International Education News

This week, IEN features the work of scholars who are exploring organizational practices aimed at dismantling systemic inequity and promoting anti-racism within education. This post is the second in a series featuring excerpts of interviews with presenters participating in the Educational Change Special Interest Group sessions at the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia in April. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “Studies of Equity-Minded Organizational Learning in Educational Contexts.” For part one of this series, see: Practices, Programs and Policies for Instructional Coaching. These interviews are part of the Lead the Change series produced by AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website. The LtC series is currently produced by Alex Lamb (Outgoing Series Editor) and Liz Zumpe (Incoming Series Editor).

Studying Organizational Change in Sites of Power: Shifting from White-Centered to Equity-Centered Decision-making Processes in Postsecondary Philanthropy — Heather McCambly, University of Pittsburgh & Krystal Villanosa, Northwestern University

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Heather McCambly (HM) & Krystal Villanosa (KV): This year’s theme centers two opposing verbs–dismantling and constructing. We can think of these two verbs as a dichotomy, as two sides of the same coin. However, in our projects together over the years we give particular attention to how the ability to engage in new, equitable and sustainable constructions in educational practice is co-constitutive with dismantling racist institutions, and vice versa. As a result, doing one without the other has clear dangers. For example, we analyze how educational grant makers come to notice their own racist practices and work to both weaken and replace them. As we have moved into the current white racial backlash to all things equitable and just in education and social policy, we are seeing firsthand that when equity-minded practices are introduced but not institutionalized they are all too easily swept away. This is true even at foundations (or universities, etc.) that may continue to profess “DEI” commitments.

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?     

HM & KV: We contend that this is a time for us to reflect as researchers on how our work supports organizations to go beyond critiquing or tinkering with white-serving routines, to replacing those routines in ways that cannot be easily eroded by new political tides. The paper featured in this symposium uses a critical institutionalization and organizational decision-making lens to examine how a prolonged effort toward equitable transformation at one postsecondary foundation changed a great many routines and mindsets, but often failed to institutionalize those changes in ways that would last. We strive to tell this story in a way that celebrates the innovative and successful changes we observed, while also using the organization’s failure to institutionalize equitable transformation as a phenomenon that opens up space to imagine and theorize alternative possibilities for future change work.

This is a time for us to reflect as researchers on how our work supports organizations to go beyond critiquing or tinkering with white-serving routines.

Navigating the (Im)Possibilities of Antiracist Organizational Learning: Insights from Graduate Students’ Experiences with ARIS — Aireale J. Rodgers & Brittney Pemberton, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Central to our understanding of educational change is the recognition that change, especially change initiatives driven by a commitment to equity, takes work – painstaking, strategic, visionary, and hard work.Yet, the critical questions of who labors, in what ways, and toward what futures often remain elusive in educational change scholarship. Overwhelmingly, the labor of equity-minded change work is distributed inequitably in educational institutions— often falling upon the shoulders of those most marginalized, notably Women of Color. This presents an important paradox: how are people, who are systematically disenfranchised and most vulnerable to institutional violence and exclusion within the institution, also the ones charged with “dismantling racial injustice and constructing educational possibilities”? Furthermore, how do Women of Color, who too often find themselves in this precarious predicament, experience and resist this labor? 

Change, especially change initiatives driven by a commitment to equity, takes work – painstaking, strategic, visionary, and hard work.

We take these questions up in our paper: “Navigating the (Im)Possibilities of Antiracist Organizational Learning: Insights from Graduate Students’ Experiences with ARIS”. This study focuses on eight Women Graduate Students of Color affiliated with an antiracist organizational learning initiative at a Historically White Institution (HWI). We highlight our participants’ experiences enacting antiracist pedagogy, the types of labor they contribute, and their efforts to challenge and seek redress for their labor. Overall, we hope this paper makes three contributions: 1) draw attention to the disproportionate burden placed on minoritized people in antiracist organizational learning and change efforts, 2) recognize the invaluable contributions Women of Color graduate students make to anti-racism initiatives at HWIs, and 3) amplify their calls for material forms redress for their labor.

