FreshEd

This year the Comparative and International Education Society's Globalization and Education Book Award goes to Suhanthie Motha for her book "Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice."

This book smoothly and bitingly makes connections between globalization, the spread of English and English language teaching, and colonialism and empire. It is an accessible read which we hope spreads widely among both academics and teachers/practitioners. Sincerely, we hope as many people as possible, both within the larger TESOL community and beyond it, have a chance to read this excellent book.

Suhanthie Motha is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington.

Does privilege have sensory dimensions? Our guest today is Howard Prosser, lecturer at Monash University’s Faculty of Education, who recently co-edited a volume entitled In the Realm of the Senses: Social Aesthetics and the Sensory Dynamics of Privilege (2015). This volume won an honorable mention in the 2015-2016 Globalization and Education Special Interest Group book award.

Together with Johannah Fahey and Matthew Shaw, Dr. Prosser argues that “within elite schools there is a relationship between ‘complex sensory and aesthetic environments’ and the construction of privilege within and beyond the school gates. Understanding the importance of the visual to ethnography, the social aesthetics of the elite schools studied in this volume are captured through the inclusion of a series of visual essays that complement the written accounts of the aesthetics of privilege. The collection also includes a series of vignettes that further explore the sensory dimension of these aesthetics: touch, taste—though metaphorically understood— sight and sound. These varying formats illustrate the aesthetic nature of social relations and the various ways in which class permeates the senses. The images from across the different schools and their surroundings immerse the reader in these worlds and provide poignant ethnographic data of the forces of globalization within the context of elite schooling.”

Dr. Prosser spoke with FreshEd contributor Rolf Straubhaar.

For the next three shows, Rolf Straubhaar will be interviewing the winners of the globalization and education Special Interest Group’s inaugural book award.

In today’s show, Rolf speaks with Irv Epstein, the first of two honorable mentions in the book award. Irv is a Professor of Peace and Social Justice at Illinois Wesleyan University where he directs its Center for Human Rights and Social Justice and chairs the Department of Educational Studies.  His latest edited volume is entitled: The Whole World is Texting Youth Protest in the Information Age.

Will Brehm is off until April 25.

Universities in the US are generally staffed by two types of people: those who teach and those who manage. Professors on the one hand and administrators on the other. But a growing class of administrators has emerged: those you blend scholarship and administration into one. My guests today, Bernhard Streitwieser and Anthony Ogden, call this new class of administrator “Scholar-Practitioners.” These types of employees often hold PhDs, use research to inform their practical work in administrative offices, and contribute to scholarly debates on the internationalization of higher education. Yet, since these types of employees are not in academic positions, the knowledge they produce is often seen to be of a lower quality than that produced by professors.

Bernhard Streitwieser and Anthony Ogden have recently published a co-edited volume that explores the many issues of scholar-practitioners. Their book highlights the history, challenges, and personal stories of scholar-practitioners around the US. Ultimately Bernhard and Anthony argue that scholar-practitioners are a valuable part of both the administrative side of universities because they incorporate theory into practice on a daily basis and contribute to scholarly debates within the field of international higher education.

Bernhard Streitwieser is an Assistant Professor of International Education at The George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development.

Anthony Ogden is currently the executive director of Education Abroad and Exchanges and an adjunct assistant professor in Educational Policy and Evaluation Studies at the University of Kentucky.  In May he’ll move to Michigan State University.

I spoke with Bernhard and Anthony during the annual Comparative and International Education Conference in early March.

Competition within and across universities is so common that it may not seem like a big deal. Professors compete for tenure. Students compete to get into a best universities. And universities compete for rankings.

But where does this competition come from and what effects is it having on higher education systems?

My guest today is Rajani Naidoo, professor in higher education management at the University of Bath. She recently edited a special issue of the British journal of the Sociology of Education looking at what she calls the "competition fetish" in higher education. The special issue, which comes out later this year, brings together articles that show the varieties of competition and the various ways actors channel, reproduce, internalize and secure competition logics. Some of the articles address the consequences of competition.

I spoke with Rajani in mid-March about the special issue.

The internationalization of education is a topic that receives plenty of buzz these days. Many students easily move across boarders to learn outside of their home country. Branch campuses by Western universities are popping up around the world. And Education businesses operate globally, selling educational materials and services to any school will to purchase them.

But can the phenomenon of international education exist within sites where there these practices don’t clearly exists?

My guest today is Phan Le Ha. She is a Professor in the College of Education, University of Hawai’i. Le Ha has a forthcoming book entitled Transnational Education Crossing 'the West' and 'Asia': Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity, and Neo-colonial Disguise. Today Le Ha and I discuss parts of this book, particularly related the the dominance of the English language in many Asia countries.

Le Ha will join Fazal Rizvi and Rattana Lao for a webinar on March 22 to discuss the issue of higher education in Asia. To sign up for the webinar, please visit the Globalization and Education SIG’s website.

Yesterday, the globalization and education special interest group hosted a keynote address at the comparative and international education society’s annual conference, which was held this year in Vancouver. I’m going to play the audio of the hour long keynote address, which was given by André Mazawi. Professor Mazawi works in the department of educational studies at the University of British Columbia. His talk is entitled “The location of globalization: on building dwelling thinking higher education.

Enjoy this special edition of FreshEd and I’ll be back on Monday with my interview with Le Ha Phan.

On today’s show, I speak with Susan Robertson about regionalism. Susan's newest co-edited volume is entitled, Global Regionalisms and Higher Education: Projects, Processes, Politics. The volume looks at and theorizes regional bodies around the world, specifically looking at the work of regional bodies on higher education. In our conversation, Susan explained the history of regions, their connection to particular political agendas of liberalization, and their work in higher education.

Susan Robertson 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.

Educational transfer or policy borrowing is one of the major topics in comparative education. When I spoke with Rattana Lao in episode 7 of FreshEd, we discussed the ways in which a culture of borrowing has emerged in Thailand’s educational quality assurance system.

On today’s show, I continue the conversation on educational transfer and policy borrowing with Jason Beech, a professor in the School of Education at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires. Jason critiques the very terms of educational transfer, suggesting the language we use is limited. Why, he asks, is it that the focus is always on policy and not other aspects of education? And has the very notion of globalization lost its cutting edge in terms of theory and method?

Instead of using grand narratives of domination or resistance, Jason uses relational notions of space, which I have talked about on other shows with Marianne Larsen and Jane Kenway. New spatial thinking provides Jason a language to think through new theoretical approaches to educational transfer. In an article co-written in 2015 and published in the journal Globalization, Societies, and Education, Jason uses the case of the one laptop per child scheme in Argentina and actor-network theory to show how material and non-material actors create educational space and new vocabularies for educational transfer.

On today’s show we continue our conversation on PISA. Last week Bob Lingard walked us through the history of the OECDs work in education and compared the main PISA test with the new service called “PISA for Schools.”

Today, Keita Takayama provides a critical reading of the so-called “PISA debate.” This debate started in May 2014 when a group of scholars published an open letter in the Guardian newspaper to Andreas Schleicher, the head of OECD’s education and skills division, criticizing PISA. Two subsequent response letters were published in the Washington Post responding to the open letter and critiquing PISA in ways left out of the original letter.

Keita Takayama, a professor at the University of New England in Australia, takes us through the arguments in these various letters. By looking at who wrote the letters, Prof. Takayama scratches the surface of the arguments to locate hidden agendas. In the end, he sees the so-called “PISA debate” as provincial.