FreshEd

How does change happen? What role do unions play in creating decent quality lives for its members? When is more militant action needed? These questions are asked by all unions. So, in our quest to explore education unions in more depth, I want to explore how transport unions begin to answer these questions. In many ways, the struggles facing teacher unions worldwide are similar to those facing the...

In the second installment of our focus on the big issues facing education unions, we focus on union renewal. My guest today is Howard Stevenson, Professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Nottingham. He has researched teacher trade unions around the world to try and understand the best way to revive the power of unions. In our conversation, he talks about his findi...

Education International is the global federation of teacher unions, representing some 32 million teachers worldwide. Every four years EI, as it is commonly known, holds a World Congress to determine its policies, principles, programs, and budget for the future. It is also where the President, Vice Presidents and General Secretary are elected to new terms. The World Congress this year was composed...

How did School Based Management become an approach to educational governance found across the world? Where did it come from and what institutions advanced the idea globally? Today I speak with Brent Edwards, an Associate Professor of Theory and Methodology in the Study of Education at the University of Hawaii. He has spent over a decade researching the phenomenon of School Based Management. In his...

Many universities around the world are focused on their efforts to internationalize. But what does that even mean? And what does that look in a single country, such as like Japan? My guests today are Tom Brotherhood and Chris Hammond. Together with Yangson Kim, they have co-written a new article in the journal Higher Education that explores junior international faculty in Japanese Universities. Th...

Teach for America has altered the landscape of teacher preparation across the country. Typically TFA recruits, as they are commonly known, are given provisional certifications and put into classrooms after taking a short training course. They then take university courses to learn to be a teacher. Learning to be a teacher while already being one poses unique challenges. My guest today is Matthew Th...

What was it like growing up and attending school in the Soviet Union and other socialist societies? Did the lived experiences of children match the official rhetoric of the state or the Western bloc? What agency did children have? My guests today are Iveta Silova and Nelli Piattoeva. Together with Zsuzsa Millei, they have a new co-edited book that explores the memories of everyday life in socialis...

Teachers are striking across America. From Arizona to Oklahoma to West Virginia, teachers are not simply demanding higher pay. They are also demanding better learning conditions for students and better working conditions for all state employees. And they are succeeding. Many of these industrial workplace actions are taking place in states that have passed right-to-work laws, meaning workers cannot...

Today we have a slightly different type of show for you. One of FreshEd’s producers, Lushik Wahba, created an amazing podcast about the experiences of international students at one small college in the USA. Over 1 million international students currently study at colleges and universities across America. Why did they choose to study in the USA? What can we learn from their experiences? Lushik’s po...

Religion in American public schools is a hot-button issue. Can prayers be said in public schools? What about in extracurricular activities? Can states provide funds to religious schools? And if parents don’t vaccinate their children for religious reasons but send them to public schools, what can the State do? These questions don’t have easy answers and the US constitution offers little help. The E...

Some thirty-five percent of out-of-school children live in conflict-affected areas. These emergency situations include both human conflicts, such as, war and natural disasters, such as earthquakes. These children are in desperate need of help. Yet before anyone can act, information is critical. Information and data on education in emergencies is, however, inadequate in most cases. My guest today i...

Today Raewyn Connell returns to FreshEd to talk about her new book, The Good University. In it, Raewyn takes a deep dive into the labor that makes a university possible while also detailing the main troubles the institution currently faces. She argues that a good university must work for the social good rather than for profit. It must embrace its democratic roots and protect the process of being t...

Are there limits to what can be said on college campuses? When a far-right-wing speaker is disinvited to speak on campus, is it an issue of Free Speech? My guest today, Neal Hutchens, explores these issues in his research and writing. Ultimately, his look at the legal issues facing universities when it comes to free speech and academic freedom go to the heart of the purpose of higher education. Wh...

The World Bank hasn’t always made loans to education. Post-World War II, the Bank focused mainly on infrastructure. Even when it did start lending to education in the 1960s, it used the idea of manpower planning, the process of estimating the number of people with specific skills required for completing a project. Only in the 1970s did the World Bank begin to think of education in terms of rates o...

Climate change and its effects aren’t some future possibilities waiting to happen unless we take action today. No. The effect of climate change is already occurring. Today. Right now. Around the world, people have been displaced, fell ill, or died because of the globe’s changing climate. These effects are uneven: Some countries and classes of people are more affected by global warming than others....

Laws that mandate education for special needs students have not always existed. In the United States, courts only began referring to students with special needs in the early 1900s. At the time, such students were typically excluded from public school. Things began to change after the Brown v. Board of Education supreme country ruling in 1954. Twenty years later in the 1970s, congress enacted vario...

Today we talk about the history and recent rise of Islamophobia worldwide. My guest is Mariam Durrani, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamilton College. In our conversation, we discusses both the state policy infrastructure enabling Islamophobia while also the everyday discourses and actions that normalize the Othering of a particular group. Dr. Durrani also discusses her own life story...

Today we continue our Education and Law mini-series with a show on the legal and policy issues surrounding special education. My guest is Janet Decker, an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at Indiana University. Dr. Decker became interested in special education policy when she taught students with autism. In our conversation, Dr. Decker talks about the...

Today we air the first ever FreshEd Live event, which was recorded last night in San Francisco. Gita Steiner-Khamsi joined me to discuss the ways in which the global education industry has altered the State and notions of free public education. We touched on a range of topics, from Bridge International to the International Baccalaureate and from network governance to system theory. Gita theorized...

Today we kick off a mini-series on education and law. Intermittently, overly the next 8 months or so, we’ll be airing a collection of conversations with scholars affiliated with the Education Law Association. These shows will touch on timely legal and policy issues affecting education. For our first show in the education and law mini-series, I speak with Julie Mead about her new co-written report...

Today we look at US imperialism in Venezuela. For the past 20 years, since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998 in what is known as the Bolivarian revolution, the US has attempted to overthrow a democratically elected government. The US has wanted to install a leader who supported its political and business interests. In January, the US tried again, thus time putting its full support behind Juan Guaido...

The UK is set to leave the EU on March 29, 2019. Will there be a delay? A hard exit? A people’s vote? With four days before the deadline, it is too unpredictable to tell with any certainty. In an effort to reflect on the Brexit process, today we re-air Will’s conversation with Susan Robertson about Brexit, which took place mere days after the vote on June 23, 2016. As we await the conclusion of th...

Today we dive into the nightmare that is the growing tide of fascism worldwide and the prospects and perils this nightmare holds for public education. My guest today is the renowned scholar, Henry Giroux. He has a new book entitled American Nightmare: Facing the challenge of Fascism, which will be published in May. Henry Giroux is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Int...

Last week, the Trump administration invited university, higher education association, and private company officials to the White House to discuss international students and post-college work. At the time of this recording, we aren’t sure what exactly was said or decided. But in an effort to provide some background on international student experiences in American Higher Education, Jenny Lee is with...

The University of Sussex was ranked the world’s best for development studies in the 2019 QS World University Rankings by subject. To celebrate, we re-air Mario Novelli's 2016 FreshEd interview. In that interview, Mario talked about the role of schools in the production of inequality. Mario not only details how modernity, capitalism, and colonialism combine to create systems of inequality inside sc...