Research seminar series on Comparative Education and International Development
This series is aimed at PGT/PGR students and staff members interested in research in the field of Comparative Education and International Development.
We expect to create a space for academic exchange and reflection around the challenges and “messiness” of conducting this type of research in different institutional contexts and world locations.
In each session an invited speaker will deliver a presentation for a maximum of 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A.
This seminar series is organized by the GLOBED and ICE Master programmes and supported by the ICE Research Network and the ELP-RTG of the School of Education.
All seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 12pm-1pm in St Andrews Building. Full details and registration links can be found below.
11th January 2023: How can we strengthen approaches to identify, refer and care for specific needs of children with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa?
Wednesday 11th January
12pm-1pm
Room 432 (St Andrews Building)
Dr Paul Lynch: How can we strengthen multi-sector and incremental approaches to identify, refer and care for specific needs of children with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa?
In this presentation Dr. Paul Lynch will draw on multi-country research in Africa to explore the barriers and facilitators that exist in identifying young children with disabilities to appropriate multi-sectoral provision through inclusive educational, health and rehabilitation care services. He will share findings on the experiences, perceived pathways, barriers and facilitators to identify children by different professionals who work in schools, communities and hospitals AND by parents of children with developmental disabilities in the early years.
The presentation will put forward incremental low-cost approaches to addressing weak referral paths, following up on children’s progress, supporting families, community health workers, as well as higher levels of medical services, are likely to work best in resource constrained settings.
Paul Lynch joined the Culture, Literacies, Inclusion and Pedagogy research and teaching group at the School of Education in October 2020. He was previously a member of the Department of Disability, Inclusion and Special Needs at University of Birmingham. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Vision Impairment Centre for Teaching and Research (VICTAR) at the University of Birmingham.
Before becoming a lecturer, Paul conducted commissioned research for Sightsavers into the educational and social inclusion of children with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa (2006 – 2019). He has conducted different types of, mixed-method, qualitative, and ethnographic research into the lives of children with vision impairment and has developed an increasingly strong interest in the cultures, beliefs and histories of children and young people with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa (including children with albinism). He also has a keen interest in participatory action research approaches to understanding early childhood development, education and disability in the Global South (principally sub-Saharan countries).
More recently, he has been leading research into early childhood education and disability in Malawi. Paul is currently running a two year GCRF British Academy funded project into early childhood education and disability in Malawi (2019-2021).
He has carried out a series of consultancies for the Department for International Development (DFID) in Ghana specifically aimed at working closely with the Ministry of Education and Science to develop an ICT and SEN policy as well as an Inclusive Education strategy.
Paul is a full member of the Disability and Society Editorial Board and on the British Journal of Visual Impairment. He is also an editor for the International Journal of Educational Development.
25th January 2023: An organized anarchy? Understanding the role of German cooperation in the construction and export of the dual training model
Wednesday 25th January
12pm-1pm
Room 432 (St Andrews Building)
Dr Clara Fontdevila: An organized anarchy? Understanding the role of German cooperation in the construction and export of the dual training model
The role of German cooperation as a key force behind the worldwide dissemination of dual training is well-established within the specialized literature. The multilayered and fragmented nature of the German cooperation landscape suggests that German efforts in this area follow a complex and evolving interplay of motivations—yet the rationales behind Germany's bilateral work in the area of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) have rarely been examined in a systematic way. Additionally, existing approaches to the question of aid motivations as provided by economics and international relations scholarship appear to be ill-suited to understanding the rationales behind Germany's TVET cooperation efforts. Drawing on a combination of document analysis and interviews with key stakeholders, this paper investigates the heterogeneity of drivers and motivations behind German cooperation efforts in the promotion and export of the dual training model and examines the coordination challenges posed by this diversity. The paper finds that German efforts in the international promotion of dual training are driven by at least three analytically distinct rationales that correspond roughly to three differentiated poles within the German policy space—namely, the economic, development and education arenas. The paper also finds that this diversity of motivations poses important coordination challenges—and that, while recent coordination efforts have succeeded in securing some degree of rhetorical consistency, only limited progress has been made in terms of operational coherence.
Dr Clara Fontdevila holds a PhD in Sociology from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She has participated in different competitive research projects, including REFORMED and Dual Apprenticeship. She has also collaborated with various educational and research organisations, including UNESCO, Education International, Fundació Jaume Bofill and the Open Societies Foundation. Her areas of interest are the political economy of education reform education and the global governance of education.
CANCELLED - 1st February 2023: A new approach to gender, education, and development? A critical analysis of Teach for All’s Girls’ Education Initiative
Please note this seminar has been cancelled.
