FreshEd

Ted Dintersmith is not your normal Silicon Valley venture capitalist trying to save the world through technology. He’s much more complex. After producing the film Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance in 2015, Ted embarked on a trip across America. For nine months he visited school after school, meeting teachers in ordinary settings doing extraordinary things. Today Ted joins FreshEd...

Today, we explore the university strikes in the United Kingdom. My guests are Ioannis Costas Batlle and Aurelien Mondon, lecturers at the University of Bath and participants in the Bath Teach Outs. Based on their experiences in the current labor movement sweeping the UK, they find an alternative to the neoliberal university. Their new co-written blog post entitled "University Strikes: Reclaiming a...

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...

Today we take a broad definition of education and explore the process of released prisoners re-integrating into American society. My guest is CalvinJohn Smiley, an assistant professor at Hunter College, City University of New York. Calvin is currently co-editing a book with Keesha Middlemass entitled Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Returning Home, which will be publi...

Are we heading towards another economic crisis? The stock market plunged last week; private debt is at an all-time high; speculative markets are on the rise; wealth remains concentrated at the top; and workers are stuck in precarious low-wage jobs. My guest today, William I. Robinson, says that the Transnational Capitalist Class is facing a crisis of over-accumulation. But what is to be done? Prof...

To kick off the new year, we have a special show for you. Today, Linda Darling-Hammond joins me to talk about her new co-authored book Empowered Educators: How high-performing systems shape teaching quality around the world. The book explores how several countries and jurisdictions have developed comprehensive teaching and learning systems that produce a range of positive outcomes, from student ac...

This is our last re-run before we air new shows. Today I'm going to play my 2016 conversation with Jane Kenway where she explains multi-sited global ethnography, which she and her team used to study elite schooling in former British colonies. The groups' latest book, Class Choreographies, was just released in paperback. If you want receive 20 percent off the book, please go to FreshEdpodcast.com/c...

Happy 2018. The FreshEd team is on break. We'll return in February. Please take our audience survey: http://www. FreshEdpodcast.com/survey On Sunday, Germany's social democratic party voted to enter formal talks with Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union to form a new government. It's been nearly 4 months since the Germans' voted in September. One reason Germany has had difficulty forming a g...

The FreshEd team is on break. We'll return in February. Please take our audience survey: http://www. FreshEdpodcast.com/survey Lobbyists are paid to influence government officials. They often operate behind closed doors, hidden from public view. In the education sector, for-profit companies rely on the work of lobbyists to promote commercial interests in public policy, from privately operated publ...

Happy 2018. The FreshEd team is on break. We'll return in February. Please take our audience survey: http://www. FreshEdpodcast.com/survey Today on the show: social networks analysis in educational research. My guest is Robin Shields. Robin is an Associate Professor at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. His research broadly investigates the globalization of education, examining patterns...

What a year! 2017 was a year of massive growth for FreshEd. We put out 44 shows that received over 25,000 listens. We covered a range of topics, including – but certainly not limited to –educational privatization, student unions, intercultural competencies, the militarization of childhood in Japan, and, of course, PISA. We spoke to professors, students, politicians, and development practitioners f...

To celebrate the 100th episode of FreshEd, I’ve saved an interview with a very special guest. Back in October, I had the privilege of sitting down with Professor David Harvey during his visit to Tokyo. For those who don’t know him, David Harvey is considered “one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century.” He is one of the most cited academics in the humanities and social...

Many students move across national borders to attend university.  Although the number of these globally mobile students is small compared to the total number of students enrolled in higher education, there numbers are increasing.   But the patterns are changing, with more regional and south-south mobility. The role of scholarships in promoting these new patterns of student mobility is gaining atte...

Today we talk about a television show that was hugely popular in Latin America called El Chavo del Ocho. The show crossed boarders across Latin America, taking on a multiplicity of meaning. My guests today, Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares, have a new edited collection that explores how the show worked and produced particular visions of Latin American childhood, schooling, and societies. They...

Finland is known to have an excellent education system. Its high scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment have convinced people around the world that Finland is a country worth copying. In 2011, Pasi Sahlberg detailed Finland’s educational reforms that helped achieve these world-class results in his book Finnish Lessons. As Pasi traveled the world talking about his award-winnin...

Ever since the 1983 Nation at Risk report, America has seemingly gone through one educational reform after another. Have these reforms worked? My guest today, Paul Reville, thinks the reforms have correctly focused on the goals of excellence and equity but have not addressed the systemic problems impacting schools. Paul Reville is the founding director of the Education Redesign Lab at the Harvard....

When I was in school, I did anything – and everything! – to get out of a test. Seriously. Ask my parents, who I drove nuts. I often refused to go to school on test days or simply pretended I was sick to get out of class just as the exam was being handed out. Tests made me nervous and I hated the idea that one number could forever define my intelligence. Today, more and more students are refusing t...

Across the globe, millions of people have been displaced from their homes. How does the international community respond to this humanitarian crisis? What is the role of education? My guest today is Sarah Dryden-Peterson. She leads a research program that focuses on the connections between education and community development, specifically the role that education plays in building peaceful and parti...

Today we look at the history and tensions of international education. My guest is Paul Tarc, an Associate professor at Western University. Paul sees certain tensions as inherent in the very idea of international education. As universities around the world embrace internationalism in an era of limited state funding, some wonder whether those idealists intentions have been clouded by hopes of increa...

This is the last episode in our four-part series leading up to the CIES 2017 Symposium. In the past three episodes, we have talked about decolonizing knowledge and innovating comparative and international education primarily from within the USA. But what does decolonization look like in other countries? Today we focus on Pakistan. My guest is Shenila Khoja-Moolji. She researches and writes about t...

The CIES 2017 Symposium aims to explore new frontiers in Comparative Education. Today, I speak with Peter Demerath about some of the exciting work being done in ethnographic research. We discuss many ideas from indigenous knowledge to grounded grit. Peter even talks about the challenges researching the same community for over two decades, as well as the value such studies can have. Peter Demerath...

Today we look inside an example of destabilizing knowledge hierarchies inside an American university. With me is Patricia Parker. Patricia helped set up the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The graduate certificate reveals the paradoxes of challenging dominant forms of knowledge inside one of the very sites, the university, responsi...

Today we kick off a four-part series called FreshEd x Symposium. During the lead-up to the 2017 Symposium, four speakers will join FreshEd to whet your appetite for the conversations and debate that will take place in Washington DC. This year’s symposium asks us to consider about how comparative and international education phenomena are studied and wade through the possibility that our field has c...

Global citizenship education is an idea you’ve probably heard about.  It’s fairly straightforward as an abstract concept. Much attention on global citizenship education today is to ensure that certain values are taught in school despite the ever-growing demands on students from subjects like Science, Math, and Language. But how can global citizenship education be measured? What tools exist to inco...

Today we look at sexuality education. In some countries, scholars who advocate for a secular worldview have constructed a progressive sexuality education that embraces science at the exclusion of religion.  With me is Mary Lou Rasmussen. In her monograph, Progressive Sexuality Education: The Conceits of Secularism (Routledge, 2015), which was just released in paperback, Mary Lou carefully explores...