As two Black women scholar-educators who have navigated similar dynamics, we are deeply invested in revealing the labor dynamic of antiracist change work. We find Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2002) definition of racism as “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” particularly revelatory in conceptualizing what’s at stake with antiracist change work (p. 261). Dr. Gilmore emphasizes that the result of racism, and conversely the consequence of forsaking the pursuit of antiracism, is premature death. Put otherwise, (anti)racism is a matter of life and death — one that is as embodied and material as it is ideological. We started 2024 with the news of the tragic and untimely death of Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey, affectionately known by many as Bonnie (may she rest in peace and power). As we watched memorials pour in through social media, we were awestruck by the legacy she left and the lives she touched for the better. Dr. Bonnie epitomized what it meant to be a changemaker. In fact, many of us know a Dr. Bonnie and many of us have also lost a Dr. Bonnie far too soon. 

If racism structures who lives and who dies, antiracist change work must be about creating tangible and sustainable pathways for people on the death-dealing end of the racial hierarchy to live long, full, self-determined lives. Articulations of educational change work that don’t adequately deal with the ways educational institutions operate as death-dealing machines that disproportionately murder the minds-bodies-spirits of People of Color, especially Black women, miss a crucial dimension. We are thrilled that the papers across our symposium will highlight that educational change demands not only recognizing but also continuously and actively interrogating the implications of power asymmetries on change work, its implications for the work, and its impact on the people who are doing this work.

How Organizational Investments in Campus Cultural Centers Can Demobilize Equity — Jackie Pedota, University of Texas at Austin

LtC: The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Jackie Pedota (JP): The theme for 2024 is deeply connected to all my research endeavors as a scholar. I explore issues within higher education at the intersection of race, power, and organizational change to understand how racialized organizational dynamics perpetuate systemic inequities for minoritized communities in ways that reinforce and reproduce racial hierarchies. Specifically, my research agenda examines how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts function within racialized organizations like predominantly white institutions (PWIs). In my work, I leverage organizational and critical theories to uncover the organizational conditions that are required for racially and ethnically minoritized students, staff, and faculty to not just survive, but really thrive, and how their thriving can ultimately open up possibilities to shift the entire campus climate to promote racial equity.

I leverage organizational and critical theories to uncover the organizational conditions that are required for racially and ethnically minoritized students, staff, and faculty to not just survive, but really thrive, and how their thriving can ultimately open up possibilities to shift the entire campus climate to promote racial equity.

Much of my work is heavily influenced by scholars and mentors who strive to dismantle racial inequities  to create more just futures for Black, Latino/a/x/e, Indigenous, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern/North African communities, such as Lori Patton Davis, Victor Ray, Liliana Garces, Antar Tichavakunda, and Heather McCambly. Guided by their prior work, my most recent project, which I’ll present this year at AERA, examines what can happen when PWIs choose to invest (or not invest) in student-initiated diversity initiatives. Over the past two years, I’ve used multiple case study methods to explore three PWIs whose Latino/a/x campus cultural centers, over time, have received varying levels of institutionalized support via infrastructure, staffing, and other financial resources. These additional resources are essential because they create new opportunities for these historically under-resourced centers to increase and broaden their reach while shifting the burden of labor from students to full-time professional staff. Yet, to gain access to this additional financial support and resources provided by university leadership, these once students-run centers and liberatory spaces that bore out of student activism must become more formally embedded within the broader university structure, a structure historically created to privilege white students and maintain white supremacy by reducing the agency of minoritized groups by any means necessary.

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?   

