Freshed

Rwanda is perhaps most well-known for the genocide it experienced in the 1990s. In its post-conflict development, the country has had to balance colonial legacies, state centralizing tendencies, and the zeitgeist of neoliberalism. This has made for a careful balancing — one that has left the government regulating the society and economy while simultaneously reducing its responsibility to citizens. In education, this balancing act manifests in the government’s three aims: credentials, controls, and creativity. The education system is based on credentials awarded through examinations, a colonial hangover, and controls students as part of the state’s centralization efforts; yet, somehow, the system promotes creativity so students can pursue a learner-centered education tailored to their own needs, preparing them for the 21st century labor market of precarious work. My guest today, Catherine Honeyman, has a new book that explores Rwanda’s opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes in post-conflict development thr

The Globalization and Education Special Interest Group holds an annual book award to honor an outstanding book that addresses issues related to globalization and education. The 2016 award will be presented on March 8 to Toni Verger, Clara Fontdevila, and Adrian Zancajo for their book The privatization of education: A political economy of global education reform, which was published by Teacher College Press. The award committee praised the book for its clear-eyed and theoretically-rich contribution to the larger debate on privatization and education in the context of global education reforms. I interviewed Toni Verger about the book last year, so will replay the episode in full today. If you happen to be attending the CIES conference in Atlanta this week, please attend the Globalization and Education SIG’s keynote address on March 8 where the book award will be presented. Toni Verger is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

A few of you have reached out to me, recommending that I ask guests about their biographies. For young scholars, it is valuable to learn from scholars with lots of experience about how they navigated the field of comparative and international education. This year FreshEd will broadcast short supplementary shows with some guests about their backgrounds and tips for young scholars. For our first installment, Joel Samoff joins me to talk about his career. Joel Samoff is Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Center for African Studies at Stanford University" I hope you enjoy this new segment and please do keep emailing me your suggestions to make FreshEd better. You can contact me anytime at will@freshedpodcast.com.

Since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, China has experienced a “Reform and Opening” period. In education, this has meant a change from an egalitarian to an elite system. Examinations emerged has the primary way of sorting students. Those who did well on various examinations rose to the next level, working their way up to higher education. This system, combining credentialism, competition, and Confucian traditions, has had profound consequences, including a rise in inequality and a growing divide between urban and rural communities. My guest today, Edward Vickers, has a new co-written book called Education and Society in Post-Mao China, detailing the past forty years in educational development. This book is the first monograph in English to offer a comprehensive analysis of China’s educational development since the death of Chairman Mao. Edward Vickers is a Professor in the department of education at Kyushu University, Japan. He specializes in education and history in East Asia.

Rui da Silva joins me today to talk about his PhD research on Portuguese Aid to Guinea-Bissau. Rui is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Minho. He is also a board member of the Centre of African Studies of the Oporto University. Guinea Bissau is a small state in West Africa that was formally colonized by Portugal. Since independence in the 1970s, the country has experienced tremendous political instability. As such, the educational development that has been undertaken in the country has been precarious. On top of this, there are many colonial legacies that make educational provision difficult. For instance, although Portuguese is the official language and language of instruction in public schools, only a handful of people in the country actually speak it. In our conversation, Rui details this history and the attempts at educational development by different organizations. He’s recently co-written articles on these topics that appear in the journals Compare and Globalisation, Societ

Each year, the Comparative and International Education Society holds elections for the position of vice-president. The way the society is organized means that this person will automatically become president after serving one year as vice president. Every vice president, in other words, steps up to hold the presidency. So, vice presidential elections are a big deal. This year, two outstanding candidates have been nominated, David Post and Aaron Benavot. Today I interview each candidate back-to-back to give CIES members a better understanding of their proposed agendas. Aaron Benavot is Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report published by UNESCO. Later this year he will return to the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership in the School of Education of SUNY-Albany, where he serves as Professor of Global Education Policy. David Post is Professor of education at Pennsylvania State University. You can check out www.FreshEdpodcast.com/vpcandidates for more details. Please remember: Voting

