- Center for the Advanced Studies of Global Education
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ
Iveta Silova
Arizona State University, Mary Lou Fulton Teacher's College, Faculty Member
- Policy Transfer, Comparative & International Education, Post-socialist transformations, Private tutoring & privatization of public education, Gender equity in education, International Development, and 22 moreMichael Apple, Critical Pedagogy, Foucault and education, Critical Theory, Socialisms, Travelling ideas-discourses, Comparative Education, Eastern/Central Europe, Central Asia, The Caucasus, The Baltics, Anthropology of Borders, Borders and Borderlands, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Cold War and Culture, Globalization, Education Policy, Development Studies, Globalization and education, Isabelle Stengers, and David Abramedit
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the... more
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. These acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
(An)Archive will be of particular interest to scholars in a variety of fields, but particularly to artists, educators, historians, social scientists, and others working with memory methodologies that range from collective biography to oral history, (auto)biography, autoethnography, and archives.
(An)Archive will be of particular interest to scholars in a variety of fields, but particularly to artists, educators, historians, social scientists, and others working with memory methodologies that range from collective biography to oral history, (auto)biography, autoethnography, and archives.
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For more than six decades, scientists have warned us of the catastrophic effects of the escalating climate crisis on the planet and people. The United Nations (UN) member states have met annually since the mid-1990s at the UN Climate... more
For more than six decades, scientists have warned us of the catastrophic effects of the escalating climate crisis on the planet and people. The United Nations (UN) member states have met annually since the mid-1990s at the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings, setting goals and delivering metrics, making promises and offering hope, but failing to enforce policy action. The recent UN COP 26 in Glasgow fell short of keeping the goal of 1.5°C global heating alive as measured against its own objectives. Despite booming policy declarations and deafening science alarms, we have yet to see the radical change in the existing systems and institutions, lifestyles and behaviors, and mindsets and hearts. Perhaps by their very objectivity, the words and numbers distance us from the searing heat of a wildfire or the smell of fear and despair as animals and humans watch the floods wash away their homes and witness the fires burn their habitats. They also reduce the complexity of intertwined webs of life by fragmenting our common planetary home into isolated ‘problems’ to be managed and fixed without addressing a much larger challenge of dismantling unjust systems and reconfiguring our relationships with each other and the planet.
Building on the scientific evidence and keeping in focus policy promises made over the decades, this report mobilizes the power of socially engaged art to bring together visions and voices of youth from across the globe in a collective effort to address the root causes of the climate crisis. It starts with the premise that education is directly implicated in the climate crisis and our failure to imagine alternatives. But it can also be the catalyst for radical change.
Aiming to shift and shuffle the dominant knowledge systems and categories with the cards from the Turn It Around! deck, this report urges you to turn toward the reality of the climate crisis by capturing its devastating impacts from youth perspectives in a way statistical data might not. It challenges existing education policies, practices, and patterns as no longer possible, tolerable, or even thinkable. With the powerful imagination and creativity of youth, the report activates a series of turning points — intergenerational, decolonial, methodological, and pedagogical — in order to turn around the environmental catastrophe, while reconfiguring the role of education toward ecologically just and sustainable futures. Recognizing that most of the human-induced damages on earth are irreversible, we invite you to follow these turns in order to unlearn harmful patterns and begin relearning how to be a part of the Earth’s ecological community. The invitation to Turn it Around! is more than an urgent call to action — it is now the responsibility of every reader to re-imagine education and work out new ways of living with the Earth.
Building on the scientific evidence and keeping in focus policy promises made over the decades, this report mobilizes the power of socially engaged art to bring together visions and voices of youth from across the globe in a collective effort to address the root causes of the climate crisis. It starts with the premise that education is directly implicated in the climate crisis and our failure to imagine alternatives. But it can also be the catalyst for radical change.
Aiming to shift and shuffle the dominant knowledge systems and categories with the cards from the Turn It Around! deck, this report urges you to turn toward the reality of the climate crisis by capturing its devastating impacts from youth perspectives in a way statistical data might not. It challenges existing education policies, practices, and patterns as no longer possible, tolerable, or even thinkable. With the powerful imagination and creativity of youth, the report activates a series of turning points — intergenerational, decolonial, methodological, and pedagogical — in order to turn around the environmental catastrophe, while reconfiguring the role of education toward ecologically just and sustainable futures. Recognizing that most of the human-induced damages on earth are irreversible, we invite you to follow these turns in order to unlearn harmful patterns and begin relearning how to be a part of the Earth’s ecological community. The invitation to Turn it Around! is more than an urgent call to action — it is now the responsibility of every reader to re-imagine education and work out new ways of living with the Earth.
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Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on a qualitative content analysis of international research on private tutoring published in the last four... more
Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown
exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on
a qualitative content analysis of international research on private
tutoring published in the last four decades (1980–2018), this study
explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in
this literature and what such constructions mean for teacher
professionalism. The findings reveal a variety of competing views about
school teachers and the teaching profession, reflecting a partial and
particular conception of the teaching profession. Influenced by the
neoliberal logic, many of these projections portray teachers who
participate in tutoring activities as corrupt or narrowly frame their work
in terms of profit, competition, or entrepreneurship. Given that most of
the reviewed research does not draw on teachers’ own perspectives, we
call for more nuanced and multidimensional approaches to
understanding teachers’ complicated roles and negotiations in this time
of neoliberal globalisation.
exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on
a qualitative content analysis of international research on private
tutoring published in the last four decades (1980–2018), this study
explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in
this literature and what such constructions mean for teacher
professionalism. The findings reveal a variety of competing views about
school teachers and the teaching profession, reflecting a partial and
particular conception of the teaching profession. Influenced by the
neoliberal logic, many of these projections portray teachers who
participate in tutoring activities as corrupt or narrowly frame their work
in terms of profit, competition, or entrepreneurship. Given that most of
the reviewed research does not draw on teachers’ own perspectives, we
call for more nuanced and multidimensional approaches to
understanding teachers’ complicated roles and negotiations in this time
of neoliberal globalisation.
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Special Issue for the East China Normal Review of Education guest edited with Iveta Silova and Yun You. Full Issue available open access here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/roea/current.
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This volume revisits the book edited by David Phillips and Michael Kaser in 1992, entitled Education and Economic Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Two and a half decades later, this volume reflects on how... more
This volume revisits the book edited by David Phillips and Michael Kaser in 1992, entitled Education and Economic Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Two and a half decades later, this volume reflects on how post-socialist countries have engaged with what Phillips & Kaser called ‘the flush of educational freedom’. Spanning diverse geopolitical settings that range from Southeast and Central Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the chapters in this volume offer analyses of education policies and practices that the countries in this region have pursued since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
This book explores three interrelated questions. First, it seeks to capture complex reconfigurations of education purposes during post-socialist transformations, noting the emergence of neoliberal education imaginaries in post-socialist spaces and their effects on policy discussions about education quality and equity across the region. Second, it examines the ongoing tensions inherent in post-socialist transformations, suggesting that beneath the surface of dominant neoliberal narratives there are always powerful countercurrents – ranging from the persisting socialist legacies to other alternative conceptualizations of education futures – highlighting the diverse trajectories of post-socialist education transformations. And finally, the book engages with the question of ‘comparison’, prompting both the contributing authors and readers to reflect on how research on post-socialist education transformations can contribute to rethinking comparative methods in education across space and time.
This book explores three interrelated questions. First, it seeks to capture complex reconfigurations of education purposes during post-socialist transformations, noting the emergence of neoliberal education imaginaries in post-socialist spaces and their effects on policy discussions about education quality and equity across the region. Second, it examines the ongoing tensions inherent in post-socialist transformations, suggesting that beneath the surface of dominant neoliberal narratives there are always powerful countercurrents – ranging from the persisting socialist legacies to other alternative conceptualizations of education futures – highlighting the diverse trajectories of post-socialist education transformations. And finally, the book engages with the question of ‘comparison’, prompting both the contributing authors and readers to reflect on how research on post-socialist education transformations can contribute to rethinking comparative methods in education across space and time.
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This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural... more
This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural insiders who were brought up and educated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain - spanning from Central Europe to mainland Asia - the book offers insights into the diverse spaces of socialist childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. These evocative memories explore the experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody “model socialist citizens” and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in “building” socialist futures. Drawing on the research traditions of autobiography, autoethnography, and collective biography, the authors challenge what is often considered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods, and engage in (re)writing histories that open space for new knowledges and vast webs of interconnections to emerge. This book will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in education, sociology and history, particularly those within the interdisciplinary fields of childhood and area studies. ‘
The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
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The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring “socialist childhoods” in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.’ —Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
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Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Sociology of Children and Childhood, History of Education, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, and 16 moreAutoethnography, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Autobiography, History of Childhood and Youth, Post-Socialist Societies, Politics Of Education, Soviet Union (History), Children and Youth, Memoir and Autobiography, Socialism, Culture in the Soviet Union, Critical sociology and politics of education, Decolonial Thought, Childhood studies, Decolonization, and Schooling Systems
Reimaginig Utopias explores the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science. This peer-reviewed... more
Reimaginig Utopias explores the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science. This peer-reviewed volume addresses the theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas encountered by researchers in the social sciences as they plan and conduct education research in post-socialist settings, as well as disseminate their research findings. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry that spans the fields of education, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book explores three broad questions: How can we (re)imagine research to articulate new theoretical insights about post-socialist education transformations in the context of globalization? How can we (re)imagine methods to pursue alternative ways of producing knowledge? And how can we navigate various ethical dilemmas in light of academic expectations and fieldwork realities? Drawing on case studies, conceptual and theoretical essays, autoethnographic accounts, as well as synthetic introductory and conclusion chapters by the editors, this book advances an important conversation about these complicated questions in geopolitical settings ranging from post-socialist Africa to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The contributors not only expose the limits of Western conceptual frameworks and research methods for understanding post-socialist transformations, but also engage creatively in addressing the persisting problems of knowledge hierarchies created by abstract universals, epistemic difference, and geographical distance inherent in comparative and international education research. This book challenges the readers to question the existing education narratives and rethink taken-for-granted beliefs, theoretical paradigms, and methodological frameworks in order to reimagine the world in more complex and pluriversal ways.
