FreshEd

Today we explore the schooling received by children affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policy of family separation. My guest is Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at California State University Sacramento. Julian writes a blog entitled “Cloaking Inequity”. In a recent post, he reported on a Texas-based detention center forcing children t...

What’s the relationship between test scores and gross domestic product? Do higher test scores lead to higher GDP? This question may seem a bit strange because most people think about the value of education on a much smaller, less abstract scale, usually in terms of “my children” or “my education.” Will my children earn a higher wage in the future if they do well on school examinations today? If I...

Rwanda is perhaps most well-known for the genocide it experienced in the 1990s. In its post-conflict development, the country has had to balance colonial legacies, state centralizing tendencies, and the zeitgeist of neoliberalism. This has made for a careful balancing — one that has left the government regulating the society and economy while simultaneously reducing its responsibility to citizens....

What are Americans’ views of higher education? The common story is that people see higher education as an investment in the future of an individual. More education from the best university will result in high salaries in the future. In this story, the public doesn’t appear. It’s all about the private good of higher education. But what if this story is wrong? Or at least biased by the very question...

Competition within and across universities is so common that it may not seem like a big deal. Professors compete for tenure. Students compete to get into a best universities. And universities compete for rankings. But what where does this competition come from and what effects is it having on higher education systems? My guest today is Rajani Naidoo, professor in higher education management at the...

Today we remember the late Geoff Whitty by replaying his 2017 interview. Last year Geoff and his colleague, John Furlong, co-edited a volume entitled Knowledge and the Study of Education: an international exploration. The volume explores these questions: How is education studied around the world? Are there different knowledge traditions to the study of education? Have there been changes over time?...

Today’s topic is space in educational research. My guest is Marianne Larsen, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario. Dr. Larsen’s recent research focuses on the overall processes and effects of the internationalization of higher education. She has been researching how internationalization policies are taken up ‘on-the-ground’, as well as the role of highe...

The FreshEd team is going on summer holidays. We’ll be back in a few weeks with new episodes. In the meantime, we’ll air some old episodes for you to enjoy. Today, Keita Takayama provides a critical reading of the so-called “PISA debate.” This debate started in May 2014 when a group of scholars published an open letter in the Guardian newspaper to Andreas Schleicher, the head of OECD’s education a...

Humans have been the center of Western philosophy and science for centuries, at least since the European enlightenment. With the rise of artificial intelligence, climate change and challenges to the very idea of subjectivity, are we moving into an era that is perhaps better labeled post-human? But what would posthumanism mean for education? My guest today is Stefan Herbrechter. A research fellow a...

Does social science as it is commonly understood and practiced work in post-socialist settings? That may sound like an absurd question, even a bit crude. My guests today, Alla Korzh and Noah Sobe, see limits to the very social imaginaries underpinning social science. They argue that the diversity of post-socialist transformations challenges the existing paradigms and frameworks of theory and metho...

The images and stories of migrant families being separated by the United States government set off a global conversation about immigration, borders, and justice. If the political philosophy of liberalism is based on liberty and equality, then the events of the past few months have challenged the very core of liberal democratic states. My guest today is Bruce Collet. He researches migration and pub...

Today we take a critical look at human rights. My guest is Radha D’Souza. Radha has a new book entitled: What’s wrong with rights? Social movements, Law, and Liberal Imaginations. In our conversation we discuss why there has been a proliferation of human rights since the end of World War II and how these rights have actually furthered the interests of the transnational capitalist class. Radha also...

Today we look at conditional cash transfers as a global phenomenon of educational development. My guest is Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva. Michelle has written a new book called Poverty Reduction, Education, and the Global Diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan. She finds that different political ideologies have been used to justify conditional cash trans...

On June 30th, Sweden will officially cancel its agreement with Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in the world. No longer will new journal articles or books published by Elsevier be available in any Swedish university or library. Why is this happening? What’s behind the disagreement between Elsevier and Sweden?   Today Wilhelm Widmark, the Library Director at Stockholm University, jo...

Today we continue our exploration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and what it means for education. Last week, we looked at comparative education as a field. Today we look at teachers. What are the prospects and perils of the fourth industrial revolution for teachers? My guest today is Jelmer Evers. Jelmer is a teacher, blogger, writer, and innovator. He teaches history at UniC in the Netherlan...

We’ve all heard the terms “Big Data,” Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. They are supposedly at the heart of a Fourth Industrial Revolution that, because of technology, is altering the way in which we live, work, and relate to one another. But how is this so-called era of datafication transforming what we mean by both “comparative” and “education”? Earlier this month, the Post Foundati...

Private interests are increasingly becoming commonplace inside education. In today’s economic globalization, the attainment of knowledge is seen as the key difference between economies that succeed and economies that stagnate or fail. Perhaps more precisely, it is knowledge that determines if an individual — not a national economy—succeeds or fails. We call this the “knowledge economy” and it is o...

Today: Case Studies. My guests, Fran Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett. They have a new co-written book entitled Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach, which will be published by Routledge later this year. Fran and Lesley contend that the recent conceptual shifts in the social sciences, some of which have been discussed by previous guests on this show, demand that case studies re-configu...

Today we look at the lessons that can be learned from radical histories. My guests are Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally. They’ve edited a new volume entitled: Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History's Schools (Routledge, 2018). They see history as an organizing tool and discuss the ways in which social movements have learned from the past. Aziz Choudry is Associate Professor a...

Today, we do a deep dive into the World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report. With me is David Edwards, the Secretary-General of Education International, a federation of 32 million teachers and other educators affiliated with unions and associations in 173 countries. David takes us through the report’s main points and offers a series of critiques compiled in a new report called “Reality Check.” He...

Today we continue our conversation with Makoto Itoh. Last week, we discussed educational privatization in Japan. This week, we explore the study of Marxism in Japan and the influence of Kozo Uno. Makoto Itoh teaches at Kokugakuin University and is professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo. His newest book, written in Japanese, is A guide to Capitalist Economy, which was published in February.

Today we look at educational privatization in Japan. My guest is the renowned Marxist scholar Makoto Itoh. In our two-part conversation, Professor Itoh argues that both the capitalist market and Soviet system have not produced democratic equality. In both systems, schools have been used to sort people by class. Makoto Itoh teaches at Kokugakuin University and is professor emeritus of the Universit...

Tunisia is known for sparking what many in the West call the Arab Spring, the revolutionary protests that swept across North Africa and the Middle East starting in 2010. My guest today is Tavis Jules. Together with Teresa Barton, he co-authored a new book entitled Educational Transitions in post-revolutionary spaces: Islam, security, and social movements in Tunisia. He argues that the Tunisian rev...

My guest today is Gina Athena Ulysse, a professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She has a new book entitled Because when God is too busy: Haiti, me & THE WOLRD. Gina’s is a feminist artist-anthropologist-activist and self-described Post-Zora Interventionist. Her creative projects lie within the intersections of geopolitics, historical representations, and the dailiness of...

How do teachers learn to teach? My guests today, Maria Teresa Tatto and Ian Menter, discuss the many paths to become a teacher in England and the USA and the policy environment that is shaping current practice. Learning to be a teacher, they argue, requires much more than simply having a lot of content knowledge. Just because you may know math really well does not mean that you would be a good mat...