FreshEd

When I was in school, I did anything – and everything! – to get out of a test. Seriously. Ask my parents, who I drove nuts. I often refused to go to school on test days or simply pretended I was sick to get out of class just as the exam was being handed out. Tests made me nervous and I hated the idea that one number could forever define my intelligence. Today, more and more students are refusing to take standardized tests across the USA. Unlike my own mini-protest, however, students who refuse to take tests are part of the Opt-Out movement. This movement is found in many states in America and units people from across the political divide. With me to talk about this growing movement is Oren-Pizmony-Levy, an Assistant Professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has been researching the opt-out movement, situating it within the global context. What motivates people to join the movement? What results have been produced? In my conversation with Oren today, we discuss his and Nancy Green Saraisky's report entitled “who opts-out and why?" Who Opts Out and Why? Results from a national survey on opting out of standardized tests https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:201689 How Americans View the Opt Out Movement https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:xd2547d7zx

Across the globe, millions of people have been displaced from their homes. How does the international community respond to this humanitarian crisis? What is the role of education? My guest today is Sarah Dryden-Peterson. She leads a research program that focuses on the connections between education and community development, specifically the role that education plays in building peaceful and participatory societies, particularly in conflict and post-conflict settings. She is concerned with the interplay between local experiences of children, families, and teachers and the development and implementation of national and international policy. Sarah has recently written an article entitled “Refugee education: Education for an unknowable future” in a special issue of the journal Curriculum Inquiry that rethinks refugee education Sarah Dryden-Peterson is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She taught middle school in Boston, founded non-profits in South Africa and Uganda, and has two school-aged children.

Today we look at the history and tensions of international education. My guest is Paul Tarc, an Associate professor at Western University. Paul sees certain tensions as inherent in the very idea of international education. As universities around the world embrace internationalism in an era of limited state funding, some wonder whether those idealists intentions have been clouded by hopes of increased revenue generation.

This is the last episode in our four-part series leading up to the CIES 2017 Symposium. In the past three episodes, we have talked about decolonizing knowledge and innovating comparative and international education primarily from within the USA. But what does decolonization look like in other countries? Today we focus on Pakistan. My guest is Shenila Khoja-Moolji. She researches and writes about the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts. In the May 2017 supplement of the Comparative Education Review, she wrote an article on teacher professional development in Pakistan. Shenila has also learned to navigate the difficult and at times imperial terrain of international education development. Shenila Khoja-Moolji is currently a visiting scholar at the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, which will be published by the University of California Press in June 2018.

The CIES 2017 Symposium aims to explore new frontiers in Comparative Education. Today, I speak with Peter Demerath about some of the exciting work being done in ethnographic research. We discuss many ideas from indigenous knowledge to grounded grit. Peter even talks about the challenges researching the same community for over two decades, as well as the value such studies can have. Peter Demerath is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. A former middle school social studies teacher, Peter has conducted ethnographic research on schooling, student identity, and academic engagement in Papua New Guinea and in the suburban and urban United States. He is currently President-elect of the American Anthropological Association’s Council on Anthropology and Education. www.freshedpodcast.com/2017symposium

Today we look inside an example of destabilizing knowledge hierarchies inside an American university. With me is Patricia Parker. Patricia helped set up the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The graduate certificate reveals the paradoxes of challenging dominant forms of knowledge inside one of the very sites, the university, responsible for reproducing colonial knowledge structures. Patrcia Parker is chair of the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina where she is also an associate professor of critical organizational communication studies and director of the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research. She will speak at the CIES 2017 Symposium later this month. www.freshedpodcast.com/2017symposium

Today we kick off a four-part series called FreshEd x Symposium. During the lead-up to the 2017 Symposium, four speakers will join FreshEd to whet your appetite for the conversations and debate that will take place in Washington DC. This year’s symposium asks us to consider about how comparative and international education phenomena are studied and wade through the possibility that our field has colonial legacies and tendencies. To kick things off, Leigh Patel joins me to discuss the ways in which settler colonialism structures American society, including the academy. Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, and writer. She is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and is working on her next book, “To study is to struggle: Higher education and settler colonialism." www.freshedpodcast.com/2017symposium

Global citizenship education is an idea you’ve probably heard about.  It’s fairly straightforward as an abstract concept. Much attention on global citizenship education today is to ensure that certain values are taught in school despite the ever-growing demands on students from subjects like Science, Math, and Language. But how can global citizenship education be measured? What tools exist to incorporate global citizenship education across the curriculum? That’s much more difficult. The Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, UNESCO, and the UN Secretary General’s education first initiative youth advocacy group convened a working group of 88 people to catalog practices and tools in use around the world that measure global citizenship education. They found some innovative ways to measure the concept. With me today is Jasodhara Bhattacharya. She was one of the lead members of working group from Brookings, which resulted in a report entitled Measuring Global Citizenship Education: A Collection of Practices and Tools. www.freshedpodcast.com

Today we look at sexuality education. In some countries, scholars who advocate for a secular worldview have constructed a progressive sexuality education that embraces science at the exclusion of religion.  With me is Mary Lou Rasmussen. In her monograph, Progressive Sexuality Education: The Conceits of Secularism (Routledge, 2015), which was just released in paperback, Mary Lou carefully explores how progressive scholarship and practice might get in the way of meaningful conversations with students, teachers, and peers who think differently about the field of sexuality education. Mary Lou Rasmussen is a professor at the School of Sociology at The Australian National University. She is co-editor, with Louisa Allen, of the Handbook of Sexuality Education which will be published in October. www.freshedpodcast.com/rasmussen

Today we talk about war and children in Japan. My guest is Sabine Frühstück, a Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also directs the East Asia Center. She has published a new book called Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. It is a cultural history of the naturalized connections between childhood and militarism. In the book, Sabine analyzes the rules and regularities of war play, from the hills and along the rivers of 19th century rural Japan to the killing fields of 21st century cyberspace. It is a timely book that addresses the red-hot debates in Japan over its imperial past, its imposed pacifism, and its creeping militarization today. www.freshedpodcast.com