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The 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a time to reflect on the educational transformations in the post-socialist nations of Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and in educational systems around the... more
The 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a time to reflect on the educational transformations in the post-socialist nations of Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and in educational systems around the world. This volume provides a comparative account of the meanings and processes of post-socialist transformations in education by exploring theories, concepts, and debates on post-socialism and globalization in national, regional, and international contexts. By contesting a common expectation that post-socialist societies would inevitably converge towards Western norms, this book sees post-socialism as open, plural, and inevitably uncertain. Speaking from particular contexts of their countries—both from within the post-socialist region of Southeast/Central Europe (Albania, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine) and outside (Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, China, and Nicaragua)—the authors engage in a theoretical and conceptual complexification of post-socialism by raising a series of important questions. What are the elements of continuities and discontinuities in various post-socialist settings and how do they interact in reshaping education policies and practices? What rationalities underpin the logic and define the purpose of education transformations in different post-socialist contexts? How do post-socialist policies function as political technologies to simultaneously promote and challenge global norms? How are global norms actually understood, experienced, and interpreted in post-socialist contexts? And, more broadly, what insights do post-socialist analyses offer for our ongoing attempts to (re)read the global in comparative education?
These questions have important implications for comparative education. In addition to providing important comparative accounts of issues specific to post-socialist societies, they open opportunities for us to engage in theorizing about globalization and its effects on education in refreshingly new ways. By re-engaging post-socialism as a conceptual category (with all of its contradictions and complexities), the essays in this book suggest a (re)reading of the global through the lens of pluralities, discontinuities, and uncertainties. They propose a (re)reading of the global that is free of its predetermined finality. Post-socialism thus becomes an intellectual space and a challenge for comparative education to embrace new theoretical and methodological possibilities.
These questions have important implications for comparative education. In addition to providing important comparative accounts of issues specific to post-socialist societies, they open opportunities for us to engage in theorizing about globalization and its effects on education in refreshingly new ways. By re-engaging post-socialism as a conceptual category (with all of its contradictions and complexities), the essays in this book suggest a (re)reading of the global through the lens of pluralities, discontinuities, and uncertainties. They propose a (re)reading of the global that is free of its predetermined finality. Post-socialism thus becomes an intellectual space and a challenge for comparative education to embrace new theoretical and methodological possibilities.
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The essays in Globalization on the Margins explore the continuities and changes in Central Asian education development since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reflecting on two decades of post-socialist transformations, they... more
The essays in Globalization on the Margins explore the continuities and changes in Central Asian education development since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reflecting on two decades of post-socialist transformations, they reveal that education systems in Central Asia responded to the rapidly changing political, economic, and social environment in profoundly new and unique ways. Some countries moved towards Western models, others went backwards, and still others followed entirely new trajectories. Yet, elements of the “old” system remain. Rather than viewing these post-Soviet transformations in isolation, Globalization on the Margins places its analyses within the global context by reflecting on the interaction between Soviet legacies and global education reform pressures in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Instead of portraying the transition process as the influx of Western ideas into the region, the authors provide new lenses to critically examine the multidirectional flow of ideas, concepts, and reform models within Central Asia.
Notwithstanding the variety of theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and conceptual lenses, the authors have one thing in common: both individually and collectively, they reveal the complexity and uncertainty of the post-Soviet transformations. By highlighting the political nature of the transformation processes and the uniqueness of historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of each particular country, Globalization on the Margins portrays post-Soviet education transformations as complex, multidimensional, and uncertain processes.
Notwithstanding the variety of theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and conceptual lenses, the authors have one thing in common: both individually and collectively, they reveal the complexity and uncertainty of the post-Soviet transformations. By highlighting the political nature of the transformation processes and the uniqueness of historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of each particular country, Globalization on the Margins portrays post-Soviet education transformations as complex, multidimensional, and uncertain processes.
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During the important, early years of transition for the post-socialist countries in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Mongolia, the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation was arguably the largest and most influential network in the region.... more
During the important, early years of transition for the post-socialist countries in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Mongolia, the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation was arguably the largest and most influential network in the region. How NGOs React follows the Soros Foundation's educational reform programs there and raises larger questions about the role of NGOs in a centralist government, relationships NGOs have with international donors and development banks, and how projects are adopted and interpreted in different contexts.
Case studies (authored by former or current educational experts of the Soros Network based in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) look at the impact of capacity-building programs, the professional development of teachers, school administrators, government officials, textbook authors, publishers, teacher educators, and university lecturers, among others. Soros's particular focus on capacity-building and how this strategy was adopted across a wide area reveals much that will instruct NGOs working in international education policy. The unique combination of perspectives from Western as well as Eastern scholars based in the region makes this collection an essential retrospective on key processes involved in the transformation of closed societies into open and free ones.
Case studies (authored by former or current educational experts of the Soros Network based in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) look at the impact of capacity-building programs, the professional development of teachers, school administrators, government officials, textbook authors, publishers, teacher educators, and university lecturers, among others. Soros's particular focus on capacity-building and how this strategy was adopted across a wide area reveals much that will instruct NGOs working in international education policy. The unique combination of perspectives from Western as well as Eastern scholars based in the region makes this collection an essential retrospective on key processes involved in the transformation of closed societies into open and free ones.
Research Interests: International Development, Comparative & International Education, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Central Asia, NGOs (Anthropology), and 12 moreGeorgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Civil Society, Open Society, Mongolia, South Caucasus, Post-socialist transformations, Open Society Institute, The Caucasus, Eastern/Central Europe, and The Baltics
This book presents the results of a study that examines how education has been affected by private tutoring in nine former socialist countries: Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Slovakia,... more
This book presents the results of a study that examines how education has been affected by private tutoring in nine former socialist countries: Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The comparative study is the first document of its kind in the former socialist countries that looks into the main factors behind the phenomena; its scale, cost, geographic spread and subjects involved; the educational, social, and economic impact of private tutoring on the education system; the policy options and alternative approaches.
The publication consists of an in-depth international comparative overview; country reports prepared by nine Education Policy Centers and their partners as well as a set of recommendations for policymakers. It can be useful for national legislative bodies, education ministries, school administrators, local authorities, policymakers, and other education stakeholders to help raise awareness of the problems and benefits of private tutoring. It can also serve as an advocacy tool in the effort to make national education policies more equitable for all students.
The publication consists of an in-depth international comparative overview; country reports prepared by nine Education Policy Centers and their partners as well as a set of recommendations for policymakers. It can be useful for national legislative bodies, education ministries, school administrators, local authorities, policymakers, and other education stakeholders to help raise awareness of the problems and benefits of private tutoring. It can also serve as an advocacy tool in the effort to make national education policies more equitable for all students.
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This book focuses on private tutoring in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Through international comparison and national case studies, it examines the ways in which not only private tutoring but also mainstream school systems have... more
This book focuses on private tutoring in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Through international comparison and national case studies, it examines the ways in which not only private tutoring but also mainstream school systems have changed during the transformation period since the collapse of the socialist era. The book provides the first insight into the scope, nature and implications of private tutoring in Central Asia. It also identifies challenges that confront education stakeholders and policymakers as they decide how to respond to the rapidly spreading and constantly changing phenomenon of private tutoring.
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Rarely do we find books in educational research that are both thick in context and rich in theory. Usually books emphasize one over the other. Authors that engage in thick descriptions tend to fall short of explaining what larger... more
Rarely do we find books in educational research that are both thick in context and rich in theory. Usually books emphasize one over the other. Authors that engage in thick descriptions tend to fall short of explaining what larger theoretical issue their case stands for. Vice versa, authors who make a case for a particular theory do not always describe their case in sufficient detail. From Sites to Occupation to Symbols of Multiculturalism is a remarkable exception. The book is a major break-through in case study methodology, multiculturalism and policy borrowing/lending research.
The book investigates a puzzle: how is it that one and the same system, the system of separate schooling for Latvian and Russian speakers, is seen as a site of occupation during one period (1987-1990) and as a symbol of multiculturalism in the next (1991-1999)? The system has stayed in place, but the meaning attached to it has been completely inverted. Is cultural change without structural change possible? Does it mean that the dual school system has become anachronistic, and will eventually disappear in light of the cultural changes of the past decade? The book is the story of a great metamorphosis of one and the same system of separate schooling that, at first unbelievable, gradually makes sense.
The book investigates a puzzle: how is it that one and the same system, the system of separate schooling for Latvian and Russian speakers, is seen as a site of occupation during one period (1987-1990) and as a symbol of multiculturalism in the next (1991-1999)? The system has stayed in place, but the meaning attached to it has been completely inverted. Is cultural change without structural change possible? Does it mean that the dual school system has become anachronistic, and will eventually disappear in light of the cultural changes of the past decade? The book is the story of a great metamorphosis of one and the same system of separate schooling that, at first unbelievable, gradually makes sense.
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This regional overview on gender equity in education in Central Europe, South Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union is based on both quantitative data and qualitative analysis of the challenges to gender equity in education in the... more
This regional overview on gender equity in education in Central Europe, South Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union is based on both quantitative data and qualitative analysis of the challenges to gender equity in education in the region. Its aim is to provide a useful tool and catalyst for policymakers and educators from the region in promoting equitable educational reform. The report also draws the attention of global policymakers to the unique challenges facing educational reformers in this region. Finally, the report argues that while there are significant challenges to such reform, there are also resources within the region on which to build. These resources include a strong commitment to educational reform (by governments, NGOs, educators, and parents), a focus on critical thinking, and a body of knowledge on curriculum development and innovative pedagogy developed within gender studies programs and women’s NGOs in the last decade.
Research Interests: Languages, Gender Studies, Education, Educational Inequalities (class; race; gender etc), Migration, and 12 morePolicy, Gender, Gender Equality, Economic Development, Post-Soviet Studies, Post-Socialist Societies, Gender and Development, Gender and education, Central European Studies, Post-Socialism, Western Balkans, and Southeast European Education
Call for papers! Special issue "Politics of Disruption: Youth Climate Activisms and Education" with Carrie Karsgaard and Victoria Desimoni! Deadline November 30, 2024. Please share widely! https://lnkd.in/g4awpDD7
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Introduction to the special issue in European Education
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
Free download here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KAmzwmAHXr8KY7EyymXi/full
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Different perspectives on how to ‘read’ the World have produced a dynamic debate about education and globalisation in the field of comparative education. Over the last decade or more, the central axis of this debate has been world culture... more
Different perspectives on how to ‘read’ the World have produced a dynamic debate about education and globalisation in the field of comparative education. Over the last decade or more, the central axis of this debate has been world culture theory, a substantial project around which most theoretical and
empirical work has revolved. World culture theory has invited us to envisage ‘globalisation’ as nothing short of the next phase of the diffusion of a set of educational models and ideas that represent ‘one of the most impressive cases of successful transmission of a cultural model in the history of human society’...
empirical work has revolved. World culture theory has invited us to envisage ‘globalisation’ as nothing short of the next phase of the diffusion of a set of educational models and ideas that represent ‘one of the most impressive cases of successful transmission of a cultural model in the history of human society’...