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on international aid each year. Most aid providers undergo periodic evaluations to assess their support. Have their policies worked? What priorities have guided aid? And what practices have been effective? With such large sums of money circulating in the evaluation process, an aid evaluation industry has emerged. Formal evaluations are undertaken by “experts” who are hired by companies that bid on evaluation contracts. Sometimes universities themselves bid on the same contracts. And professors navigate the tricky terrain of research-for-hire. Many of FreshEd’s listeners have likely participated in an evaluation of an aid project. I know I have. My guest today, Professor Joel Samoff, thinks it’s time to “re-think evaluations, from conception through method to use.” Joel Samoff is a Consulting Professor in African Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He studies and teaches about development and underdevelopment, with a particular i

Today I speak with Arathi Sriprakash, a lecturer in the sociology of education at the University of Cambridge. Arathi co-edited with Keita Takayama and Raewyn Connel a special issue of Comparative Education Review on post-colonialism in the field of comparative and international education. The special issue shows that the field of comparative and international education continues to have many colonial entanglements, which have gone unrecognized in most accounts. Colonial logics underpinned many of the field’s founding figures and contemporary forms of modernization theory continue to be widely assumed today:. Knowledge is produced in the global north, often with data taken from the global south; theory is reserved for northern scholars; and some societies, like CIES in North America, have held more power over smaller societies from Asia and Africa. In most aspects of the field, we continue to see uneven power dynamics of where and how knowledge is produced by whom and with what effect. The special issue

As we near the end of 2016, I want to take stock of the field of globalization and education. What were the big ideas this year? And where are we going in 2017? For the final show of the year, I’ve invited Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, co-editors of the journal Globalisation, Societies, and Education, to reflect on the year in research and point to future directions. In our conversation, we discuss a range of issues facing education, including: the limitations of mobility studies, the increase of migration worldwide, the rise of populism and anti-globalization movements, the role of trade deals in education, and the Hayekian world in which we find ourselves where individuals — not societies or governments — are at the center of social imaginaries and how this relates to educational privatization, private debt, and the discourse of choice. Susan Robertson is a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, and Roger Dale, is a Professor of Education in the Centre for Globalisation,

Earlier this week, the globalization and education special interest group hosted a public webinar entitled “Puncturing the Paradigm: Education Policy in a New ‘Global’ Era.” The webinar brought together Professor’s Toni Verger and Andy Green to discuss their new co-edited Handbook on Global Education Policy. D. Brent Edwards Jr moderated the event. I’m going to play the webinar’s audio here but encourage you to check out FreshEdpodcast.com where you can find a video of the event. I hope you enjoy the show and I’ll be back next week with our final episode of the year.

Today we explore youth violence in Trinidad with my guest Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams. Hakim situates his study of Trinidad within the country’s colonial past. He is also actively creating a new paradigm to address youth violence that blends a systems approach with restorative justice practices. Hakim Williams is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Education at Gettysburg College. Early this year, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) at The Earth Institute, Columbia University. In today’s show, Hakim discusses his article, “A Neocolonial Warp of Outmoded Hierarchies, Curricula and Disciplinary Technologies in Trinidad’s Educational System,” which can be found in the latest issue of Critical Studies of Education.

What is the connection between education and the economy? For many neoclassical economists, the connection is found in Human Capital theory. My guest today, Professor Steve Klees, thinks human capital theory and rates of return analyses are very problematic. In our conversation today, Steve talks about his new article, “Human Capital and Rates of Return: Brilliant Ideas or ideological dead ends?”, which can be found in the latest issue of the Comparative Education Review. He takes us through human capital theory, its internal logical fallacies, and proposes a set of alternatives. Steve Klees is professor of International Education Policy in the College of Education, University of Maryland.

Today we continue our look at global education policy. Last week, I spoke with Andy Green about social cohesion, one of the two main pillars found in most, if not all, of education policies worldwide. The second pillar, as Professor Green pointed out, is education for economic development. This global policy of education has recently manifested, in many countries, through various practices and processes of educational privatization. With me today is Toni Verger to talk about the global diffusion of education privatization not as a global education policy per se but as a set of processes through which private actors participate more actively in a range of education activities that have traditionally been the responsibilities of the state. In this sense, privatization directly impacts education policy. Not only is Toni a co-editor of the Handbook of Global Education Policy but he is also a co-author of a new book entitled The Privatization of Education: A political economy of global education reform. In

