FreshEd

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...

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...