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The centrality of culture for achieving environmental sustainability has long been underscored by philosophers, psychologists, and social scientists concerned about the environment. However, to date few studies have detected an empirical... more
The centrality of culture for achieving environmental sustainability has long been underscored by philosophers, psychologists, and social scientists concerned about the environment. However, to date few studies have detected an empirical relationship between cultural dimensions and actual
environmental impacts on Earth (e.g., the Ecological Footprint, EF). This study examined the hypothesis that an individualistic society, herein defined as one whose members predominantly believe in forms of
independent self-construal, would exhibit a higher environmental impact compared to a less individualistic society, herein defined as one where the prevailing belief is in interdependent selfhood. This study tested three sub-hypotheses. First, due to the dominance of the independent self, people in an individualistic society tend to be less inclined to believe that human activities cause environmental problems (i.e., lower levels of anthropogenic perception). Second, these low levels of anthropogenic
perception prevent members of individualistic societies from consciously organizing pro-environmental behavior, resulting in a higher environmental impact. Third, even among countries with similar levels of anthropogenic perception, those in individualistic societies would exhibit higher environmental impacts due to less self-control when facing trade-offs between individual and social benefits. To examine these hypotheses, the study used three indices comprising country-level data including Hofstede’s
‘individualism-collectivism’ scale, EF, and anthropogenic perception of climate change. Results confirm higher EF for more individualistic countries, supporting the main hypothesis and confirming positive
results for all subhypotheses. The findings suggest that although the independent self has traditionally been a major cornerstone of western civilization and been valorized in other places worldwide during the
modern era, rewriting this culturally-derived concept of self might now be necessary to move towards greater environmental sustainability.
environmental impacts on Earth (e.g., the Ecological Footprint, EF). This study examined the hypothesis that an individualistic society, herein defined as one whose members predominantly believe in forms of
independent self-construal, would exhibit a higher environmental impact compared to a less individualistic society, herein defined as one where the prevailing belief is in interdependent selfhood. This study tested three sub-hypotheses. First, due to the dominance of the independent self, people in an individualistic society tend to be less inclined to believe that human activities cause environmental problems (i.e., lower levels of anthropogenic perception). Second, these low levels of anthropogenic
perception prevent members of individualistic societies from consciously organizing pro-environmental behavior, resulting in a higher environmental impact. Third, even among countries with similar levels of anthropogenic perception, those in individualistic societies would exhibit higher environmental impacts due to less self-control when facing trade-offs between individual and social benefits. To examine these hypotheses, the study used three indices comprising country-level data including Hofstede’s
‘individualism-collectivism’ scale, EF, and anthropogenic perception of climate change. Results confirm higher EF for more individualistic countries, supporting the main hypothesis and confirming positive
results for all subhypotheses. The findings suggest that although the independent self has traditionally been a major cornerstone of western civilization and been valorized in other places worldwide during the
modern era, rewriting this culturally-derived concept of self might now be necessary to move towards greater environmental sustainability.
Research Interests: Environmental Philosophy, Education, Self and Identity, Development Studies, Environmental Education, and 12 moreClimate Change, Environmental Psychology, Environmental Studies, Sustainable Development, Comparative & International Education, Cultural Psychology, Environmental Sustainability, Individualism, Education and Development, Ecological Footprint, Anthropocene, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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Contribution to GTI Forum: The Pedagogy of Transition
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While discussions surrounding education for sustainable development (ESD) are diverse, most scholars and policy makers view student-centered learning (SCL) as axiomatic. In contrast, we argue that promoting SCL potentially stymies... more
While discussions surrounding education for sustainable development (ESD) are diverse, most scholars and policy makers view student-centered learning (SCL) as axiomatic. In contrast, we argue that promoting SCL potentially stymies educational contributions to sustainability by extending a culturally specific belief in ontological individualism. We first highlight that countries committed to SCL tend to be dominated by ontological individualism and then show that these same countries score lower on a range of social and environmental sustainability indices. Moreover, countries where the belief in ontological individualism reigns tend to be liberal market economies, an institutional arrangement largely ineffective or even detrimental to social and environmental sustainability. In raising these issues, we seek less to provide a definitive account of the key relationships than to catalyze a deeper conversation about how to reimagine the taken-for-granted logics of education as the sustainability imperative looms.
Research Interests: Education, Environmental Education, Critical Pedagogy, Learning and Teaching, International Education, and 8 moreComparative & International Education, Student Centered Learning, Resilience (Sustainability), Environmental Sustainability, Comparative Education, Comparative and International Development Education, Sustainability, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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Van Doesum et al. (1) report a positive correlation between social mindfulness and national environmental performance represented by the Environmental Performance Index (EPI)...
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Los niños constituyeron un elemento clave del proyecto de construcción del imperio soviético, la reconfiguración de la infancia y la remodelación del espacio colonial en sí. Los niños de diferentes etnias en los territorios de las... more
Los niños constituyeron un elemento clave del proyecto de construcción del imperio soviético, la reconfiguración de la infancia y la remodelación del espacio colonial en sí. Los niños de diferentes etnias en los territorios de las repúblicas soviéticas debían estar unidos por el idioma ruso y por un sentimiento de patriotismo soviético, manifiesto en lemas políticos como la "amistad de todos", la "igualdad interétnica" y el "internacionalismo". El currículum educativo y las actividades se utilizaron para facilitar la "fusión" social y cultural de todos los grupos étnicos sobre la base del idioma y la cultura rusa soviética. Al mismo tiempo, el imperio soviético promulgó la idea de la "unidad en la diversidad", permitiendo a las minorías nacionales el derecho a la autodeterminación y cierta autonomía política dentro de un contexto socialista. Basándose en la teoría postcolonial y los estudios de geografía crítica, este artículo analiz...
This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the... more
This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory's telos of a ‘world culture’ neglects the notions of power and agency, and continues to use discourses of modernism and ‘scientific’ methodology to justify conformity as the reigning global ‘norm’. The world culture theory ultimately results in an unwitting legitimisation of neoliberal policies and its varied educational projects. Drawing on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of discourse analysis, we examine how the semantics and content of the world culture theory have evolved as it embraced an increasingly large and diverse community of scholars aligned with it. By highlighting some significant semantic shifts during the last four decades, we explore how the world culture theorists forged a relatively new (privileged) space in comparative education – a space that has increasingly turned deterministic and normative. Through a careful deconstruction of some of the basic assumptions of world culture theory, we call for reopening of an intellectual space for new ways of thinking about educational phenomena in the context of globalisation.
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Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Postcolonial Studies, International Education, Postsocialism, Colonialism, and 11 morePolitics Of Education, Socialism, Comparative Education, Critical sociology and politics of education, Comparative and International Development Education, Knowledge Production, Colonial Discourse, Politics of knowledge production, Comparative International Education, Politics of Education, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
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Purpose-Humans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses... more
Purpose-Humans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on education, offers a fuller explanation for our lack of success and calls attention to alternatives. Design/methodology/approach-The authors first critically review mainstream approaches that have been used to achieve environmental sustainability, then introduce an alternative that the authors call the cultural approach. The authors finally discuss how educational research should be re-articulated based on the cultural approach. Findings-The authors identified three mainstream approachesthe technological, cognitive approach and behavioristall of which function to reproduce modern mainstream culture. In contrast, the cultural approach assumes modern mainstream culture as the root cause of environmental unsustainability and aims to rearticulate it. To elaborate a cultural approach, the authors recommend education scholars to (1) bring attention to the role of culture in sustainability and (2) identify education practices that are potentially useful for enacting a cultural shift, primarily developing richer synergies between qualitative and quantitative research. Originality/value-Unlike many previous studies in the field of education, the authors' account highlights how current mainstream approaches used for current global education policymaking often merely reproduces modern mainstream culture and accelerates the environmental crisis. It thus proposes to redirect educational research for a cultural shift, one that allows human society to move beyond the comforting rhetoric of sustainability and face the survivability imperative.
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Notwithstanding the variation in focus–from macroeconomic monetary and trade policies, to economic wealth programs aimed at creating jobs, to supply-and demand-side reforms–the central discourse on international aid has been dominated by... more
Notwithstanding the variation in focus–from macroeconomic monetary and trade policies, to economic wealth programs aimed at creating jobs, to supply-and demand-side reforms–the central discourse on international aid has been dominated by a political economist's viewpoint. Steven Klees' article,“Aid, Development, and Education” continues to use an economic perspective by challenging some of the neoliberal economic assumptions made within the development industry since the 1970s. 2 He offers a refreshing progressive ...
In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is important to... more
In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is important to understand how the education of young children in this region has changed in response to a world rapidly globalising and increasingly driven by market economic policies. Just how much have post-socialist states, as others across the world, reoriented their educational projects to ensure the development of individuals maximally adapted for the information economy of late capitalism? This study probes this question through the critical discourse analysis of a genre of early literacy textbooks – bukvari – used widely throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet education system. Through comparison of literacy texts published in the late Soviet era with those used over the past two decades in independent Latvia and Ukraine, we explore how discourses representing children and their behaviors – what we call ‘literacies of childhood’ – have evolved during post-socialist transformations. In contrast to the predominant assumption that values common to socialism should have given way to cosmopolitan, neoliberal principles, we find surprising flows and modifications between visions of the ‘Soviet’ and ‘post-Soviet’ child. Most significantly perhaps, our analysis reveals that even the most recent textbooks reject assertions of a global and future-oriented citizen, instead idealising visions of a distinctly national Latvian or Ukrainian citizenry, growing up in a trapped-in-time, ethnically and linguistically homogenous homeland.
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Nagorno-Karabakh is caught in a terse tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. South Ossetia, also in the south Caucasus, is a fuse for conflict between Georgia and Russia. Transdniester, on the eastern border of Moldova, likewise... more
Nagorno-Karabakh is caught in a terse tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. South Ossetia, also in the south Caucasus, is a fuse for conflict between Georgia and Russia. Transdniester, on the eastern border of Moldova, likewise remains an unrecognized breakaway state. Clearly, battles over borders and disputes about space—who it belongs to and who belongs to it—continue to rage in the vast territory of the former Soviet Union. Since the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1991¸ a host of new states have asserted manifold, sometimes explosive, claims to their territory, their home. Such claims have been central to geopolitical disputes and scholarly research.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Education, Environmental Education, Critical Pedagogy, Learning and Teaching, and 9 moreInternational Education, Student Centered Learning, Resilience (Sustainability), Environmental Sustainability, Comparative Education, Comparative and International Development Education, Comparative International Education, Sustainability, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students’ self-construal, the view of self held by members of the... more
University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students’ self-construal, the view of self held by members of the university community (i.e., whether the self is viewed as independent or interdependent with nature). This runs counter to the findings in psychology that people’s behavior is strongly affected by their self-construal. We thus conducted an exploratory attempt to include self-construal measurements into a campus environmental sustainability project at National Taiwan University. We specifically examined whether the university had contributed to the transformation of students’ self-construal for greater environmental sustainability. Toward this end, we first confirmed that a psychological scale for self-construal, the connectedness to nature scale (CNS) that had been mainly tested in Western contexts, successfully predicted the likelihood of students’ ec...
