FreshEd

I’m going to generalize here. I bet for many listeners schooling is understood as an institution that instills in children a type of practical knowledge that hopefully makes them future productive citizens. Education through schooling is the answer to many social problems. It’s very purpose is to improve society.

But where did these ideas come from? Why do many people think schooling is to improve society? What knowledge and systems of reason govern this type of thinking about education?

My guest today, Professor Tom Popkewitz, dives deep into these questions. Tom joined me to talk about some of his newest thinking, which he is currently writing up as a book tentatively entitled, The Impracticality of Practical Research: A History of Present Educational Sciences and the Limits of its System of Reason.

Get ready: My conversation with Tom covers a lot of ground: touching on the notion of cosmopolitanism, connecting the Enlightenments in the 18th and 19th centuries to the 20th century progressive education era in America, and finally to contemporary teacher education and the rise of PISA.

He challenges us to think about what it means to compare in educational sciences today. Where did such comparative thinking come from and how does it primarily work?

Tom Popkewitz is a professor in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Full link: www.freshedpodcast.com/tompopkewitz

How can we think about inequality and education? My guest today, Mario Novelli, dives into the subject by looking at the role of schools in the production of inequality.

Since 2010, Mario has researched issues related to the role of education in peace building processes, working with UNICEF on a series of projects.

In our conversation, Mario not only details how modernity, capitalism, and colonialism combine to create systems of inequality inside school systems but also publicly struggles with his role in the production of inequality through his work in international educational development.

Mario Novelli is Professor of the Political Economy of Education and Director of the Centre for International Education (CIE) at the University of Sussex. His latest article discussed in this podcast can be found in the most recent issue of the British Journal of the Sociology of Education.

Did you know that today there are more forcibly displaced people than at any time since World War II?

The total number comes out to roughly 65 million, including internally displaced peoples, asylum seekers, and refugees. That’s roughly 1 out of every 113 people on Earth.

Today I speak with three professors from Teachers College, Columbia University about their research project on refugees, which is being funded by the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

At Teachers College, Mary Mendenhall is an Assistant Professor of Practice in International and Comparative Education; Garnett Russell is an Assistant Professor of International and Comparative Education; and Elizabeth Buckner is a Visiting Assistant Professor in International Comparative Education.

If you’d like to see some of their research photos showing urban refugee education, please check out FreshEdpodcast.com

It’s been over two months since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Right after it happened, I invited Prof. Susan Robertson on FreshEd to talk about the possible consequences the Brexit vote would have on education. During that conversation, I asked if this vote would open the possibility for a new left to emerge within the British Labour Party.

Well, how have things turned out?

To update the situation in the United Kingdom, I recently spoke with Mario Novelli. Mario Novelli is Professor of the Political Economy of Education and Director of the Centre for International Education (CIE) at the University of Sussex. For years, Mario has followed the solidarity work of Jeremy Corbyn, who is now Leader of the labour party and currently in a leadership battle with Owen Smith.

This short episode of FreshEd has been taken from a longer conversation I had with Mario about his research on inequality and education, which will air on September 12.

You’ve probably heard about the elaborate Olympic handover from Rio to Tokyo that included a video animation of Super Mario walking through Shibuya, jumping through a green tube, and then appearing at the closing ceremony in Rio. The super Mario custom dropped to the floor and there was, lo and behold, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, standing in a red hat holding a red ball, ready to take the helm of the Tokyo Olympics, which will take place in 2020. It was an unusual moment, to say the least, for the Japanese leader, who is typically reserved and anything but showy.

But the scene perfectly captured the contemporary push by the Abe administration to internationalize Japan. There he was in front of a global audience, showing off Japan’s athletes and pop-culture icons. Abe has been on a march to change Japan: he’s trying to alter the constitution to allow Japan to send military forces abroad, something that has not been done since World War II. And his administration started something called super-global universities, which aim to allow graduates to “walk into positions of global leadership.”

Reforms to Japanese education are not knew and we can learn a lot by looking at previous experiences. My guest today, Peter Cave, has a new book that explores changes in Japanese junior high schools in the 1990s and in the early 2000s.

