Global Studies in Education (GSE)

The Global Studies in Education (GSE) division is built upon the tradition of the Comparative and International Education program at Illinois. It includes faculty and students interested in examining the changing forms of global interconnectivity and interdependence and their implications for thinking about and researching educational policy and governance; the media and popular cultures; the politics of social identities; postcolonialism in education; gender, class and racial inequalities; the political economy of knowledge production and management; development and education; and issues concerning the new global ecologies of learning. The Faculty associated with the division have conducted research in most regions of the world, and have also written extensively on theories of globalization; postcoloniality; identity and the politics of representation; culture and education and the emerging role of international and non-government organizations in the development and evaluation of educational policies. They organize major international conferences; publish widely; consult with governments and non-government organizations; and edit various journals including Policy Futures in Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory; and E-Learning.

The GSE division offers an on-campus graduate program (MA and PhD) and an on-line Masters program in Educational Policy Studies with a concentration on Global Studies in Education. The details of GSE on-line can be found on gse.ed.uiuc.edu Many of the senior doctoral on-campus students in GSE work as teaching assistants on the on-line program, and have developed an open source website of teaching and research resources on Globalization and Education. They also publish a BLOG on global studies in education. In addition to careers in teaching and research, GSE graduates have also gone on to find employment as college administrators and as policy analysts in national educational bureaucracies, development agencies, international organizations and transnational corporations.

GSE division enjoys extensive networks across the globe, and has participated actively in the World Education Network’s project on Constructing Knowledge Spaces; A UNESCO funded project The Asia-Pacific Programme of Educational Innovation for Development (APEID) describing recent shifts in educational policies in the Asia-Pacific; And a whole range of other international projects. It has organized summer study tours to Brazil (2005) and Granada Spain (2006), and is planning a study tour of South Africa. The division has strong links with most of the area studies centers at the University of Illinois, and other units concerned with teaching and researching international issues.

 

Faculty and Research Interests

Bill Cope (multiculturalism and public policy; learning as design; social and technological literacy)

Antonia Darder (critical pedagogy; immigration and biligualism; Latina-Latino studies; identity and culture in transnational contexts)

Cameron McCarthy (race, identity and representation; postcolonialism; globalizing cultural studies; media and consumer culture)

Michael Peters (policy futures in education, knowledge economy and cultures; poststructuralism; technology and development; higher education policy)

Fazal Rizvi (globalization and educational policy: international organizations; uneven global development; internationalization of higher education)

Affiliated Faculty

Nicholas Burbules (social and political theory; dialogue in teaching; technology studies)

 

Courses in Global Studies in Education

• Globalization and Educational Policy
• Identity and Culture in Transnational Contexts
• Global Perspectives in Curriculum
• Technology, Globalization and Educational Reform
• Political Economy of Knowledge and Education
• Comparative and International Education
• Globalization, Development and Higher Education
• Knowledge Management and Educational Policy
• Globalizing Cultural Studies and Education

 

Recent Faculty Activity

Bill Cope joined Illinois as a Research Professor in Fall 2006 from Australia where he has had a distinguished academic and policy career. Bill directs Commonground, a large globally networked company that organizes conferences, publishes monographs and journals, conducts research and develops educational software. He has recently completed, with Mary Kalantzis, a book for Cambridge University Press on learning by design which explores new pedagogic approaches appropriate for the new global and technological era.

Antonia Darder is currently an associate with the Center for Advanced Studies, working on a book: Forging a Puerto Rican Feminism: The Power and Poetics of Embodied History.  In the last year, she delivered keynote addresses at the  Sixth Annual Sociology of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Conference in London and at The Higher Education Academy: Sociology, Anthropology, Politics (C-SAP) International Conference at the University of Birmingham. Darder is the founder and producer of Liberacion! The Nexus of Global/Local Politics, Art and Struggle, a radio program that combines interviews and commentaries of educators and community activists from the U.S. and around the world on issues of global concern.

Cameron McCarthy is Communication Scholar and University Scholar attached to the departments of Educational Policy Studies, the Institute of Communications, and Advertising and Consumer Studies at the University of Illinois. In 2006, he was Global Studies Scholar-in-Residence at the University of A Coruña, Spain. His most recent essay, “Representing the third world intellectual: C.L.R. James and the contradictory meanings of radical activism” can be found in Anglo-Saxonica (Série II- número 23, pp. 54-92), a journal published by Center for English Studies, University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Michael Peters spent the summer months as a visiting professor in universities in Mexico (UNAM, Chiapas, Veracruz), South Africa (Stellenbosch), and Colombia (Santiago de Cali), and delivered keynotes and seminars at the Universities of Bristol (UK), London (Institute), and Montreal (McGill), as well as presenting conference papers at a number of conferences, on the basis of his latest book Building Knowledge Cultures, with Tina Besley (2006), which he is extending in relation to higher education and the question of ‘development’.

Fazal Rizvi is currently an international panel member for education on the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008). During the course of 2006, he delivered the Routeldge Lecture at the British Educational Research Association Meeting in Warwick, the Radford lecture at the Australian Association for Research in Education in Adelaide and keynote addresses at the Alliance of International Educators conference in Shanghai and at the Commonwealth Ministers of Education meeting in Cape Town. His forthcoming book, Globalizing Educational Policy, will be published by Routledge in late 2007.