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This article combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together the authors’ childhood memories of “common worlding.” Our collective biography brings into focus how we engaged in common... more
This article combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together the authors’ childhood memories of “common worlding.” Our collective biography brings into focus how we engaged in common worlding in our childhoods through dreaming, metamorphosis, and play by tactfully moving across different worlds and learning with the human and more-than-human others we encountered. As we foreground childhood memory and its potential to reimagine pasts, presents, and futures, we explore what kind of conditions are necessary to (re)attune ourselves to the multiple worlds around us in order to maintain and nurture children’s—and our own—other-worldly connections.
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PurposeHumans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on... more
PurposeHumans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on education, offers a fuller explanation for our lack of success and calls attention to alternatives.Design/methodology/approachThe authors first critically review mainstream approaches that have been used to achieve environmental sustainability, then introduce an alternative that the authors call the cultural approach. The authors finally discuss how educational research should be re-articulated based on the cultural approach.FindingsThe authors identified three mainstream approaches – the technological, cognitive approach and behaviorist – all of which function to reproduce modern mainstream culture. In contrast, the cultural approach assumes modern mainstream culture as the root cause of environmental unsustainability and aims to rearticulate it. ...
Research Interests: Sociology, Ontology, Education, Environmental Education, Climate Change, and 15 moreEducational Development, International Education, Cultural Psychology, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Sustainability, Individualism, Comparative Education, Engineering Ethics, Self Construal, Originality, Anthropocene, Comparative International Education, Conceptualization, Mainstream, and Sustainability
Drawing on the concept of “pedagogies of time,” this article analyzes early literacy textbooks and our own childhood memories of temporal socialization in (post)Soviet Armenia, Georgia, and Latvia. While textbook analysis reveals... more
Drawing on the concept of “pedagogies of time,” this article analyzes early literacy textbooks and our own childhood memories of temporal socialization in (post)Soviet Armenia, Georgia, and Latvia. While textbook analysis reveals purposeful socialization of children into modern linear timelines, memory stories interrupt these predetermined trajectories and shift attention toward multiple forms of temporalities that coexist alongside and entangle with each other. Using a speculative thought experiment, we “edit” a chronological timeline in one of the stories from early literacy textbooks as an attempt to simultaneously (re)write the dominant timespaces of socialist modernity and the way childhood appears there.
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This article combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together the authors’ childhood memories of “common worlding.” Our collective biography brings into focus how we engaged in common... more
This article combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together the authors’ childhood memories of “common worlding.” Our collective biography brings into focus how we
engaged in common worlding in our childhoods through dreaming, metamorphosis, and play by tactfully moving across different worlds and learning with the human and more-than-human others we encountered. As
we foreground childhood memory and its potential to reimagine pasts, presents, and futures, we explore what kind of conditions are necessary to (re)attune ourselves to the multiple worlds around us in order to maintain
and nurture children’s—and our own—other-worldly connections.
engaged in common worlding in our childhoods through dreaming, metamorphosis, and play by tactfully moving across different worlds and learning with the human and more-than-human others we encountered. As
we foreground childhood memory and its potential to reimagine pasts, presents, and futures, we explore what kind of conditions are necessary to (re)attune ourselves to the multiple worlds around us in order to maintain
and nurture children’s—and our own—other-worldly connections.
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Her research explores discourses of teacher autonomy, the nature and process of achieving teacher agency, and manifestation of different dimensions of teacher autonomy in classroom practices and student achievement. Ketevan also studies... more
Her research explores discourses of teacher autonomy, the nature and process of achieving teacher agency, and manifestation of different dimensions of teacher autonomy in classroom practices and student achievement. Ketevan also studies students' awareness of environmental sustainability and childhood memories in postsocialist educational contexts.
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By adopting a collective name, we foreground our entangled, perpetual becoming-with as researchers and human beings who refuse to single out or rank our contributions. Our collective name is inspired by the figure of Mnemosyne from Greek... more
By adopting a collective name, we foreground our entangled, perpetual becoming-with as researchers and human beings who refuse to single out or rank our contributions. Our collective name is inspired by the figure of Mnemosyne from Greek mythology, goddess of memory and mother of the nine Muses. Spanning almost ten years, our research examines childhood memories through the collective biography method, which contributes to writing alternative histories and informs our current thinking about (post)socialist and (de)colonial pasts, presents, and futures.
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This article aims to reimagine education-and our selves-within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated. Design/Approach/Methods: The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative... more
This article aims to reimagine education-and our selves-within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated. Design/Approach/Methods: The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative thought experiments to connect and bring into conversation seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time-European "paganism" and 13th-century Japanese Buddhism, as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. These thought experiments are conducted through a series of "and if" questions around education and schooling. Findings: The article proposes to radically reimagine education in two ways. First, it invites readers to reconfigure education as a "connective tissue" between different worlds, bringing together rather than hierarchizing them. Second, it proposes to reframe education as an opportunity to learn how to anticipate and animate our ongoing entanglement with more-thanhuman worlds. Originality/Value: Using the concept of "metamorphosis" as an antidote to Western metaphysics, the article re-situates education within a wider set of possibilities in relation to the takenfor-granted ways of knowing and being, as well as the notions of space and time.
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It is usually at the edges where the great tectonic plates of theory meet and shift that we find the most dramatic developments and upheavals. When four tectonic plates of liberation theory-those concerned with the oppressions of gender,... more
It is usually at the edges where the great tectonic plates of theory meet and shift that we find the most dramatic developments and upheavals. When four tectonic plates of liberation theory-those concerned with the oppressions of gender, race, class, and nature-finally come together, the resulting tremors could shake the conceptual structures of oppression to their foundations. (Plumwood 1993, 1) We live in a moment of epochal precarity, marked by the devastating impacts of the climate catastrophe and persistent political impasse. Altering life on the entire planet, humans have become the dominant force behind the irreversible ecological breakdown, including natural resource depletion, water and air pollution, human overpopulation, and a fundamental collapse of the ecosystems that have sustained life on Earth for millions years. As the climate catastrophe escalates, its effects result in resource shortages and famines, cause species extinctions and displacements, and trigger migrations of climate refugees on a global scale. Entire generations of living beings and connectivities are being destroyed and lost, while damaged ecosystems are unable to recuperate themselves. Deborah Bird Rose (2015) described it as a "double death," a process that amplifies death to such an extent that not only individuals but entire groups, species, and ways of life are being eradicated: "Double death involves the death of future continuities." Variously called Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Chthulucene, 1 this new era has tied the fate of humanity to the fate of the planet,
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摘 要:本文旨在将教育— 以及我们自身 (our selves)— 置于不止于人类世界的多重世界的背景 下进行重新想象，在这些个世界中，万事万物(包括人类与非人类)都深刻地彼此关联着。本文的目的 是通过有意识地进行两项假想实验— 知识论和本体论意义上的“退步”— 来达成的。借助这两项实 验，看似跨越时空、互不相关的知识体系— 欧洲的“异教”和 13 世纪的日本佛教— 以及来自原住民... more
摘 要:本文旨在将教育— 以及我们自身 (our selves)— 置于不止于人类世界的多重世界的背景 下进行重新想象，在这些个世界中，万事万物(包括人类与非人类)都深刻地彼此关联着。本文的目的 是通过有意识地进行两项假想实验— 知识论和本体论意义上的“退步”— 来达成的。借助这两项实 验，看似跨越时空、互不相关的知识体系— 欧洲的“异教”和 13 世纪的日本佛教— 以及来自原住民 研究、生态女性主义研究和去殖民性的(decolonial)学术研究，得以发生关联并进行对话。这些假想实 验，是以围绕着教育 (education) 和学校教育 (schooling) 而提出的一系列“如果......又如何......”式的问 题来完成的，但有时候，这个过程也会被栩栩然飞舞于灭绝边缘的蝴蝶所投下的阴影所打断。本文提议 从两个方面入手，对教育进行激进的重新想象。首先，它邀请读者将教育重构为连接不同世界的“结缔组 织”，其意在促成团结，而不是对这些世界加以分化、排序和评定高下。其次，本文提议将教育重新界定 为一种机遇，让我们学习如何期待与那些不止于人类的多重世界的不断缠结(entanglement)，并为这种 缠结赋予生机活力。这要求我们借助比较意义上的“其他选择”，将学习重新界定为一种相遇，将相遇重 新界定为一种学习。本文的价值在于，将“化生”(metamorphosis)的概念作为西方形而上学的一剂“解 毒药”，把教育重新置于一个包含有更多可能性的更宽泛的背景之下，这些可能性不仅包括那些被视作理 所当然的求知和存在的方式，也包括对空间和时间的观念。
关键词:边界思维;比较教育学;不止于人类世界的多重世界;多重宇宙;SF
关键词:边界思维;比较教育学;不止于人类世界的多重世界;多重宇宙;SF
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Acrobats, phantoms, and fools. Such experiences often stem from our attempts to 'fit' into the official cartography of Comparative Education, which reflects a particular reading of the formation of knowledge and knowing subjects in the... more
Acrobats, phantoms, and fools. Such experiences often stem from our attempts to 'fit' into the official cartography of Comparative Education, which reflects a particular reading of the formation of knowledge and knowing subjects in the field. Rather than viewing cartographies as universal, we reframe them as embodied and embedded. Combining reflections on our own intellectual journeys in Comparative Education with those of other scholars and fictive characters, we move across time and space to develop a collective biography that explores our interwoven positionalities. We begin by outlining both the parallel lines along which our biographies have unfolded and their various points of intersection. We then present a series of generic scholarly experiences that shape our collective biographies and the field's boundaries. Our own recollections are entangled with experiences and voices of 'Others' who did not appear at the time or perhpahs were present but remained beyond out horizon. Animating ourselves by entering into these relationships with 'Others' enables us to reclaim pluraity in the very structure of the field's cartography and our own biographies. This in turn provokes reflection on the implications for doing comparative education, especially in relation to encountering 'otherness' or 'foreignness'. In closing, we suggest that embracing the contradictory vistas opened by such entanglements can help enhance the field's mobility, as well as our own.
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The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western... more
The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the 'science' to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland', such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning-and being-to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children's literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies-nature and culture, time and space, self and other-by bringing the 'pagan' worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon.