Dr Matthew Thomas: A new approach to gender, education, and development? A critical analysis of Teach for All’s Girls’ Education Initiative
Improving educational access and quality for girls has been an ongoing goal of governments, multilateral agencies, NGOs, and other organisations for decades. As new types of development actors have emerged, however, so too have questions about their approaches to girls’ education, gender, and development. This study examines how girls’ education and gender equality are constructed by one prominent (and increasingly powerful) actor, Teach for All (TFAll), which supports national affiliate programs across 60+ countries to recruit (primarily) elite graduates into teaching. In 2014, TFAll launched its Girls’ Education Initiative, intended to ‘identify and address the barriers that keep girls from learning and fulfilling their potential’ (TFAll, 2021; see also TFAll, 2014), though it has received scant scholarly attention to date. The paper therefore extends research about TFAll as a prominent organisation involved in the global governance of education as well as draws theoretically on Unterhalter’s (2017) dispersal framework. The dispersal framework highlights how gender equality in policies and programs ‘blinks on and off’ – sometimes appearing as an objective or having importance in girls’ education and sometimes not appearing at all. We first conducted an historical analysis of the emergence and evolution of TFAll’s interest in gender and girls’ education, utilising in-depth online searches and digital archival research. We then engaged in a comprehensive mapping exercise to examine the corpus of online GEI materials (n=161), which included individual webpages and news stories from TFAll as well as a range of supplemental resources produced by external organisations. Third and finally, a subset of these texts/online resources associated with GEI, TFAll, and its founders were analysed through critical discourse analysis to attain a more nuanced understanding of the internal organisational logic of GEI. The study suggests TFAll has adopted common, though contested, neoliberal discourses associated with the power of girls’ education to solve wider development problems, where gender equality itself rarely features as a key goal. These and other data suggest that TFAll — a relatively recent development actor with newfound interests in gender — has in many ways relied on an approach to girls’ education that ‘blinks on and off. In sum, this study explores how an education public-private-partnership with global influence largely adopted discourses around girls’ education and gender equality that lack nuance and engagement with more robust research.
Matthew A.M. Thomas is Lecturer in International and Comparative Education at the University of Glasgow, where he leads the MSc and convenes the research group in International and Comparative Education. His research examines educational policies, pedagogical practices, and teacher and higher education. Most recently, Matthew is the co-editor of Examining Teach For All (Routledge, 2021), the Handbook of Theory in Comparative and International Education (Bloomsbury, 2021), and Australian Universities (Sydney University Press, 2022).
8th February 2023: Disaster Didacticism: pedagogical interventions and the ‘learning crisis’
Wednesday 8th February
12pm-1pm
Room 432 (St Andrews Building)
Professor Michele Schweisfurth: Disaster Didacticism: pedagogical interventions and the ‘learning crisis’
The presentation is based on a recent essay article (Schweisfurth 2023). It offers a critical perspective on the prevailing language of ‘learning crisis’ and on the solutions widely promoted by international organisations active in lower- and middle-income countries. Focusing specifically on pedagogical interventions, it outlines three cases: foundational learning; information technology; and systematic observation of teachers’ classroom practice. It then offers critiques of the interventions, based on five questions concerning: unintended consequences of the discourse of disaster; the understandings of pedagogy that underpin the interventions; alternative evidence that has not been considered in the prescriptions; the risks of focusing on foundational subjects to address ‘learning loss’; and actor legitimacy. The presentation will conclude with reflections on the purpose and methodology behind the research and writing.
Schweisfurth, Michele (2023) Disaster didacticism: Pedagogical interventions and the ‘learning crisis’. International Journal of Educational Development, Vol 96.
About Michele Schweisfurth: I joined the School as Professor of Comparative and International Education in January 2013 from the University of Birmingham. Originally from Canada, I have a wide range of international experience as a researcher, teacher, and advisor. I am a comparative educationist interested in the tensions between global frameworks (such as children’s rights, and notions of ‘best practice’ in teaching and learning) and local and cultural imperatives.
CANCELLED - 22nd February 2023: Language skills and labour market outcomes in a multilingual country: Human capital or network economies?
Please note this seminar has been cancelled.
Professor Kristinn Hermannsson: Language skills and labour market outcomes in a multilingual country: Human capital or network economies?
This paper examines the impact of language competence on labour market outcomes in Ghana, a country where about 80 languages are in use. Our paper addresses three objectives: 1) to determine whether competence in majority languages convey additional labour market benefits due to network economies that arise in contexts of high linguistic fragmentation; 2) examining returns to multilingual competencies and the extent to which these are consistent with notions of linguistic network economies or human capital explanations; and 3) examine how observed estimates may be sensitive to sorting into labour market participation by different linguistic groups. Using data from the World Bank’s STEP skills survey, we fit cross-sectional “Mincerian” wage equations augmented with language skills and also explicitly model sorting into employment using a Heckman 2-stage regression, in order to correct for selection bias.
Kristinn Hermannsson joined the School of Education in October 2013. From the Westfjords of Iceland, he is a graduate of Reykjavik University (BSc), Maastricht University (MSc) and the University of Strathclyde (MSc with distinction, PhD). Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, he was a Research Associate with the Fraser of Allander Institute in the Department of Economics at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to joining academia Kristinn was a policy analyst with the Icelandic National Audit Office. My ongoing research examines inequality in access to education and inequality in labour market outcomes, in particular social-origin pay gaps. I'm also working on analysing spatial inequality in the development of tertiary education and the role of diverse skills in refugee migration and integration.
