FreshEd

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. http://www.freshedpodcast.com/jenniferklein/ Email: info@freshedpodcast.com Twitter: @freshedpodcast

Many countries around the world participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the cross-national test administered by the OECD. Today we look at the economic costs for a country to participate in PISA. My guests are Laura Engel and David Rutkowski. They followed the money through publicly available budget documents in the United States to uncover exactly how much the test costs both the federal and state governments. Through this complicated web, they found a host of contractors and sub-contractors hired to implement PISA and call for a full cost-benefit analysis in order to determine if PISA is worth it. Laura Engel is an Associate Professor of International Education and International Affairs at the George Washington University and David Rutkowski is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in Educational Policy and Educational Inquiry at Indiana University School of Education. Their latest co-written article published in the journal Discourse is called “Pay to play: What does PISA participation cost in the US?” www.freshedpodcast.com/LauraEngel-David Rutkowski/ email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

What’s the connection between education and development? My guest today, Dan Wagner, argues that it’s past time to move beyond conceptualizing development as economic growth. For Dan, the framework we should use is learning as development. He calls on social scientists to work towards a Learning Gini Index that not only takes learning seriously but also equity. Dan Wagner is Professor of Education and UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the director of the International Literacy Institute and International Educational Development Program.  In today’s show we talk about his new book, Learning as Development: Rethinking International Education in a Changing World (Routledge 2018). He has also published a new book for UNESCO entitled Learning at the Bottom of the Pyramid (UNESCO 2018). www.freshedpodcast.com/danwagner/ email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

What’s the connection between education and climate change? My guest today, Arjen Wals, takes a critical take on sustainability yet offers a hopeful outlook. In our conversation, Arjen details a few examples of school-level practices that could be seen as working towards a sustainable future while also critiques educational competition and the hidden curriculum of commodification. He ultimately calls for more dissonance in education systems as a way to learn new forms of sustainability to combat climate change. Arjen Wals is the UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development and Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. I spoke with Prof. Wals at the 2018 Global Education Meeting, which was a high-level forum held in Brussels in early December that reviewed the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. www.freshedpodcast.com/arjenwals/ email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

Today we look at the role of education in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. My guest is Parfait Eloundou, professor and department chair of development sociology at Cornell University and member of the independent group of scientists writing the Global Sustainable Development report. I spoke with Parfait during a break at the UNESCO Global Education Meeting held in Brussels in early December. In our conversation, Parfait calls wealth inequality, demographic changes, and parental choices the perfect storm of inequality. Education plays an important role in overcoming this social trifecta of disparity. We also discuss the assumption of meritocracy in education and the lack of a class analysis in the SDGs. www.freshedpodcast.com/parfait-eloundou-enyegue/ email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

This is the final episode of 2018. It’s been an incredible year for FreshEd. We’ve aired 41 new episodes and had nearly 130,000 downloads over the past 12 months. We’ve also received financial support from the Open Society Foundations, which is allowing us to transcribe episodes and translate a few into Chinese and Arabic. I’d like to say thank you to Sherry, Hang, and Lushik for their tireless efforts producing the show. FreshEd would not be possible without you. I’d also like to thank our listeners for your continued support. It’s been wonderful to hear from you over the year. Please do consider rating us on iTunes or sending your comments directly to me through our website. Your feedback will only make the show better. In what is now becoming a tradition, today we review the field of comparative and international education for 2018. With me are Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, co-editors of the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education. In our conversation, we touch on many topics, from the contradictions found within the Sustainable Development Goals to the lack of Climate Change research in the field and to the power of PISA. Susan and Roger also point to new directions in research for 2019. Susan Robertson is a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, and Roger Dale is a Professor of Education at the University of Bristol. http://www.freshedpodcast.com/2018inreview/ email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

Sustainable Development Goal 4 is all about education. Under the goal, there are seven targets, ranging from providing equitable access to education worldwide to making sure students have relevant skills for the future. The most revolutionary yet incredibly complex indicator is 4.7. My guest today, Aaron Benavot, takes us through the history of target 4.7. How did the international community agree on such a revolutionary target? But Aaron warns us about the future of the target given there is no consensus on how to measure it across countries. Aaron Benavot is a Professor in the department of educational policy and leadership at the school of education, University at Albany, State University of New York. He was previously the Director of the Global Education Monitoring report. www.freshedpodcast.com/aaronbenavot email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

Today we take stock of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by the United Nations three years ago. With me is Silvia Montoya who is the director of the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. UIS is charged with monitoring some of the SDGs. In our conversation, which we had on the sidelines of the Global Education Meeting in Brussels, we dive into the problems and challenges of trying to measure concepts such as literacy, global citizenship, and sustainability. Today’s episode of FreshEd was made possible through the support of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Tokyo and Education International. www.freshedpodcast.com/montoya email: info@freshedpodcast.com twitter: @freshedpodcast

How can we define comparative education? That question has long vexed scholars in the field. My guest today is Angela Little, who has spent her entire career in comparative education and has wrestled with this very question. Angela argues that it is best to define the field through shared action rather than agreed-upon definitions and talks about the challenges of being an academic-slash-practitioner. She also discusses the recent role that southern theory plays in the field of comparative education. Angela Little is Professor Emerita at the University College London, Institute of Education, University of London.

Is there a worldwide learning crisis today? My guest, Keith Lewin, argues that the real issue in much of international education development has to do with financing. In our conversation, we discuss aid to education and the ways in which the Sustainable Development Goals don't take the idea of sustainability seriously. Keith Lewin is an Emeritus Professor of International Education and Development at the University of Sussex. http://www.freshedpodcast.com/keithlewin twitter: @freshedpodcast email: info@freshedpodcast.com