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In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies.... more
In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children's lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actually experienced. In this article, first, we delve into the utility of memory stories for exploring childhoods and children's everyday lives in a variety of socialist spaces. Second, we explicate how memory stories about everyday life can serve as data for cultural-political analysis. We aim to show how 'thinking through' memory stories enables us to learn about childhood and children's lives and to gain access to historical socio-political discourses and practices. We conclude with the relevance of our discussion for engagements with current global problems. ARTICLE HISTORY
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The Soviet nation-building project placed children at the center of complex and contradictory political socialization processes that aimed to simultaneously forge a common Soviet identity while promoting national languages and cultures.... more
The Soviet nation-building project placed children at the center of complex and contradictory political socialization processes that aimed to simultaneously forge a common Soviet identity while promoting national languages and cultures. This ambitious nation-building project was explicitly taught in the official school curriculum and further reinforced through children's participation in political youth organizations. But children learned the Soviet nationhood also through mundane, everyday practices. This article explores how children growing up in the Soviet Union became 'national' subjects in times and spaces where the nation was taught implicitly-and learned unselfconsciously-in the everyday. Building on the work of John Fox and others, the article makes ordinary, taken-for-granted expressions of nationalism visible by retelling childhood memories of 'breaching' the nation-that is, instances when the unspoken order of the Soviet 'nation' was unexpectedly upset and needed to be restored-through such everyday experiences as wearing (or not) a hair-bow or sharing jokes about bows in girls' hair. ARTICLE HISTORY Childhood has been historically placed at the heart of nation-and empire-building projects, linking the futures of children to the visions of new social order in political, economic, and social realms (Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018; Cannella and Viruru 2004; Millei and Imre 2016; Stephens 1995). In this context, social scientists and policymakers alike have tended to treat children as 'a malleable tabula rasa that could be (re)fashioned through education for nation-building purposes' (for critique see Millei, Silova, and Piattoeva 2018, 233; see also, Kelly 2007; Kirschenbaum 2001). Furthermore , most scholarship on children's role in nation-building processes-and their evolving sense of national belonging-has predominantly focused on the cognitive aspects of learning the 'nation' through the official school curriculum (e.g. lessons in national literature, history and civics) and extracurricular activities (e.g. political youth organizations) (e.g. see Bezrogov 2014; Janmaat 2005; Michaels and Stevick 2009; Piattoeva 2010). While focusing on state-sanctioned articulation of the nation in school curriculum, such research has not considered children's agency and subjec-tivity (Millei and Kallio 2018), reducing political socialization to a unidirectional top-down process and thus constraining our ability to understand the link between childhood and nation in more dynamic and relational ways. Shifting away from top-down political socialization literature and re-centering children as active participants-and more broadly 'as active beings in a social world' (James and Prout 1990, 233)-at all points of their lives, this article examines the ways in which children are socialized into becoming 'national' subjects through mundane, ordinary practices of their everyday life. It builds on the
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The centrality of culture for achieving environmental sustainability has long been underscored by philosophers, psychologists, and social scientists concerned about the environment. However, to date few studies have detected an empirical... more
The centrality of culture for achieving environmental sustainability has long been underscored by philosophers, psychologists, and social scientists concerned about the environment. However, to date few studies have detected an empirical relationship between cultural dimensions and actual environmental impacts on Earth (e.g., the Ecological Footprint, EF). This study examined the hypothesis that an individualistic society, herein defined as one whose members predominantly believe in forms of independent self-construal, would exhibit a higher environmental impact compared to a less individualistic society, herein defined as one where the prevailing belief is in interdependent selfhood. This study tested three sub-hypotheses. First, due to the dominance of the independent self, people in an individualistic society tend to be less inclined to believe that human activities cause environmental problems (i.e., lower levels of anthropogenic perception). Second, these low levels of anthropogenic perception prevent members of individualistic societies from consciously organizing pro-environmental behavior, resulting in a higher environmental impact. Third, even among countries with similar levels of anthropogenic perception, those in individualistic societies would exhibit higher environmental impacts due to less self-control when facing trade-offs between individual and social benefits. To examine these hypotheses, the study used three indices comprising country-level data including Hofstede’s ‘individualism-collectivism’ scale, EF, and anthropogenic perception of climate change. Results confirm higher EF for more individualistic countries, supporting the main hypothesis and confirming positive results for all subhypotheses. The findings suggest that although the independent self has traditionally been a major cornerstone of western civilization and been valorized in other places worldwide during the modern era, rewriting this culturally-derived concept of self might now be necessary to move towards greater environmental sustainability
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Professor Kazamias has argued that comparative education has lost its “soul,” by abandoning its historical and humanist episteme in the first half of the 20th century and turning to an ahistorical and nonhumanist social science today.... more
Professor Kazamias has argued that comparative education has lost its “soul,” by abandoning its historical and humanist episteme in the first half of the 20th century and turning to an ahistorical and nonhumanist social science today. This essay takes the readers on a journey across time and space in search of comparative education’s “soul,” briefly encountering a goddess in Greek mythology, a witch in medieval Europe, Alice in Wonderland, and Donna Haraway in the Chthulucene.
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This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy- making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on... more
This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy- making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in search for the right problem – that is, they appear to be used as tools to legitimize educational reforms. The survey results pointed to a growing perception among stakeholders that ILSAs are having an effect on national educational policies, with 38% of respondents stating that ILSAs were generally misused in national policy contexts. However, while the ILSA literature indicates that these assessments are having some influence, there is little evidence that any positive or negative causal relationship exists between ILSA participation and the implementation of education reforms. Perhaps the most significant change associated with the use of ILSAs in the literature reviewed is the way in which new conditions for educational comparison have been made possible at the national, regional, and global levels.
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This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of... more
This article explores the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education in and about (post)socialist spaces of Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union after the Cold War. We engage in a particular form of decoloniality, or what Walter Mignolo terms delinking. Delinking challenges the " emancipatory project " of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to decolonize knowledge, thus interrupting dominant understandings about the organization of the world, society, and education. We do not propose to replace this epistemology with another or others, but take it as the target of critique in a world where many different views could co-exist on a non-hierarchical basis. Our critique is threefold. First, we engage in rethinking and rewriting the socialist past(s) through new and multiple frames to reveal potential possibilities for imagining multiple post-socialist future(s). Second, we show the relations and the intertwined histories of " different worlds, " thus unsettling the established spatial partitions of the world. Third, we examine how coloniality has shaped our own identities as scholars and discuss ways to reclaim our positions as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at and interpret the world from our own origins and lived realities. We believe that this kind of delinking fractures the hegemony of Western-centric knowledge, enabling comparative education to gain a global viewpoint that is more inclusive of different voices.
Research Interests: Sociology of Education, Postcolonial Studies, International Education, Comparative & International Education, Postsocialism, and 9 moreColonialism, Politics Of Education, Socialism, Critical sociology and politics of education, Comparative and International Development Education, Knowledge Production, Colonial Discourse, Politics of knowledge production, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
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World culture theory seeks to explain an apparent convergence of education through a neoinstitutionalist lens, seeing global rationalization in education as driven by the logic of science and the myth of progress. While critics have... more
World culture theory seeks to explain an apparent convergence of education through a neoinstitutionalist lens, seeing global rationalization in education as driven by the logic of science and the myth of progress. While critics have challenged these assumptions by focusing on local manifestations of world-level tendencies, such critique is comfortably accommodated within world culture theory. We approach the debate from a fresh perspective by examining its ideological foundations. We also highlight its shift from notions of myth and enactment toward advocacy for particular models, and we show that world culture theory can become normative, while obscuring our view of policy convergence. Finally, we critique the methods and evidence in world culture research. We argue that such research, while failing to support its own claims, actually produces world culture, as its assumptions and parameters create the very image of consensus and homogeneity that world culture theorists expect scholars to accept—in faith—as empirically grounded.
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This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the... more
This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory’s telos of a ‘world culture’ neglects the notions of power and agency, and continues to use discourses of modernism and ‘scientific’ methodology to justify conformity as the reigning global ‘norm’. The world culture theory ultimately results in an unwitting legitimisation of neoliberal policies and its varied educational projects. Drawing on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of discourse analysis, we examine how the semantics and content of the world culture theory have evolved as it embraced an increasingly large and diverse community of scholars aligned with it. By highlighting some significant semantic shifts during the last four decades, we explore how the world culture theorists forged a relatively new (privileged) space in comparative education – a space that has increasingly turned deterministic and normative. Through a careful deconstruction of some of the basic assumptions of world culture theory, we call for reopening of an intellectual space for new ways of thinking about educational phenomena in the context of globalisation.
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In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is important to... more
In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is important to understand how the education of young children in this region has changed in response to a world rapidly globalising and increasingly driven by market economic policies. Just how much have post-socialist states, as others across the world, reoriented their educational projects to ensure the development of individuals maximally adapted for the information economy of late capitalism? This study probes this question through the critical discourse analysis of a genre of early literacy textbooks – bukvari – used widely throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet education system. Through comparison of literacy texts published in the late Soviet era with those used over the past two decades in independent Latvia and Ukraine, we explore how discourses representing children and their behaviors – what we call ‘literacies of childhood’ – have evolved during post-socialist transforma- tions. In contrast to the predominant assumption that values common to socialism should have given way to cosmopolitan, neoliberal principles, we find surprising flows and modifications between visions of the ‘Soviet’ and ‘post-Soviet’ child. Most significantly perhaps, our analysis reveals that even the most recent textbooks reject assertions of a global and future- oriented citizen, instead idealising visions of a distinctly national Latvian or Ukrainian citizenry, growing up in a trapped-in-time, ethnically and linguistically homogenous homeland.
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Abstract When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia and the newly independent republics of the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus engaged in redefining their political, economic, and social relationships vis-avis each other and... more
Abstract When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia and the newly independent republics of the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus engaged in redefining their political, economic, and social relationships vis-avis each other and the world. In the Baltics, the main impetus for reforms was “a return to Europe,” which was reflected in the efforts to replace Soviet education policies and practices with European ones.
n this article, the authors examine the role of education in the maintenance of social cohesion and the formation of new identities amid the economic decline and political volatility of six new nations: Azerbaijan, in the southern... more
n this article, the authors examine the role of education in the maintenance of social cohesion and the formation of new identities amid the economic decline and political volatility of six new nations: Azerbaijan, in the southern Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. The authors first describe the historical legacies in education in the period before independence in 1991. Then they analyze the systemic crises in education since 1991, as well as the newly independent nations' often half-hearted attempts to embrace Islam and to find some place for religious and ethical thought and values in what had been aggressively secular educational systems. The authors pay particular attention to the ways in which the educational systems have deteriorated since 1991, examining economic deterioration, the degradation of educational infrastructure, and the decline in enrollment and retention, while considering the effects of these crises on social cohesion and political legitimacy. The authors conclude with some thoughts about the potential struggles that lie ahead as the peoples of Azerbaijan and Central Asia seek to reform their educational systems and thereby stabilize and revitalize the processes of social cohesion in their societies.