JP: First, I want scholars, administrators, and senior university leaders to understand how seemingly neutral university structures, policies, and practices meant to establish order, efficiency, and “fairness” can perpetuate systemic inequities for minoritized communities in ways that reinforce racial hierarchies within predominantly white organizations. In a previous publication examining the institutionalization of one cultural center, I argue how seemingly neutral, everyday organizational structures, policies, culture, and practices at PWIs (like student fee allocation processes) can disproportionately impact racially and ethnically minoritized university populations, reducing their agency while causing psychological harm (Pedota, 2023). These negative impacts can also be magnified over time as cultural centers become more formally and structurally embedded within the broader university environment by new or existing administrative burdens. These burdens disproportionately take time and resources away from racially and ethnically minoritized groups, as they often face stricter regulatory and accountability standards when compared to other groups across campus. Thus, organizational investments in diversity initiatives, no matter how well-intentioned, can diminish the impact of these initiatives as they become part of an inherently racist system that is antithetical to their intended purpose.

Second, I want to demonstrate how organizational change via institutionalized support for diversity initiatives can provide many important benefits. But, without other substantial campus-wide efforts and attention to racialized organizational dynamics embedded within PWIs, these investments and the benefits these investments produce are limited. In my current project, I found that while additional funding, staffing, infrastructure, and resources were crucial for broadening and increasing support for Latino/a/x students, staff, and faculty, these isolated efforts also serve to absolve university leaders from engaging in more university-wide organizational changes that disrupt racial inequities. As informed by the work of our discussant Eric Felix, institutional leaders must move beyond conceptions of isolated/consolidated DEI labor to a more collaborative/distributed model of shared responsibilities, where everyone is organizationally responsible and accountable for the success and well-being of minoritized campus communities. 

 Ultimately, I hope my work pushes university administrators and senior leaders to move beyond trying to address individual bias or interpersonal racism (e.g., diversity trainings) to understand that these problems are more systemic and historically embedded within these organizations, even in the most subtle ways. My work demonstrates how diversity initiatives, as they currently function within racialized organizations, are insufficient but vital within the present socio-political context. Racism is built into higher education systems, and if we want to dismantle racial injustice, leaders need to look inward and commit to assessing and altering everyday organizational structures, policies, practices, norms, and routines that continue to advantage white students, staff, faculty, and senior leaders at the expense of racially and ethnically minoritized campus communities. I hope my empirical work is a call to action and that leaders can leverage it to demonstrate the urgent need to dismantle existing inequitable organizational structures, policies, and practices by engaging in racialized change work, as termed by Heather McCambly.  

Teacher Education’s Racial Discourses & Novice Teacher Reflections: Questions raised for programs’ racial equity initiatives — Joy Esboldt, University of California, Berkeley

LtC: The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Joy Esboldt (JE): My paper “Teacher Education’s Racial Discourses and Novice Teacher Reflections: Questions raised for programs’ racial equity initiatives” examines the efforts and impacts of University-Based Teacher Education (UBTE) Programs’ efforts to address and engage with antiracism through the perspectives of recent graduates, now practicing in K-12 schools. More broadly, my research asks how teachers, leaders, and organizations learn for transformative racial equity and what are the multi-level (micro, meso, macro) mechanisms that shape, support, and constrain such learning. As such, it responds to AERA’s theme in several ways.

The work of teachers for transformative change in public education is critical, yet deeply constrained.

First, the theme calls on us to “examine the most complex issues and challenges…not avoid[ing] but embrace[ing] the most vexing problems” around the enduring presence of racial injustice in schools. The enduring urgency of preparing teachers to work for racial equity is well-established within UBTE. However, this task and the study of it are often categorized as inherently limited as UBTEs strive to prepare pre-service teachers for vastly different contexts of future employment which will inevitably shape teachers’ enactment teachers. Building on the theoretical framework of multisited ethnographies, which examines what “takes hold as people and practices move across time and space” (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014, p. 604), my work examines how novice teachers engage and adapt discourses and ideas of racial equity from UBTE once practicing in schools. In doing so, it offers reflective questions for UBTE’s own organizational equity learning and work to prepare and support teachers. 

