Asian Education Podcast

In this episode, Edward Vickers talks to Evelyn Kim (Kim Min Ji), who lectures on the Comparative Education MA at the UCL Institute of Education. They discuss Evelyn’s work on policies pursued by the South Korean government since around 2012 under the rubric of ‘Happiness Education’. Various surveys have suggested that young people in Korea are particularly unhappy, by comparison with their peers...

In this episode, Ed talks to Benjamin Mulvey of Glasgow University about an article Ben has recently written with Bok-Nga Lee on ‘the intellectual-state relationship and academic freedom in China’. Many observers have noted growing constraints affecting scholarly research and higher education in China over recent years. At the same time, some of the work on Chinese higher education published in pr...

The Philippines is one of the largest exporters of migrant workers in the world. Global shipping as well as the hospitality, medical, entertainment, domestic work and other sectors of many economies rely heavily on Filipino workers. In this episode, Edward Vickers talks to Dr Mark Maca about his research into the relationship between education and the phenomenon of Filipino migrant labour. They di...

NGOs and philanthropic organisations have played a growing role in the education sector in many societies over recent years. This has perhaps been especially apparent in the aid sector, with the activities of outfits such as the Gates Foundation expanding alongside the work of bilateral and multilateral aid organisations. In this episode, Latika Gupta and Edward Vickers discuss the case of India,...

The plight of the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar has largely been forgotten in recent years, as global attention has turned to crises in other regions. But hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain displaced and effectively stateless, with the largest number (around a million) in Bangladesh. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Yeshim Iqbal, Senior Research Scientist at Global TIES (Transforming Interve...

In this, the third of our three episodes on education and ethnocultural diversity in Thailand, we talk to Chawin Pongpajon of Chulalongkorn University, who is also a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education. Chawin’s doctoral project is entitled Education for assimilation or social transformation? Investigating school education for peace and social justice in the conflict-affected southern...

Continuing our discussions of education and the challenges of ethnocultural diversity in Thailand, in this episode we talk to Omsin Jatuporn, who is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science Education, at Chiang Mai University. Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, is central to a region that is culturally, linguistically and ethnically highly diverse. Whereas, in the previous episode,...

In recent years, Thailand has experienced a wave of migration from neighbouring countries, particularly of workers seeking relatively low-paid, low-skilled jobs. This has added a new element to the ethnocultural and linguistic diversity that has always been a feature of Thai society - though one that has often been obscured in official discourse. Migrant workers and their families face wide-rangin...

(See below for a selection of images from David’s article, related to the discussion in this episode.) In this final episode of our series on The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery (linked to the special issue of Comparative Education), Edward Vickers talks to David Tobin of Sheffield University. David has researched and published extensively on the politics of contemporary Xinjiang and th...

Following on from the previous episode, in which we discussed the ROC’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, in this episode of the Asian Education Podcast we discuss language education in Taiwan and its relationship with the island’s fraught identity politics. Haruna Kasai, a doctoral student at Kyushu University, is currently researching language education policy and practice in contemporar...

In this episode of our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, we discuss a little-known entity perhaps only peripherally related to education, but central to the shifting politics of identity in contemporary Taiwan: the ‘Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission’ (蒙藏委員會) (MTAC). In her doctoral research, Alessandra Ferrer examined the changing role of the MTAC following th...

In this episode, recorded in December 2023, Ed talks to Queenie Lam of Trier University (Germany) and Y-Europe about the issue of academic freedom in China, specifically as it relates to Hong Kong. Dr. Lam grew up in Hong Kong, but has family roots in mainland China (Fujian) and South East Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia). She worked from 2010 until 2022 at the Academic Cooperation Association...

Continuing our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, featuring authors of articles in the related special issue of Comparative Education, in this episode Edward Vickers interviews James Leibold and Tendor Dorjee, co-authors of an article on boarding schools for Tibetan students in contemporary China. We begin by discussing the origins on the boarding school program for Tibeta...

The special issue of Comparative Education on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’ (issue 60.1, 2024) features an article by Tianlong Yu and Zhenzhou Zhao on ‘Confucianism in Multicultural China’. In this episode of the Asian Education Podcast, Edward Vickers talks to Tianlong about his work with Zhenzhou on this article, and also more generally about the resurgence of popular and offi...

Continuing our series on ‘the politics of education on China’s periphery’, in this episode Ed and Gairan interview Yan Fei, who co-authored a paper for the Comparative Education special issue (60.1) on ‘shifting state policies and the curricular portrayal of China’s minority nationalities’. Dr. Yan has researched the changing depiction of non-Han groups in China’s history textbooks during the enti...

This second season of the Asian Education Podcast features conversations with various contributors to a special issue of the journal Comparative Education on the theme of ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’. The special issue is devoted primarily to analysis of peripheralised communities on the geographical margins of China - in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and...

In this final episode of our first season, Edward Vickers talks to Prof. Lin Tzu-Bin of National Taiwan Normal University’s College of Education about one of the most ambitious - and contentious - education policies to be introduced in Taiwan in recent years: the Bilingual Education Policy. Introduced by the current administration of the Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨 or DPP) in 2018, the po...

The War Heritage Podcast is produced by Tim Winter and colleagues in the WARMAP partnership. A podcast about war and culture in Southeast Asia, it was produced with funding from the UNESCO Jakarta Office. Over the past two decades, Asia has undergone a war memory book, and as the gravity of power in the region shifts away from America and Japan, the legacy of World War II has become a source of ac...

Shadow education, in the form of examination-preparatory tutorial schooling, is pervasive across much of Asia. The costs in terms of family finances, the narrowing of educational focus and the ex-hausting competitiveness of examination cramming for the youngsters involved have aroused much scholarly commentary. But can shadow education take benign as well as malign forms? And how can regulation he...

In this episode, Edward Vickers talks to Professor Fazal Rizvi of the University of Melbourne about his recent involvement in recent education reform initiatives in the Kingdom of Bhutan. Famous internationally for its espousal of the ‘Gross Happiness Index’ in place of the conventional notion of GDP, Bhutan is otherwise relatively little understood or researched by outsiders (in part due to strin...

In March 2023, Edward Vickers recorded an interview with Professor Krishna Kumar (Episode 7) in which they discussed the reform of the curricula and textbooks produced by India’s National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) during Prof. Kumar’s term as Director between 2005 and 2010. To the surprise of many - including Prof. Kumar - the NCERT curricula and related teaching materi...

In this episode, Edward Vickers interviews Professor Krishna Kumar ‘on location’ in Chandigarh, India. Professor Kumar, formerly of the Central Institute of Education at Delhi University, is a distinguished theorist of education and prominent commentator on a range of educational issues in India and more widely. From 2005 to 2010, he was the Director of India’s National Council for Educational Res...

Part 2: Ethical implications of educational technology and learning assessments This episode continues the conversation begun in Episode 5 with Professor Anita Rampal, former Dean of the Faculty of Education at Delhi University. We further discuss the growing ascendency of ‘non-state actors’ in Indian education, with a focus on the push for the use of technology in teaching and assessment. In Indi...

In this episode of the Asian Education Podcast, we are joined by Professor Anita Rampal, who was the Dean of the Faculty of Education at Delhi University and has over 40 years of active engagement with the state education system in India. Her long and rich career as an educationist includes her involvement in the development of the 2005 National Curriculum Framework, in particular, serving as Chai...

In this episode of the Asian Education Podcast, we are joined by Dr Brenda Dobia, who has a background both in clinical psychology and cultural studies, and has been actively involved in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), both in her native Australia and in Asia-related projects. In Australia, she has worked with indigenous children and youth and on training pre-service teachers in Education for...