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"Private tutoring is typically conceptualized as an institutionalized fee-based supplementary education that occurs because of high stakes testing, remedial classes, structural issues like overloaded curriculum, and intensive social... more
"Private tutoring is typically conceptualized as an institutionalized fee-based supplementary education that occurs because of high stakes testing, remedial classes, structural issues like overloaded curriculum, and intensive social competition. The common metaphor for private tutoring is “shadow education,” implying a separation between public schooling and private tutoring. While most of the factors are present in the Cambodian context, they nevertheless fail to explain the complicated arrangements between the public educational system and private tutoring that emerged in the 1990s. This report argues that in Cambodia the main form of private tutoring is not a shadow separate from mainstream schooling. Rather, it may be best understood as a key element in a hybrid arrangement between public schooling and complementary private tutoring, which operates as one single system and casts its own shadow.
This report directly addresses some of the quality and equity implications of private tutoring in the broader context of the privatisation of public education in Cambodia. Building on extensive qualitative and quantitative data collected in Cambodia in 2011, this report reveals inequities resulting from a public-private hybrid system of schooling. This report also highlights the differences and similarities between private tutoring (Rien Kuo) and government school classes. Focusing on the scope, nature, and implications of Rien Kuo, the findings are organized around the following three main categories: (1) curriculum differences between Rien Kuo and mainstream schooling, (2) achievement differences among students attending private tutoring and those who do not, and (3) societal effects of private tutoring."
This report directly addresses some of the quality and equity implications of private tutoring in the broader context of the privatisation of public education in Cambodia. Building on extensive qualitative and quantitative data collected in Cambodia in 2011, this report reveals inequities resulting from a public-private hybrid system of schooling. This report also highlights the differences and similarities between private tutoring (Rien Kuo) and government school classes. Focusing on the scope, nature, and implications of Rien Kuo, the findings are organized around the following three main categories: (1) curriculum differences between Rien Kuo and mainstream schooling, (2) achievement differences among students attending private tutoring and those who do not, and (3) societal effects of private tutoring."
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Aiming to move away from singular history writing toward multiple histories, this book brought together a group of scholars to (re)narrate histories in ways that would lead to more complex understandings of the (post)socialist pasts,... more
Aiming to move away from singular history writing toward multiple histories, this book brought together a group of scholars to (re)narrate histories in ways that would lead to more complex understandings of the (post)socialist pasts, presents, and futures. Committed to this outlook, we invited colleagues from different disciplines to engage with our volume in a series of afterwords rather than having one last word or single voice close the book. These authors speak from multiple perspectives, including different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, as well as various levels of personal connections to (post)socialist histories and contexts. They discuss contributions and implications of our work for different fields, including international relations, comparative education, childhood studies, collective biography research, and decolonial studies. This ensemble of comments, reflections, and critiques offers different ways for readers to connect with our work and also points out new perspectives, complexities, and directions for future research. Together they inspire ample thoughts for what could follow afterward.
Research Interests: Sociology and Discipline
Aikuisten järjestämiin poliittisiin toimintoihin, kuten kommunististen puolueiden pioneeriliikkeisiin tai kesällä järjestettyihin työleireihin, osallistuminen oli keskeinen osa lasten elämää sosialistisissa yhteiskunnissa. Tässä... more
Aikuisten järjestämiin poliittisiin toimintoihin, kuten kommunististen puolueiden pioneeriliikkeisiin tai kesällä järjestettyihin työleireihin, osallistuminen oli keskeinen osa lasten elämää sosialistisissa yhteiskunnissa. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelemme henkilökohtaisten muistitarinoidemme kautta lasten jokapäiväisen poliittisen elämän neuvottelutilanteita esikouluissa ja alakouluissa Unkarissa ja kolmessa entisessä neuvostotasavallassa keskittymällä erityisesti koulupukuihin ja tyttöjen hiuksiin kiinnitettyihin rusetteihin. Näytämme miten banaalit esineet – erityisesti rusetit – sekä niihin liittyvät diskurssit ja käytännöt, tarjosivat poliittisen subjektiuden kehitysmahdollisuuksia erilaisissa geopoliittisissa ja henkilökohtaisissa ympäristöissä. Muistitarinoidemme kautta problematisoimme vallitsevan käsityksen sosialistisesta koulujärjestelmästä yksiselitteisesti tukahduttavana ja monipuolistamme ymmärrystämme politiikasta tuomalla esiin lasten politiikan.
Research Interests: Education, Values Education, Educational Development, Political Science, Education (Social Policy), and 10 moreGlobalization And Higher Education, Comparative Education, Globalization and education, Comparative and International Development Education, Global education, Decolonial Thought, Westernization, Educational Policy Studies, Comparative International Education, and Springer Ebooks
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Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective... more
Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective biography research, we explore the everydays of childhood—from mundane to ideological—to make visible the multiple ways in which our political agency emerged in particular spaces and times. Our memory stories are about hair bows as part of school uniform and the multiple roles they played in our being and becoming schoolgirls and political subjects. The emphasis is on how wearing (or not) a hair bow helped us work with/in or against the norms, as well as feeling the pain and desire to be or act otherwise.
Research Interests: Sociology, Politics, Autoethnography, Ideology, Postsocialism, and 15 moreAnthropology of Children and Childhood, Autobiography, History of Childhood and Youth, Memory Studies, History of Childhood, Children and Youth, Memoir and Autobiography, Socialism, Critical sociology and politics of education, History of Childhodd, Childhood studies, School Uniforms, Scholarship, Comparative International Education, and International Perspectives on Childhod
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Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective... more
Official politics in children’s lives during socialism took various forms, ranging from school curriculum, youth organizations, and celebrations in everyday life. Drawing on current scholarship about children’s politics and our collective biography research, we explore the everydays of childhood—from mundane to ideological—to make visible the multiple ways in which our political agency emerged in particular spaces and times. Our memory stories are about hair bows as part of school uniform and the multiple roles they played in our being and becoming schoolgirls and political subjects. The emphasis is on how wearing (or not) a hair bow helped us work with/in or against the norms, as well as feeling the pain and desire to be or act otherwise.
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Although private tutoring has existed for centuries, it has attracted little attention in the academic and education policy literature. This situation began to be remedied in the 1990s, but the topic remains in great need of further... more
Although private tutoring has existed for centuries, it has attracted little attention in the academic and education policy literature. This situation began to be remedied in the 1990s, but the topic remains in great need of further study. A number of studies refer to private supplementary tutoring as “shadow education”(eg, Stevenson and Baker, 1992; Bray, 1999; Baker and LeTendre, 2005), highlighting its relationship to mainstream education systems.
In the former socialist countries, private tutoring has deep roots but was modest in scale until the early 1990s. Since that time, private tutoring has become a vast enterprise. The findings of the cross-national study reveal that private... more
In the former socialist countries, private tutoring has deep roots but was modest in scale until the early 1990s. Since that time, private tutoring has become a vast enterprise. The findings of the cross-national study reveal that private tutoring is widespread in all countries examined, with more than half of the student population receiving some type of private tutoring in the last year of secondary school.
Silova, I. & Eklof, B. (2013). Education in Eastern and Central Europe: Re-thinking post-socialism in the context of globalization. In R. F. Arnove & C. A. Torres (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectic between the global and the... more
Silova, I. & Eklof, B. (2013). Education in Eastern and Central Europe: Re-thinking post-socialism in the context of globalization. In R. F. Arnove & C. A. Torres (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectic between the global and the local (4th edition) (pp. 379-402). New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Foreign aid is frequently associated with generating dependency and implies an imposition of reforms by international donors (Moss et al. 2006; Dichter 2003; Brautigam 2000; Maren 1997). However, what if a country, such as Kazakhstan,... more
Foreign aid is frequently associated with generating dependency and implies an imposition of reforms by international donors (Moss et al. 2006; Dichter 2003; Brautigam 2000; Maren 1997). However, what if a country, such as Kazakhstan, does not depend on foreign aid, and yet engages in international cooperation? There are numerous countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Iran that are not aid dependent. Yet they seek international technical assistance to ensure that their reforms are in line with international
Among the nine former socialist countries examined in this study, private tutoring is a widespread but underrecognized phenomenon with social, economic, and educational implications. In some respects, private tutoring may be considered... more
Among the nine former socialist countries examined in this study, private tutoring is a widespread but underrecognized phenomenon with social, economic, and educational implications. In some respects, private tutoring may be considered beneficial. It is an avenue for private investment in human capital, provides incomes for underpaid educators, and can be a constructive out-of-school activity for under-supervised youth. However, private tutoring can also exacerbate social inequalities, distort curricula, and invite corruption.
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Since the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989, the international community has responded “with considerable fanfare and significant resources” to support post-socialist transformation processes in the countries of Southeast and Central... more
Since the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989, the international community has responded “with considerable fanfare and significant resources” to support post-socialist transformation processes in the countries of Southeast and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union (Quigley 1997, 2).
Turkmenistan stands out in this book—and possibly in global experience—as a country where education reform has notbeen merely hampered by the many objective challenges common to the postsocialist transformations in the region. Until 2007,... more
Turkmenistan stands out in this book—and possibly in global experience—as a country where education reform has notbeen merely hampered by the many objective challenges common to the postsocialist transformations in the region. Until 2007, it has been deliberately propelled backward toward illiteracy and isolation from the world for political ends.
Blog published in NORRAG, available online: https://www.norrag.org/covid-19-climate-and-culture-facing-the-crisis-of-neoliberal-individualism-by-iveta-silova-hikaru-komatsu-and-jeremy-rappleye/
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In the current context of accelerating climate change, current approaches to education represent not a solution but a key problem for environmental sustainability. How might we begin to rethink our starting assumptions?
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Continuation of discussion laid out in NORRAG blog (Fall 2018)
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This blog was written by Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye (Kyoto University Graduate School of Education), and Iveta Silova (Arizona State University Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education) in response to the recent blog by... more
This blog was written by Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye (Kyoto University Graduate School of Education), and Iveta Silova (Arizona State University Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education) in response to the recent blog by Edward Vickers about the role of education in climate change. It responds to Professor Vickers’ critique and expands on the discussion paper presented by Professors Komatsu and Rappleye at the ASU Symposium on Global Learning Metrics in November 2018.
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"The Earth does not need more ‘educated’ consumers of knowledge, but rather a radical rethinking of our approach to education." This blog is a response to the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released... more
"The Earth does not need more ‘educated’ consumers of knowledge, but rather a radical rethinking of our approach to education." This blog is a response to the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released on October 8, 2018. The report calls for unprecedented changes necessary to limit the impending climate change catastrophe; yet, it mentions education only in passing. Is education a solution or a problem to the current climate change challenges we face? Read this blog to find out more.
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The 2018 World Development Report (WDR) “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise” has been widely praised for placing education at the forefront of the international development agenda. But while signaling a global commitment to... more
The 2018 World Development Report (WDR) “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise” has been widely praised for placing education at the forefront of the international development agenda. But while signaling a global commitment to increasing education access and quality in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the 2018 WDR is also a reflection – and reminder – of what’s been historically wrong with the broader international development industry itself. Despite more than six decades of development efforts to eradicate global poverty and inequality through sustainable practices, the results are not promising: poverty is persisting, inequality is widening, and environment degradation is accelerating. Will education fair better in addressing these global challenges or is it just the latest panacea for the deeper structural problems of the international development industry?