The globalization and education special interest group of the comparative and international education society will be hosting a public webinar on December 12 entitled “Puncturing the Paradigm: Education Policy in a New Global Era.” The webinar will bring together the four co-editors of the newly published Handbook of Global Education Policy, Karen Mundy, Andy Green, Bob Lingard, and Toni Verger. During the lead up to that event, FreshEd will interview the co-editors to set the stage for the webinar. Today I speak with Professor Andy Green about the global education policy of social cohesion. Although we often think of education policy as primarily concerned with economic development, it also has been historically connected to the idea of creating a cohesive group of people who share certain norms and customs. Benedict Anderson called this “imagined communities.” Andy Green has looked at the effect from education on social cohesion across the globe. Andy Green is Professor of Comparative Social Science and

For the past 7 weeks, FreshEd has focused on global learning metrics. Although there is much more to say on that subject, I think it’s time to look at something completely different. This week Sachi Edwards joins me to talk about interfaith dialogue initiatives in US higher education. The ideas of religious identity, religious oppression and religious privilege are often overlooked when we think about social justice. Sachi wants to change that. Sachi Edwards is an Adjunct Professor in Higher Education, Student Affairs, and International Education, at the College of Education, University of Maryland. She’s recently published her first book entitled Critical Conversations about Religion: Promises and pitfalls of a social justice approach to interfaith dialogue (Information Age Publishing, 2016).

This is the final show in the global learning metrics mini-series. The two day inaugural CIES symposium has concluded. As a wrap up, I’m going to play my brief conversation with Pasi Sahlberg, a professor at the University of Helsinki, about some of his reactions to the symposium. He tweets at @pasi_sahlberg. I hope you’ve enjoyed this mini-series!

Day one of the CIES symposium just ended. Before we start day two, I thought it important to revisit a remark Tom Popkewitz made on this podcast a few months ago. Tom argued that educational metrics, and the comparison that comes with them, have always been about inscribing in children a certain moral order. I’ve been surprised that this type of thinking has been relatively absent in the conversations today. What will tomorrow bring? Stay tuned!

This is the last installment of the FreshEd mini-series on global learning metrics. On Thursday, the CIES Symposium kicks off in Scottsdale, Arizona. For this last show, I’ve invited Karen Mundy to talk about the Global Partnership for Education. Karen offers interesting insight into learning metrics because she is both an academic and a development practitioner. Karen Mundy is the Chief Technical Officer at the Global Partnership for Education. She came to the Global Partnership for Education in 2014 from the University of Toronto where she was Professor and Associate Dean of Research, International and Innovation. She will present some of the ideas discussed in this podcast at the CIES Symposium in Scottsdale Arizona, which starts on Thursday. Now it’s time for me to catch my flight! See you in Scottsdale!

We often think of international assessments as being synonymous with PISA, the OECD international assessment that has been the focus of many shows in FreshEd’s mini-series on global learning metrics. But international assessments have a history far beyond PISA. In fact, it was the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, known as the IEA, that first introduced large-scale comparative studies of educational systems in the late 1950s. This history is important to consider when thinking about global learning metrics today. My guest today is Dirk Hastedt, Executive Director of the IEA. He’s spent many years working with the IEA, seeing the development of assessments in new subjects, such as citizenship and computer literacies, and the emergence of league tables, which rank education systems and have become popular today. Drik offers valuable insight for any discussion on the feasibility or desirability of global learning metrics. Check out www.FreshEdpodcast.com for more deta

Next week the CIES Symposium will take place where scholars and practitioners from around the world will come together to discuss and debate the desirability and feasibility of global learning metrics. I’ve had the honor of interviewing many of the speakers who will attend the symposium. And one things that has struck me during my conversations about global learning metrics is that often a universal meaning of education is assumed by the tests and those who use it. For instance, a 2013 OECD report that used PISA data was entitled “What makes Schools Successful?” Implied in the very title of that report is an assumption that there is a universal definition of success, as if all schools around the world agreed on what it means to be successful. Moreover, the report implies that it is PISA data itself that can reveal the answer. Perhaps more clearly, a 2013 report by the Learning Metrics Task Force, which is a multi-stakeholder collaboration organized by UNESCO Institute of Statistics and the Center for Univ