FreshEd

Can film help us understand educational phenomena? My guest today, David Cole, has co-written a new book called A Pedagogy of Cinema. By analyzing images in various films, he attempts to produce philosophical insights into education systems dominated by a digitalized, corporatized, and surveillance-controlled world.

David Cole is an Associate Professor in Education at Western Sydney University, Australia and the leader of the Globalisation theme in the Centre for Educational Research.

The Global Partnership for Education is a powerful multi-stakeholder organization in educational development. It funnels millions of dollars to develop education systems in dozens of low-income countries. Yet the board of directors of the organization strategically avoids some of the most important and controversial topics in education today.

My guest today, Francine Menashy, has researched the Global Partnership for Education and the ways in which its board of directors avoids the topic of low-fee private schools, which is a heavily debated idea in both education policy and research.

Francine Menashy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership in Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She researches aid to education and non-state sector engagement, including the policies of international organizations, companies, and philanthropies.

Her research discussed in today’s show was funded through a fellowship with the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation.

Education For All is a global movement led by UNESCO. It began in 1990 when 155 countries adopted the World Declaration on Education For All. The movement was renewed in the year 2000 when countries agreed on the Dakar Framework for Action, which committed them to achieve education for all by the year 2015.

Education For All continues to be a common phrase in educational development. But it has changed over its 26-year existence. It linked into Goals 2 and 3 of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals and was tied closely to the World Bank through the funding mechanism known as the Fast Track Initiative.

The movement has adapted and adopted new elements and has included additional actors, such as non-governmental organization, human rights activists, and philanthropic organizations and individuals.

My guest today, Leon Tikly, argues in a forthcoming article in Comparative Education Review that Education For All is best understood as a regime, borrowing an idea from international relations. He says there are “a set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge.” Of course there are tensions within the regime of education for all, and in this article he attempts to think through what these might be.

Leon Tikly is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on education in low income countries and in particular countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. He is known for his theoretical work on how to conceptualize education as an aspect of the postcolonial condition.

Do schools provide the best education possible for children? My guest today believes schools are the greatest barrier to education. Simon Springer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, Canada. He advocates and practices with his children a concept he calls un-schooling, but which also goes by the more popular name de-schooling.

Simon’s research agenda explores the political, social, and geographical exclusions that neoliberalism has engendered, particularly in the context of contemporary Cambodia, where he emphasizes the role of violence and power. He cultivates a cutting edge theoretical approach to his scholarship by foregrounding both poststructuralist critique and a radical revival of anarchist philosophy.

In today’s show Simon discusses his new co-edited volume, The Radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism, Geography, and the spirit of revolt (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 

Before starting the show, I want to apologize for the high pitched sound that you’ll hear throughout the interview. Since this is a no-budget show that doesn’t record in professional sound studios, sometimes these technical problems happen. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I decided to play the interview as-is because Simon’s ideas are worth considering.

My guest today is José Cossa, a Visiting Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo. In the fall of 2016, he will join the faculty of Peabody College at Vanderbilt University as a Senior Lecturer.

In today’s show, José talks about his archival research on three past editors of the Comparative Education Review. He is concerned with the ways in which the field of comparative education was formed and the role journal editors play in setting intellectual boundaries.

His work can be found in the book Crafting a Global Field (Springer, 2016).

Human capital theory connects education to the labor market. It posits that more education makes workers more productive, which increases earnings. A more educated and productive workforce subsequently increases the gross domestic product of a nation. This theory has been prevalent since the 1950s and continues to play a central role in the minds of both policymakers and parents: You go to school because you will get a better job in the future; The government invests in education because it will have a return on investment in larger GDPs.

My guest today says human capital theory is dead.

Hugh Lauder is Professor of Education and Political Economy at the University of Bath. He specialises in the relationship of education to the economy and has for over 10 years worked on national skill strategies and more recently on the global skill strategies of multinational companies.

My guest today is Iveta Silova, Director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Arizona State University. Professor Silova has spent her career studying post-socialist education transformation processes.

In today’s show she discusses some of her new work comparing Latvian textbooks before, during, and after Soviet occupation.

Large-scale assessments such as PISA have profoundly changed the processes of educational policy making. Countries that do well on PISA are turned into reference societies by other countries trying to emulate educational success.

My guest today is Florian Waldow, a professor of comparative and international education at Humboldt University in Berlin.

One of Florian’s main research interests is the study of educational “borrowing and lending”, particularly the ways in which countries point to experiences from abroad as a way to legitimate policy agendas and how educational “reference societies” are constructed.

In today’s show, Florian talks about how the German media has interpreted the PISA success of countries in Scandinavia and Asia. His research shows that reference societies can both be positive and negative — pointing towards education reforms Germany should enact and those it should not.

The research discussed in this podcast was published in 2016 in the journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogik.

Full Citation: Waldow, F. (2016). Das Ausland als Gegenargument: Fünf Thesen zur Bedeutung nationaler Stereotype und negativer Referenzgesellschaften. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 62(3), 403-421.

Photo Credit: Eric Lichtscheidt

Today on the show: social networks analysis in educational research.

My guest is Robin Shields. Robin is an Associate Professor at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. His research broadly investigates the globalization of education, examining patterns of convergence and differentiation in educational policy and practice. He particularly focuses on the innovative application of research methods such as social network analysis and multilevel modeling to address key theoretical debates in the field. He has applied these methods to the study of international higher education and international development education.

On today’s show we discuss some of his work looking at twitter feeds of world class universities, which can be found in the February 2016 issue of Higher Education.

Private interests are increasingly becoming commonplace inside education. In today’s economic globalization, the attainment of knowledge is seen as the key difference between economies that succeed and economies that stagnate or fail. Perhaps more precisely, it is knowledge that determines if an individual — not a national economy—succeeds or fails. We call this the “knowledge economy” and it is one of the main reason why private interests have entered education systems. Private interests in education range from private schools and private textbook and examination companies to the emerging belief that education is an individual, positional good that can be purchased and to the financialization of education where companies buy and sell student debt. It also includes things such as evidence based policy and information technology

Our guest today, Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi sees herself as a second generation researcher of educational privatization. Whereas the first generation of scholars aimed at describing the phenomenon, she attempts to explain — or theorize — it. How can we explain the rise of a global education industry?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi is a Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. She is a co-editor of the newest World Yearbook of Education, which focuses on “The global education industry.” The volume was co-edited with Antoni Verger and Christopher Lubienski and is the focus of today’s show.