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A short video about my recent research on the memories of socialist childhood (with Zsuzsa Millei and Nelli Piattoeva)!
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This talk is based on my upcoming publication, which examines the social construction of childhood in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet early literacy textbooks in Latvia.
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For more than six decades, scientists have warned us of the catastrophic effects of the escalating climate crisis on the planet and people. The United Nations (UN) member states have met annually since the mid-1990s at the UN Climate... more
For more than six decades, scientists have warned us of the catastrophic effects of the escalating climate crisis on the planet and people. The United Nations (UN) member states have met annually since the mid-1990s at the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings, setting goals and delivering metrics, making promises and offering hope, but failing to enforce policy action. The recent UN COP 26 in Glasgow fell short of keeping the goal of 1.5°C global heating alive as measured against its own objectives. Despite booming policy declarations and deafening science alarms, we have yet to see the radical change in the existing systems and institutions, lifestyles and behaviors, and mindsets and hearts. Perhaps by their very objectivity, the words and numbers distance us from the searing heat of a wildfire or the smell of fear and despair as animals and humans watch the floods wash away their homes and witness the fires burn their habitats. They also reduce the complexity of intertwined webs of life by fragmenting our common planetary home into isolated ‘problems’ to be managed and fixed without addressing a much larger challenge of dismantling unjust systems and reconfiguring our relationships with each other and the planet.Building on the scientific evidence and keeping in focus policy promises made over the decades, this report mobilizes the power of socially engaged art to bring together visions and voices of youth from across the globe in a collective effort to address the root causes of the climate crisis. It starts with the premise that education is directly implicated in the climate crisis and our failure to imagine alternatives. But it can also be the catalyst for radical change. Aiming to shift and shuffle the dominant knowledge systems and categories with the cards from the Turn It Around! deck, this report urges you to turn toward the reality of the climate crisis by capturing its devastating impacts from youth perspectives in a way statistical data might not. It challenges existing education policies, practices, and patterns as no longer possible, tolerable, or even thinkable. With the powerful imagination and creativity of youth, the report activates a series of turning points — intergenerational, decolonial, methodological, and pedagogical — in order to turn around the environmental catastrophe, while reconfiguring the role of education toward ecologically just and sustainable futures. Recognizing that most of the human-induced damages on earth are irreversible, we invite you to follow these turns in order to unlearn harmful patterns and begin relearning how to be a part of the Earth’s ecological community. The invitation to Turn it Around! is more than an urgent call to action — it is now the responsibility of every reader to re-imagine education and work out new ways of living with the Earth.
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This is a report on the cost of a very long internal war to children's education in Colombia
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Building on the scientific evidence and keeping in focus policy promises made over the decades, this report mobilizes the power of socially engaged art to bring together visions and voices of youth from across the globe in a collective... more
Building on the scientific evidence and keeping in focus policy promises made over the decades, this report mobilizes the power of socially engaged art to bring together visions and voices of youth from across the globe in a collective effort to address the root causes of the climate crisis. It starts with the premise that education is directly implicated in the climate crisis and our failure to imagine alternatives. But it can also be the catalyst for radical change. Aiming to shift and shuffle the dominant knowledge systems and categories with the cards from the Turn It Around! deck, this report urges you to turn toward the reality of the climate crisis by capturing its devastating impacts from youth perspective in a way statistical data might not. It challenges existing education policies, practices, and patterns as no longer possible, tolerable, or even thinkable. With the powerful imagination and creativity of youth, the report activates a series of turning points — intergenera...
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In the face of the multiple existential threats we have brought upon ourselves, this background paper calls for education to be reimagined and reconfigured around the future survival of the planet. To this end, we offer seven visionary... more
In the face of the multiple existential threats we have brought upon ourselves, this background paper calls for education to be reimagined and reconfigured around the future survival of the planet. To this end, we offer seven visionary declarations of what education could look like in 2050 and beyond. These declarations proceed from three premises. Firstly, human and planetary sustainability is one and the same thing. Secondly, any attempts to achieve sustainable futures that continue to separate humans off from the rest of the world are delusional and futile. And thirdly, education needs to play a pivotal role in radically reconfiguring our place and agency within this interdependent world. This requires a complete paradigm shift: from learning about the world in order to act upon it, to learning to become with the world around us. Our future survival depends on our capacity to make this shift.
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This report was produced during the Comparative and International Education (CIE) 405 graduate course: "Experiencing the United Nations: NGOs in Education Policy and Practice," taught by Professor Iveta Silova in cooperation with Bill... more
This report was produced during the Comparative and International Education (CIE) 405 graduate course: "Experiencing the United Nations: NGOs in Education Policy and Practice," taught by Professor Iveta Silova in cooperation with Bill Hunter and Michelle Vella at the College of Education, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. Students attended the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) NGO Consultation Day on February 21st and served as volunteer rapporteurs. Building on the Lehigh University/United Nations (LU/UN) partnership initiative, the course focused on a structured practical experience for students to learn about the dynamics of NGO/UN relationships in international education development. The course was organized around the 55th session of the CSW. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of CSW NGO Committee.
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This research investigates the changes in the status of the teaching profession during the EFA years (2000-present). Using a modified version of Quinn (1997) as the framework, the study has used the following... more
This research investigates the changes in the status of the teaching profession during the EFA years (2000-present). Using a modified version of Quinn (1997) as the framework, the study has used the following components to assess changes in the status of the teaching profession: credentials, induction, professional development, authority/self governance, and compensation. Teacher commitment is used as a proxy for educational quality. This study finds that the overall trend in the status of the teaching profession has improved at best and unchanged at worst. While induction and professional development displayed negative trends, credentials and authority both showed positive increases. Compensation (by contract type) and commitment were unchanged. These results are influenced by the positive trends in job satisfaction. Three case studies-Indonesia, Kenya, and Morocco-provide deeper context into the complicated nature of adjusting the status of the teaching profession and introduce a framework to help mitigate potential challenges for measuring the status of the teaching profession for future researchers.
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Van Doesum et al. (1) report a positive correlation between social mindfulness and national environmental performance represented by the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), that is, a higher EPI for countries with higher scores of... more
Van Doesum et al. (1) report a positive correlation between social mindfulness and national environmental performance represented by the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), that is, a higher EPI for countries with higher scores of social mindfulness (SoMi). This result comes at a crucial time, as it highlights the relationship between people’s mindset (culture) and environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, we have identified two issues with their analysis. The first issue is that Van Doesum et al. (1) fail to consider differences in GDP per capita among countries: The identified correlation between SoMi and EPI might be a statistical artifact. Indeed, we found positive correlations of GDP per capita with both SoMi and EPI for countries with GDP per capita less than $20,000. When using data for countries with GDP per capita greater than $20,000, the correlation between SoMi and EPI becomes weak (r = 0.199 with a 95% bootstrapping CI of [ 0.230, 0.569]; Fig. 1A). The correlation coefficient (r = 0.199) is much smaller than that for the relationship without considering the variations in GDP per capita among countries (r = 0.594). Our findings thus suggest that the relationship between SoMi and EPI reported by Van Doesum et al. may be a statistical artifact, and therefore we should use caution when considering the results. The second issue of Van Doesum et al.’s (1) analysis is that it uses an environmental index that prioritizes local environmental sustainability over global environmental sustainability (i.e., EPI). A country that performs well according to EPI could have detrimental impacts on global environmental sustainability (e.g., high CO2 emissions). The shift in perspectives is crucial as the world faces the climate crisis on a global scale. We thus replace EPI used by Van Doesum et al. with 1) EPI that was revised recently to emphasize global sustainability by including the magnitude of CO2 emissions as one component (2), 2) Ecological Footprint of Consumption (EF) that has been traditionally used to assess global sustainability (3), and 3) planetary
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Purpose:This article aims to reimagine education—and our selves—within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated.Design/Approach/Methods:The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative... more
Purpose:This article aims to reimagine education—and our selves—within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated.Design/Approach/Methods:The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative thought experiments to connect and bring into conversation seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time—European “paganism” and 13th-century Japanese Buddhism, as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. These thought experiments are conducted through a series of “and if” questions around education and schooling.Findings:The article proposes to radically reimagine education in two ways. First, it invites readers to reconfigure education as a “connective tissue” between different worlds, bringing together rather than hierarchizing them. Second, it proposes to reframe education as an opportunity to learn how to anticipate and animate our ongoing entanglement with more-than-human worlds.Originality/Value...
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Research Interests: Sociology, Environmental Philosophy, Education, Self and Identity, Development Studies, and 15 moreEnvironmental Education, Climate Change, Environmental Psychology, Environmental Studies, Sustainable Development, Cultural Psychology, Culture, Environmental Sustainability, Individualism, Education and Development, Climate Change Impacts, Ecological Footprint, Anthropocene, Comparative International Education, and Sustainability
Driven by a growing awareness of the need to better understand complex problems in the era of globalization, the shift towards a knowledgebased economy has resulted in a common interest to strengthen the value of research among... more
Driven by a growing awareness of the need to better understand complex problems in the era of globalization, the shift towards a knowledgebased economy has resulted in a common interest to strengthen the value of research among governments, research producing agencies, funders, and the broader public. Rising demands on limited resources and a general culture of accountability have produced, at least in much of the industrialized world, a political climate emphasizing the need for “evidence-based“ policy and practice in all public service sectors. The result has often been to integrate research into policy and practice across various disciplines and public service sectors, including education.
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The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an embodiment of a new social order. However, living socialism often meant something quite different compared to its official interpretations on... more
The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an embodiment of a new social order. However, living socialism often meant something quite different compared to its official interpretations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. We discuss the importance of exploring personal memories to gain a more complex understanding of childhood and the (post)socialist lived experience. Following the critique of the dominant narratives about childhood, we invite an epistemological, ontological, and methodological rethinking of assumptions about how we approach research. We highlight the diversity of the region’s histories, individual lived experiences, and the multiple ways of being a (post)socialist child. We close with an overview of the book and afterwords that connect the contributions to different disciplinary fields.
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This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolonizing knowledge production in and about (post)socialist societies. We develop three decolonial strategies to disrupt and complicate accounts... more
This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolonizing knowledge production in and about (post)socialist societies. We develop three decolonial strategies to disrupt and complicate accounts of childhood, schooling, and subjectivities framed by and embedded in the epistemologies of modernity, socialist ideologies, and post-socialist “Westernization” projects. First, we highlight how memories of children’s lived experiences—situated in local and personal histories—enable us to multiply cultural imaginaries about childhood. Second, we trace relationalities between seemingly disparate spaces and times of childhoods, disrupting the linearity and singularity of time/space. Finally, we discuss how coloniality of knowledge and being affects the various subjectivities we present about ourselves as children and researchers, and how memory research (re)shapes us in return.
