net, co-written with Caroline Junemann and Diego Santori, he explores through network ethnography the evolution of the global education policy community that is advancing privatization. Stephen Ball is a Distinguished

How did American universities end up being seen as the best in the world? My guest today, David Labaree, argues it was the very decentralized and autonomous structure of the higher education system that allowed universities to develop an entrepreneurial ethos that drove American higher education to become the best. Today, America’s universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world The messy structure of American higher education was not planned, however. There was no strong state or strong church directing the system from above. Rather higher education developed in a free market where survival was never guaranteed. Such a system produced unintended consequences that would make American higher education the envy of the world. David Labaree is a professor of Education at Stanford University. His new book is A Perfect Mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American Higher Educat

Today: global citizenship education. What is global citizenship education and how is it practiced? And what is the relationship between national citizenship and global citizenship? Are they compatible? My guest today is Miri Yemini, an Honorary Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Education at University College London and a Lecturer in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University She has recently published a book entitled Internationalization and Global Citizenship in Education.

We’ve talked a lot about PISA on this show. Today we take a fresh look at the test, digging into the specifics about how the test is created and what the results can tell policy makers and teachers. My guest today is Sam Sellar, a reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies. He has recently co-written with Greg Thompson and David Rutkowski a short book on PISA titled, The Global Education Race: Taking the measure of PISA and international assessment.

A group of Yale graduate students are protesting their labor conditions as teachers. They are demanding the administration recognize them as a union and negotiate their contract as full employees of the university. After all, graduate students teach many undergraduate classes. But the administration is stalling, waiting for Donald Trump to appoint an anti-union National Labor Relations Board that, they hope, will throw out the union’s right to exist. My guest today is Jennifer Klein, a professor of history at Yale University who has followed the unionization efforts closely. She’s written a recent New York Times op-ed detailing the events at Yale. The fight over graduate student’s right to unionize at Yale is a microcosm of the reliance on precarious work across the American higher education system. You can find the solidarity statement in support of the graduate students here.

Today we look at the globalization of curriculum markets with Professor Catherine Doherty. Catherine uses the example of the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Australia to think about the movement of global curriculum inside local markets. Why do schools choose to include global curricula like the IB? And what impact do these new curricular offerings have on educational choice both locally and globally? By looking at various schools across Australia, Catherine unpacks the social ecology of the IB, highlighting ideas about educational strategy and imagined motilities. She empirically demonstrates how the global-local binary is a historical artifact. Catherine Doherty is a Professor of Pedagogy and Social Justice in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.

Today we discuss human rights education with Monisha Bajaj. Monisha, has recently edited a book entitled Human Rights Education: Theory, Research Praxis, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of human rights education, its diverse range of practices, and the ways it has changed overtime. We also discuss the challenges to Human Rights Education today. Monisha Bajaj is a professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. Check out www.freshedpodcast.com

What’s the relationship between test scores and gross domestic product? Do higher test scores lead to higher GDP? This question may seem a bit strange because most people think about the value of education on a much smaller, less abstract scale, usually in terms of “my children” or “my education.” Will my children earn a higher wage in the future if they do well on school examinations today? If I major in engineering, will I earn a higher income than if I majored in English? The answer to these question is usually assumed to be a resounding “yes.” Doing better on examinations or studying subjects that are perceived to be more valuable will result in higher wages at the individual level and higher GDP at the national level. Such a belief shapes educational policies and influences educational decision making by families. It has even resulted in a global private tutoring industry that prepares students for tests in hopes of getting ahead. But what if this assumption isn’t true? What if the relationship betwe

I hated tests growing up. They made me feel physically ill. But we aren’t going to look at the types of tests I disliked so much, those given by a teacher to her or his students. We aren’t even going to look at standardized tests administered across one country. Instead, today’s show focuses on tests that are administered around the world. We call these types of tests international large-scale assessments. One of the most popular today is called PISA — the Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA tests 15-year-old’s scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. The latest test, in 2015, was administered in 72 countries. Think for a moment of how complex it must be to create, administer, and interpret PISA across 72 countries. The test must be reliable in different contexts; it must successfully recruit national government officials to help collect data; and it must rely on a small army of statisticians to discern what the test results actually mean. For many, the benefit of a