Dr. Peter Cave is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester. Through an ethnography of two schools over 11 years, he was able to detail how, if at all, educational reforms translated into educational practice.

And these insights can help us understand the reforms being proposed today by the Abe administration.

Peter Cave’s new book is “Schooling Selves: Autonomy, Interdependence, and Reform in Japanese Junior High Education”, which was published this year by the University of Chicago Press.

Today we look at developmental leadership in the Philippines. My guest is Professor Michele Schweisfurth.

In a recent report for the Developmental Leadership Program, with support from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Michele and a team explored the ways in which higher education has supported the emergence of developmental leaders and the formation of networks among leaders in the Philippines.

Michele Schweisfurth is Professor of Comparative and International Education at the University of Glasgow, where she is also co-Director of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change.

Her latest co-written report on developmental leadership in the Philippines can be found on FreshEd’s website: FreshEdpodcast.com. Check it out today.

Today: Case Studies. My guests, Fran Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett. They have a new co-written book entitled Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach, which will be published by Routledge later this year.

Fran and Lesley contend that the recent conceptual shifts in the social sciences, some of which have been discussed by previous guests on this show, demand that case studies re-configure their approach towards culture, context, space, place, and comparison.

Fran Vavrus is a professor in the college of education and human development at the University of Minnesota.

Lesley Bartlett is a professor in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

I spoke with Fran and Lesley in Mid-July.

They have written an exclusive summary of their forthcoming book, Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach, for FreshEd listeners, which is only available on FreshEdpodcast.com Check it out today.

Low-fee private schools are a hot topic in educational research. What happens when public schooling is provided by for-profit companies that charge families monthly user fees? What happens when those companies receive government funds? Researchers around the world have been exploring various issues around for-profit public schooling.

One company has been of particular interest. Bridge International Academies operates schools in Africa and Asia and is supported by people such as Bill Gates and Mark Zukerburg. Bridge International uses a standard curriculum that is read off of a tablet computer. This low-cost model of schooling relies on paying small wages to instructors, who simply read the curriculum, and fees paid by students to attend (or government subsidies). I can be extremely profitable when delivered to scale. In the most extreme case, in Liberia, the Ministry of education is trying to outsource its entire primary education system to Bridge International.

Given Bridge international’s work, it’s no wonder that researchers are interested in exploring what's happening at the policy level and at the school level when it comes to low-fee private schools.

In May this year, Canadian Researcher Curtis Riep was in Uganda researching Bridge International’s work. At one of his meetings, held at a local café, he was arrested for impersonation and criminal trespassing while collecting data. These charges were later proven to be baseless and he was released and not charged .

The interesting thing, however, is that Bridge International seems to have played a role in Curtis’ arrest. Before he was arrested, for instance, Bridge International took out a public notice in New Vision, a local newspaper, warning the general public of Dr. Riep's presence.

My guest today takes us through this odd case and explores the larger issues around Bridge International. Angelo Gavrielatos is a project director at Education International, the Global federation of teacher unions and the organization that funded Curtis Riep's research.

After recording the show with Angelo, new developments unfolded in Uganda. Check out FreshEdpodcast.com for the latest updates.

In a recent paper for the University of Johannesburg, Raewyn Connell shared some of her thinking on the decolonization of knowledge. In many ways she aimed to re-think the history of knowledge itself, moving away from the Northern bias and colonial structures in mainstream social science. She argues, “The relationship between knowledge produced in different parts of the world is not as simple as “Western” domination. Knowledge flows in multiple directions from the metropole to the periphery and from the periphery to the metropole.”

Raewyn is a Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. She has been an advisor to United Nations initiatives on gender equality and peacemaking, and, in 2010, the Australian Sociological Association established the Raewyn Connell Prize for the best book in Australian sociology.

After her interview, Will Brehm wanted to ask Raewyn an additional question. You can find Raewyn's answer online at www.FreshEdPodcast.com

We don’t normally air shows in the middle of the week but the vote in Britain to leave the EU warrants a special show. Let’s call it FreshEdge — a look at the most pressing issues today.

Susan Robertson joins us today to talk about Brexit and its implications for education. She is professor of sociology of education in the Graduate school of education at the university of Bristol. She is also co-editor of the journal Globalization, Societies, and Education.