Research Interests: Sociology, Political Sociology, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, Autoethnography, and 15 moreSocialisms, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Autobiography, History of Childhood and Youth, Memory Studies, History of Childhood, Memoir and Autobiography, Socialism, Culture in the Soviet Union, Critical sociology and politics of education, Decolonial Thought, Knowledge Production, Production economics, Childhood studies, and Decolonization
The international construction of a new political economic order in Cambodia has had contradictory effects on education. The rhetoric of democracy thrives alongside corruption and human rights abuses, the Education for All initiative... more
The international construction of a new political economic order in Cambodia has had contradictory effects on education. The rhetoric of democracy thrives alongside corruption and human rights abuses, the Education for All initiative exists alongside privatization of public education, and many international education development efforts perpetuate (post)colonial legacies. In this context, private tutoring has emerged as an essential part of the public education system. A mastery of the required curriculum is now possible only through a careful combination of public schooling and private tutoring. Only those who can afford private tutoring thus receive access to a complete national education and have greater opportunities to successfully graduate from public school. Drawing on a preliminary analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including 26 classroom observations, six focus groups with a total of 37 participants, grade tracking of 36 students, and informal interviews with 10...
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Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Childrens Geographies, Education, Sociology of Education, and 11 moreSociology of Children and Childhood, History of Childhood and Youth, European education, Memory Studies, Post-Socialist Societies, Political Socialization, Politics Of Education, Socialism, Post-Socialism, Childhood studies, and Politics of Education
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Silova, I. & Kazimzade, E. (2010). The changing status of the teaching profession in post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Implications for teacher education. In K. Karras & C. C. Wolhuter (Eds.), International handbook on teacher education worldwide... more
Silova, I. & Kazimzade, E. (2010). The changing status of the teaching profession in post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Implications for teacher education. In K. Karras & C. C. Wolhuter (Eds.), International handbook on teacher education worldwide (pp. 55-72). Athens, Greece: Atrapos Editions.
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Bridging political geography, childhood studies, and comparative education, this article examines how the early literacy textbooks of post-Soviet Armenia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine attempt to engender a national... more
Bridging political geography, childhood studies, and comparative education, this article examines how the early literacy textbooks of post-Soviet Armenia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine attempt to engender a national ‘sociospatial consciousness' in the minds of their young readers. The concept of ‘pedagogies of space’ offers a theoretical lens through which the authors examine how politics and culture shape representations of the spatial, embedding childhood within particular national landscapes and inscribing these spaces within the mythology of the homeland. Textbook analysis reveals that post-Soviet childhood(s) appear to be constructed within specific contexts and therefore ‘rooted’ in particular memories and myths, always irrevocably linked to particular (national) geographies. Not only does this ‘rootedness' attempt to delimit how children think of themselves, but it also shapes the contours of how ‘childhood’ is, and can be, imagined in these contexts.
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Opening chapter in Fan & Popkewitz's new series Handbook of Education Policy Studies (full volume available here: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-981-13-8347-2.pdf). The chapter outlines a new roadmap for studies in... more
Opening chapter in Fan & Popkewitz's new series Handbook of Education Policy Studies (full volume available here: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-981-13-8347-2.pdf). The chapter outlines a new roadmap for studies in educational policy transfer, utilizing the work of Mignolo's (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity. It aims to elucidate a path leading to decolonial and spiritual/ontological options, rooted in a rethinking of Kantian subjectivity and sympoetic encounters.
Research Interests: Education, Values Education, Educational Development, Education (Social Policy), Comparative & International Education, and 7 moreGlobalization And Higher Education, Comparative Education, Globalization and education, Comparative and International Development Education, Global education, Decolonial Thought, and Educational Policy Studies
Full Book Available (Open Access): https://brill.com/view/title/57471 This chapter underscores the pressing need to reflect deeply on the consequences of the current education paradigm, one rooted in the ‘modernist Western paradigm’ for... more
Full Book Available (Open Access): https://brill.com/view/title/57471
This chapter underscores the pressing need to reflect deeply on the consequences of the current education paradigm, one rooted in the ‘modernist Western paradigm’ for climate change (Sterling et al., 2018). Our purpose is to initiate a different sort of conversation than the one that currently surrounds SDG 4: one that helps researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike imagine something beyond the current education paradigm and gives the next generation a chance to shift
off our current trajectory of environmental catastrophe.
This chapter underscores the pressing need to reflect deeply on the consequences of the current education paradigm, one rooted in the ‘modernist Western paradigm’ for climate change (Sterling et al., 2018). Our purpose is to initiate a different sort of conversation than the one that currently surrounds SDG 4: one that helps researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike imagine something beyond the current education paradigm and gives the next generation a chance to shift
off our current trajectory of environmental catastrophe.
Research Interests: Environmental Education, Climate Change, Educational Development, Sustainability in Higher Education, Millenium Development Goals, and 12 moreComparative & International Education, Unesco, World Bank, Environmental Sustainability, Comparative Education, Comparative and International Development Education, Anthropocene, Education for Sustainable Development, OECD Education Policy, Culture and the Anthropocene, Sustainability, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Did you grow up during the Cold War, on either side of the Berlin Wall? Would you be willing to share your childhood memories? If so, we would like to invite you to participate in a memory workshop to share and analyze memory stories... more
Did you grow up during the Cold War, on either side of the Berlin Wall? Would you be willing to share your childhood memories? If so, we would like to invite you to participate in a memory workshop to share and analyze memory stories about your own childhood experiences around the theme ‘crossing divides’. Download the document to read the details!!!!
Research Interests: Sociology of Children and Childhood, Cold War, Autoethnography, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Autobiography, and 10 moreHistory of Childhood and Youth, Memory Studies, Cultural Memory, History of Childhood, Post-Socialist Societies, Socialism, Post-Socialism, Childhood studies, Childhood, and Collective Biography
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A commentary on the special issue of ECNU Review of Education "Rethinking Large-Scale Assessments and the Purpose of Education" edited by Yong Zhao, Zhenguo Yuan and Yurou Wang
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New York: Palgrave Mac-Millan, 2018. 304 pp. $109.00 (eBook). ISBN 978-1-137-50875-1. The study of educational transfer has a long history in comparative education research , yet it remains one of the most contested research topics. It... more
New York: Palgrave Mac-Millan, 2018. 304 pp. $109.00 (eBook). ISBN 978-1-137-50875-1.
The study of educational transfer has a long history in comparative education research , yet it remains one of the most contested research topics. It reveals theoretical and methodological tensions over how to approach the study of educational transfer, how to position ourselves in this process, and how to interpret the impact of traveling policies and practices on education quality and equity in the context of globalization. While some scholars have pursued the study of educational transfer in hopes of identifying best practices and international standards that could be useful for improving education elsewhere, others have focused on critically analyzing-rather than recommending the phenomenon of educational transfer. Brent Edwards's The Trajectory of Global Education Policy belongs to the latter group of scholars who attempt to trace the complex trajectories of educational transfer and critically examine a variety of issues related to the historical, political, and economic dimensions of the educational transfer process. What makes this book stand out from other studies is an important (and unexpected) shift in focus. Rather than looking at the one-way transfer of education policies from the global to the local, Edwards reverses the long-established direction of policy transfer research and instead examines the ways in which the local and national education policies and practices constitute and affect the global. The book traces the origins and the trajectory of the EDUCO program, known in Spanish as Educación con Participación de la Comunidad or, in English, as Education with Community Participation. (read more in the attachment)
The study of educational transfer has a long history in comparative education research , yet it remains one of the most contested research topics. It reveals theoretical and methodological tensions over how to approach the study of educational transfer, how to position ourselves in this process, and how to interpret the impact of traveling policies and practices on education quality and equity in the context of globalization. While some scholars have pursued the study of educational transfer in hopes of identifying best practices and international standards that could be useful for improving education elsewhere, others have focused on critically analyzing-rather than recommending the phenomenon of educational transfer. Brent Edwards's The Trajectory of Global Education Policy belongs to the latter group of scholars who attempt to trace the complex trajectories of educational transfer and critically examine a variety of issues related to the historical, political, and economic dimensions of the educational transfer process. What makes this book stand out from other studies is an important (and unexpected) shift in focus. Rather than looking at the one-way transfer of education policies from the global to the local, Edwards reverses the long-established direction of policy transfer research and instead examines the ways in which the local and national education policies and practices constitute and affect the global. The book traces the origins and the trajectory of the EDUCO program, known in Spanish as Educación con Participación de la Comunidad or, in English, as Education with Community Participation. (read more in the attachment)
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As a brilliant science historian, active ecofeminist, curious multispecies theorist, and passionate storyteller, Donna Haraway has always been interested in exploring ways of relating to "the Other." While her earlier research focused on... more
As a brilliant science historian, active ecofeminist, curious multispecies theorist, and passionate storyteller, Donna Haraway has always been interested in exploring ways of relating to "the Other." While her earlier research focused on the possibilities of crossing boundaries between humans and machines (see "Cyborg Manifesto" [1985]) as well as humans and animals (see "Companion Species Manifesto" [2003]), Haraway's most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, urges us to address issues related to the catastrophic environmental crisis, suggesting that the survival of humans and the Earth depends on our ability to engage with each other in a multitude of multispecies assemblages. She argues, "we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become with each other or not at all" (Staying with the Trouble, 4). A recently released documentary, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, produced by Fabrizio Terranova, captures Haraway's lifelong work-and her larger than life personality-inviting the audience to imagine new ways of surviving on a damaged Earth. Like an octopus, Haraway pulls you gently into the spiraling depths of her thinking, and before you know it, you find yourself thinking with and "becoming-with" Haraway and all other critters-human and nonhuman-around you. While the film has been screened across the world since 2016, it reached our doctoral seminar at Arizona State University in the fall of 2018. Aiming to explore the changing role of education in the age of the Anthropocene, we discussed perspec-tival shifts necessary to radically challenge the ideas of human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism to survive on a damaged Earth. The life of all species is, with certainty, at stake in this uncertain time. So how can education contribute to rethinking what it means to be human and resituating the human within the rela-tional flow of life on Earth where everyone and everything-both human and non-human-are always already interconnected? "Beings do not preexist their relatings" (98), 2 and our semester-long encounter with her work created a unique experience of an emergent being-in-relation, a deep entanglement with Haraway and with each other in the context of the impending climate change catastrophe. We found that writing this movie review itself became an embodiment of a unique "becoming-with" experience, enabling us to pick up each other's ideas, play with meanings, and weave For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.