Freshed

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 metaphorica

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 Bern

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 f

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

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.

PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. It is a test administered by the OECD in many countries around the world. You might have heard about the test because of the international league tables comparing systems of education that are created after the results are released. In recent years, Finland and Shanghai have come out on top, unleashing a wave study trips to those place by policymakers who want to learn the secret of good education. Bob Lingard, a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, has spent many years researching the rise of global education governance. He sees the PISA for Schools program as part of the expanding work in education by the OECD. He spoke with me in mid-January about his recent article and recounts the historical evolution of the OECD’s work in education. He ultimately questions the comparative value of the PISA for Schools program.

Social movements produce a huge amount of intellectual knowledge. Yet, in many academic circles, this knowledge is overlooked. My guest today, Aziz Choudry, has spent most of his life working with social movements around the world. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University and visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg. His newest book Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements was published in 2015 by the University of Toronto Press. All book proceeds will be donated to the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal. Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice. Professor Choudry is concerned with “making visible the dialectical relationship between ‘Research’ and ‘organizing.’” I spoke with Aziz Choudry in mid January about his new b

My guest today is Jane Kenway, emeritus professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. For the past several years, Professor Kenway has led a team of scholars and students from around the world on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools in 12 countries. The study explores the global forces, connections and imaginations on elite schools, and hopes to enhance our understanding of how many national and transnational leaders are formed through their education. The project has resulted in many publications, which you can find links to on our website. I spoke with Professor Kenway in January on one of her recent pieces about how she and her team conducted this research, comparing more “traditional” forms of ethnography with her use of “global multi-sited ethnography.”

Right-wing extremism in Germany has made headlines in recent weeks, with the first publication since World War II of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, and the anti-immigrant protests that have peppered the country since a group of Syrian refugees attacked women in Cologne. More broadly, the past decade has witnessed a steady rise of far right politics and social movements across Europe — from the rise of the Golden Dawn party in Greece to the 2011 mass shootings in Norway. My guest today, Cynthia Miller Idriss, talks about her forthcoming book, “The Extreme goes Mainstream?: the Commercialization of Far Right Youth Subculture in Germany,” which will be published later this year by Princeton University Press. Over the past several years, Dr. Miller Idriss has collected thousands of images from the far right youth subculture and conducted interviews in schools where extremism thrives. She argues “that far from being mere ‘subcultural style,’ commercialized extremist products can be a gateway to radical

Is gender parity in education the same as gender equality? And what about gender equity? These terms have different meanings but are often conflated to mean the balance between the number of boys and girls attending school. This statistical measure of parity says nothing of gender equality or equity, and misses important issues of education quality. And yet gender parity is precisely the indicator used by many school systems, international assessments, and global development goals to judge an education system’s approach to gender. My guest today, Supriya Baily, argues that when the language of parity is used to discuss equity, we miss the large structural factors that actually hinder gender justice in education. In a new article, co-writen with Halla Holmarsdottir for the journal Gender and Education, she argues that gender equality is different from gender parity and that we must move beyond simplistic notions of access to really understand gender and education. Dr. Baily is an Associate Professor at George

Tests are part and parcel of the schooling experience. If a child goes to school, then I’m sure he or she will, at some point in time, have to take a test. But the nature and purpose testing has changed and seen a rapid expansion in the past thirty years. Tests have become increasingly standardized and connected to high-stake outcomes. Moreover, standardized testing has become the main tool by which policymakers measure education quality. Standardized tests are both a national and international issue. The rise of international assessments, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, have created a world in which governments at all levels rely on standardized testing. For students, testing — and the preparation for testing — has become commonplace. My guest today, Will Smith, calls the worldwide phenomenon of standardized assessment the “Global testing culture.” Will is a senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, where he is deve

Consider this opening paragraph to an article in University World News early this year: Many Asian countries have been setting ambitious goals to expand and improve their higher education sectors to respond to their growing aspirational middle class and as a result are on the way to catching up with and even overtaking the best higher education systems of the West. Indeed, the Institute of International Education’s latest report on global education research entitled “Asia: The next higher education superpower?” finds that the total number of universities and tertiary graduates in Asia outnumber those in North America and Europe. From the viewpoint of many Western policymakers and media elite, the rise of Asia in terms of education is understood both as an opportunity and source of anxiety. On the one hand, countries such as Australia view the rise of Asia as an opportunity to expand trade, increase student mobility, and grow research collaborations. On the other hand, as Asia becomes a dominate global e

In the last few decades, higher education in Asia has seen rapid expansion of enrolment rates, institutional growth and change, an internationalization drive, and knowledge outputs that are comparable to many western universities. Nevertheless, the topic of Asian Higher education remains mostly understudied. The same can be said of Asian higher esducation research and its communities, which continue to be underrepresented in the international higher education literature. My guest today, Hugo Horta, is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. He has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Higher Education Policy on higher education research in East Asia. Together with Jisun Jung and Akiyoshi Yonezawa, Hugo Horta’s special issue presents an understanding of the evolution of higher education research communities in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The country level studies distill the unique organization and evolution of national higher educat

Policy borrowing is a major topic in field of comparative education. On the surface the idea is relatively simple: one group of policy makers borrow the ideas of other policy makers to improve a system of education. This usually is described as borrowing “best practices.” But the work of many comparative education researchers has shown that who borrows what policy and for what reason is much more complex. We cannot, as Michael Sadler warned in 1900, assume a picked flower in one part of the world will blossom in soil at home. My guest today, Rattanna Lao, dives head first into the debates on policy borrowing in her new book, A Critical Study of Thailand's Higher Education Reforms: The Culture of Borrowing, which was published earlier this year by Routledge. She argues that although the Thai state has always been an active borrower of western ideas, the perseverance of a 'Thai-ness' discourse has often been used to suggest its so-called independence and idiosyncrasy. Rattana Lao received a doctorate in C

In many parts of the world, students commonly attend and pay for private tutoring classes. Sometimes these extra classes are for remedial purposes, giving students additional help on content covered in mainstream school. Other times students use private tutoring to prepare for school examinations. The phenomenon of private tutoring is diverse around the world, and researchers commonly use the term “Shadow Education” to describe it. Tutoring is considered a shadow because it often mimics the curriculum of regular schooling – as the content of the curriculum changes in regular schooling, so it changes in the shadow; and as the regular school system expands or contracts, so does the shadow system My guest today is Mark Bray, UNESCO Chair Professor in Comparative Education at the University of Hong Kong, and Director of its Comparative Education Research Centre. He is also President-Elect of the US-based Comparative & International Education Society (CIES). And I should add, was my advisor during my doctoral

On November 17, the Globalization and Education SIG hosted a webinar on educational pritpviitization. The event was moderated by D. Brent Edwards Jr. and brought together three speakers:Christopher Lubienski (University of Illinois), Frank Adamson (Stanford University) and Tamasin Cave (SpinWatch). The hour-long webinar can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1-QEtL6iA0