CANCELLED - 1st March 2023: Gender, Subject Choice and the Student Experience in Higher Education: looking at India, Rwanda and the UK
Please note this seminar has been cancelled.
Dr Barbara Read: Gender, Subject Choice and the Student Experience in Higher Education: looking at India, Rwanda and the UK
About Barbara Read: I am a sociologist of education, with an interdisciplinary background in history, social anthropology, and women's studies. Currently Reader in Gender and Social Inequalities at the School of Education, University of Glasgow, I was previously Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education, Roehampton University (2007-12) and Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University (2001-2007). I am currently PI for an ESRC-funded project entitled Gendered Journeys: The Trajectories of STEM students through Higher Education and Into Employment, in India and Rwanda. This project is due to end in December 2023.
8th March 2023: Conflict, Migration and Education
Wednesday 8th March
12pm-1pm
Room 432 (St Andrews Building)
Dr Marta Moskal: Conflict, Migration and Education
Today’s education in emergencies emphasises protecting the right to education in crisis situations, while conflict is theoralised as interruption to education. In this talk Dr Marta Moskal will provide an overview of current geopolitical situation (globally drawing on selected local case studies) and recent research to explain the development of the field of education in conflict and emergencies. The presentation and follow up discussion will focus on the questions: In which ways conflict and migration can be understood as challenge faced by education systems locally, nationally and internationally? And how to realise the right to education for all in the conflict and emergencies contexts?
Marta Moskal is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) of Sociology of Education and Migration. She joined the School of Education at Glasgow from Durham University (2017-20). She trained at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and at the University of Montpellier in geography, sociology and public policy and received a PhD from Jagiellonian in 2004. She then was Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University, Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh (2006-07) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Centre for Educational Sociology at Edinburgh (2008-11), and Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow (2012-16).
Her research addresses the need for equitable opportunities for ethnic minorities and migrants important for institutions and states. Her work demonstrates social and cultural diversity matters for optimal education and career outcomes of a society. And how this knowledge can be translated into fair and inclusive policies and practices for migrant students, workers, refugees and families to help them realise their best contribution, including the large influx of students to Higher Education in the UK.
CANCELLED - 22nd March 2023: The application of 'home international comparisons' in a new ESRC project on the UK's statistical evidence base in adult education
Please note this seminar has been cancelled.
Professor Ellen Boeren: The application of 'home international comparisons' in a new ESRC project on the UK's statistical evidence base in adult education
This presentation will delve deeper into the structural arrangements of education policy making in the UK, highlighting the role of devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In international research, the UK is often labelled as a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon group while variation exist between its different countries. The focus of the presentation will be on the use of the UK's setting as a 'laboratory' for policy learning as part of a new ESRC project. This new study will analyse the use of the evidence-base on adult learning and education by the different governments. During this session, the audience will get the opportunity to learn more about the application of 'home international comparisons' and discuss its strenghts as well as weaknesses for use in education research.
Ellen Boeren is Professor in Education at the University of Glasgow since July 2019. She obtained her PhD in Educational Sciences in 2011 from KULeuven in Belgium and worked for more than 7 years at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Boeren won the Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Adult Education literature for her monographh 'Lifelong Learning Participation in a Changing Policy Context: an Interdisciplinarity Theory'. Between 2019 and 2022, she was an editor for Adult Education Quarterly. She received funding for her work from the European Commission, the OECD and UNESCO and is about to start a new ESRC Standard Grant project.
29th March 2023: Decolonising Lifelong Learning
Wednesday 29th March
12pm-1pm
Room 432 (St Andrews Building)
Professor Srabani Maitra: Decolonising Lifelong Learning
In the age of transnational migration, the practices and policies of lifelong learning in many immigrant-receiving countries continue to be impacted by the cultural and discursive politics of colonial legacies. Drawing on a wide range of anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship, this presentation argues for an approach to lifelong learning that aims to decolonise the ideological underpinnings of colonial relations of rule, especially in terms of its racialised privileging of ‘whiteness’ and Eurocentrism.
About Srabani Maitra: I am a Professor in Sociology of Adult and Vocational Education at the School of Education, in the University of Glasgow. I have a PhD in Adult Education and Community Development from OISE at the University of Toronto and a Masters degree in Women’s Studies from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. Before arriving in Glasgow, I was an Eyes High Post-doctoral scholar at the Werklund School of Education in the University of Calgary, Canada. I completed my undergraduate and post graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
Currently, I am one of the Leads for College of Social Sciences (UofG) Interdisciplinary Research Theme 'Addressing Inequalities' and Acting Deputy Head of the School of Education. Within the School of Education, I also lead the Research and Teaching Group on ‘Culture, Literacies, Inclusion and Pedagogy (CLIP) and is also the School’s Champion for South Asia. In this capacity I am a member of University’s Regional Working Group for South and Central Asia and has been leading work on establishing virtual hub for Gender and STEM education with some of the esteemed Universities in India. Since 2018, I am one of the convenors for the highly prestigious European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) network: Migration, Transnationalism, Racisms.
My research combines interdisciplinary theories and methodologies from sociology and education to focus on the issues of adult and vocational education, workplace skill training, transnational migration, race/racism and decolonisation.