FreshEd

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 concludes on February 17!

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 interest in education, and with a primary geographic focus on Africa. He has recently co-written a report for The Expert Group for Aid Studies entitled Capturing complexity and context: evaluating aid to education.

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 argues that post-colonial theory, broadly defined, can help overcome the continued prevalence of colonialism in the field today. The co-editors call for a rethinking of the way knowledge is produced in CIE. Arathi joined FreshEd to detail some of the ideas in 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, Education and Society, at the University of Bristol. Check out www.freshedpodcast.com.

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 our talk today, Toni discusses his book on education privatization, outlining the factors driving its spread globally. Toni Verger is researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He will join Andy Green, Bob Lingard, and Karen Mundy on December 12 for a public webinar focused on global education policy. You can visit FreshEdpodcast.com for more details.

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 Director of the Center on Learning and Life Chances at the Institute of Education, University College London. He will participate in the webinar on global education policy on December 12. Check out Freshedpodcast.com/webinar for more details about the event.

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).