Have you ever visited schools like Eton College in the United Kingdom, St. Albans in the United States, or Geelong Grammar School in Australia? Maybe you were among the lucky few to have attended one. These schools are primarily reserved for children from the most privileged families, members of the 1 percent, as we would say today. The schools are steeped in tradition, covered in oak and ivy, and cost a small fortune to attend. The fees at St. Albans, for instance, run as high as $58,000 USD. For that price, it’s no wonder that these schools offer some of the best education money can buy and have produced some notable graduates. For instance, 19 prime ministers from the UK attended Eaton. Talk about a small circle! These schools, which are found worldwide, produce and sustain social class and have had to adapt to changing global and local circumstances over the decades. Many started as all boy’s schools but have since become co-educational. Others were reserved for national elites to produce competent colo

Can education be used to create peace? Can it help mend long standing issues in conflict afflicted regions? These questions don’t have easy answers, but we’ll jump into the debates surrounding them feet first. My guests today, Mieke Lopes Cardozo and Ritesh Shah, have been studying education, social transformations, and peacebuilding for the past decade and have worked and written together since 2011. They find that education has the capacity for both positive and negative outcomes. Education can certainly help resolve conflict by creating community and giving voice to under-represented groups in society. However, education can also be used as tool by ruling elites as a way to maintain their grip on power, which may sow further divisions in society. Think of it this way: imagine if a ruling party in a country decides to censor content from history textbooks that may question its power. Would that really create the conditions under which peace is possible? Or imagine if minority groups are purposefully exclu

One of the primary goals of education is to prepare youth for the labor market. This task is infinitely difficult because economies are constantly changing. What will the global labor market look like in 30 years and how will it impact specific countries? It’s impossible to know for sure, which therefore makes deciding which skills to teach inside national school systems difficult to pinpoint. It’s a major public policy question facing many governments. But there are some skills that employers want right now that they feel schools are not teaching. Plus, with the labor movement in decline worldwide, jobs have become precarious for many people. This reality requires laborers to have the grit and tenacity to be flexible in their job choices as economies change. Can schools teach these soft-skills to students? My guests today have recently co-edited a book that dives into the subject, looking at the skills deemed necessary by employers but lacking in students. The book is entitled “Bridging the Skills Gap: Inn

For the past few years, the Globalization and Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society has hosted an annual keynote address focused on cutting edge issues in the study of globalization and education. In early March at the CIES conference held in Atlanta, Fazal Rizvi gave the annual address. Fazal Rizvi is a well-known and prolific scholar on issues related to globalization, and was one of the first guests on FreshEd in 2015. He is a Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, where he joined in 2010 after being based at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he directed the Global Studies in Education program. Along with Professor Bob Lingard, who also joined FreshEd, Fazal is the author of a widely-read book, Globalizing Education Policy. His keynote address was entitled “Globalization and education after Trump and Brexit”. Following his remarks, we will hear a few words from Dr. Mario Novelli, who is Professor of Political Economy o

The field of Global Studies has a similar historical trajectory as the field of comparative education. Both fields in the American context were formalized in the 1950s during the Cold War and expanded in the 1980s when scholars “began to take note of the rapidly increasing transnational flows of people, ideas, and products, and the social, political, economic, and cultural consequences of these trends.” Both also lack a clear disciplinary home. Scholars bring myriad academic perspectives to each field, from economics to sociology and from history to anthropology. So today we explore global studies in depth in an effort for mutual learning. With me today is a leading scholar of global studies, Hilary Kahn. Hilary Kahn is the assistant dean for international education and global initiatives and director of the Center for the Study of Global Change in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. She is a co-director of the Framing the Global project, which is trying to “develop and di