FreshEd

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, Societies and Education.

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.