Courses
CURRENT
AEC 3180: Global Governance and Educational Change
Winter Semester 2012
Mondays 9:30-12:30 / Location: Smart Room 7-105
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto
Professor Karen Mundy
e-mail: karen.mundy@utoronto.ca
Course Overview:
Most educators and educational researchers today operate with a considerable awareness of the global forces that affect their work – be it in terms of the rising emphasis on technology and information in the classroom, the aggressive popular discourse on preparing children and nations for a competitive international knowledge economy, or issues raised by an increasingly diverse, border-crossing population of learners. Yet our mounting sense of the global dimension of domestic educational issues has not been accompanied by attention to formal, cross-national co-operation in the field of education. This course is a doctoral level seminar on evolving forms of international relations and co-operation in education.
It has five primary goals:
• To orient students to various theoretical perspectives on globalisation and changes to world order, and to encourage reflection on the changing context for international relations in education.
• To introduce students to key organisations and actors involved in education internationally, through a review of their policies and practices. UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, the OECD, the World Trade Organisation, bilateral aid donors, international nongovernmental actors (including NGOs, Foundations, unions and other network organizations), the private sector, and the work of regional organisations like the European Union may be among the organisations and actors studied.
• To look at the influence and impact of international actors on national and international educational policies and practices, focusing in particular on their role in alleviating poverty and reducing inequality.
• To familiarise students with various research methods and approaches to studying the politics of education in the international arena.
• To stimulate normative debate and discussion about reform and of global institutions and their work in education. Short introductory lectures will be given at regular intervals, but the primary format for this course is a participatory research seminar. Members of the seminar will be asked to read a variety of articles and to come to class with brief written interventions.
PAST
EDU5594: Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers
(Fall 2007)
Course Overview:
In this course, pre-service students will be introduced to the field of Comparative and International Education. Each week will be lead by a different faculty member at OISE/UT, and will focus on international research on a theme relevant to teachers. Weekly sessions will combine lectures, small group discussion and the viewing of a documentary on education in comparative perspective.
CTL 6000 (CIE 1001): An Introduction to Education in International and Comparative Perspective
(Winter 2005)
Course Overview:
Comparative education is an interdisciplinary field, broadly organized around two distinctive (though often overlapping) goals. On the one hand, much of the research in the field of comparative education has asked “big picture” or macro-historical questions about the relationship between education and political, economic, and social change (“development”), using cross-national or comparative evidence. This type of research might be described as macro-historical, or macro-sociological. It includes recent efforts to make sense of processes of globalization and the way in which education is internationally organized. Research in this tradition has long been influenced by wide-ranging theoretical and ideological debates in the social sciences. Another important dimension of comparative research has been instrumental in character. Here comparative research is used to help guide the improvement of education at various levels and in various contexts. International achievement studies, research on human capital, and cross-national studies of school effectiveness illustrate this tradition. Research in this vein has continued to grow alongside rising pressure to make our national educational systems more internationally competitive. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the origins and development of the field of international and comparative education and to explore how comparativists have engaged some of the theoretical and ideological debates that characterize research in the social sciences. The course also offers an opportunity to think through and write scholarly papers on issues pertinent to international and comparative education through the production of a reflection paper, and final interpretive literature review.