Second, the call urges attention to dismantling racial injustice to not simply be limited to the “halls of academia” but to attend to other learning communities, constructed identities, and contend with our own lived experiences. In examining how teachers negotiate meanings of racial equity from their UBTE programs within their new schools and districts, my research holds implications for schooling organizations and equity-oriented practitioners as well as for academic research. This work raises theoretical questions around the relationship between sites of learning, but it also calls on UBTE programs, school leaders, and practicing teachers to not just critique shortcomings but imagine alternative ways to build the world “as it should be.” 

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?     

JE: I approach my scholarship with the belief that the work of teachers for transformative change in public education is critical, yet deeply constrained within existing systems and structures as well as histories and dominant narratives (see Leonardo & Esboldt, 2023). Likewise, transformative change within U.S. UBTE is needed to support the development of equity-, justice-, and asset-oriented antiracist educators (Souto-Manning, 2019; Zeichner, 2014), while not forgetting UBTE’s history, contributions, and public role within our neoliberal era (Anderson, 2019; Horsford et. al., 2019; Lipman, 2011). Finally, given the importance of local context and the complexity of teaching, there is no universal formula to prepare and support teachers to work for racial justice (Bartolomé, 1994; Philip, 2019). As I echo scholars and practitioners who have asserted this for generations, I hope my scholarship extends this conversation with implications for practice, policy, and scholarship. 

For practice, my work generates a lens for reflection and critical questions for teacher education programs committed to transformative change around how their program supports and constrains teachers’ future understandings and work for racial justice in complex and situated ways (Philip & Benin, 2014). While teachers graduate and enter diverse external environments outside of UBTE’s scope and control, UBTE program leaders might intentionally seek out graduates’ experiences, stories, and understandings to better understand the various effects and growth areas for program efforts. We know that teachers’ efforts to advance racial equity, justice, and critical democracy will inherently be challenged by the systems around them. Specific insight into the ways UBTE graduates navigate, make sense of, and/or feel (under)prepared to address these challenges in classrooms/schools might allow programs to deliberately support pre-service teachers’ development to critically theorize and grapple with the unique dynamics, contexts, and relations of students they will later face. Rather than an external mandate of reform, this perspective prompts transformation initiated from within (Ellis, 2019; Souto-Manning, 2019). 

For equity-driven leaders and policymakers, this work necessitates interrogating the impact of various discourses of equity and epistemologies of teacher learning in teacher education policy, programs, and structures. This reminds us that it is not enough for equity or racial justice to be named, included, or nodded to, instead, we must ask how policies, structures, and norms within teacher education policy and programs support or constrain teachers’ critical efforts for transformative social change in the future, rather than simply upholding the status quo. 

Finally, for scholarship, my work adds to calls to move beyond simple binaries of practice-belief gaps in teacher learning or the two-worlds problem of teacher education. While important constraints to consider, our scholarship must build from this foundational research, to reconceptualize transformative learning for teachers as a mechanism for educational change in all its complexity. I add to calls to ask multi-leveled and multi-sited questions from our research and to design studies that speak across levels of society and sites of practice. 

A Racialized Organization Approach to Faculty Agency for Racial Equity Change Work — Román Liera, Montclair State University

LtC: The 2024 AERA theme is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. How does your research respond to this call?

Román Liera (RL): In studying organizational change to advance racial equity in higher education, I have learned that dismantling racial injustice and constructing possibilities for transformation often involves the following four components: organizational learning, agency, evaluation contexts, and racial equity (e.g., Dowd & Liera, 2018; Liera, 2020a; 2020b; 2023; Liera & Dowd, 2019; Liera & Hernandez, 2021). In higher education, faculty members are uniquely positioned to advance racial equity across disciplinary departments and program offices because they often oversee their university’s teaching, research, and service components (Griffin, 2020). However, faculty who wish to advance racial equity may be deterred by a lack of training, a lack of support from leadership, or an uncertain sense of authority within larger university power structures (McNair et al., 2020). Although theories of change emphasize multi-level, multi-stakeholder change efforts (Kezar et al., 2021) and equity-minded, inquiry-driven change efforts (Bensimon & Malcom, 2012; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015), faculty agency, specifically within the context of racial equity change is under-theorized.

The paper I am presenting at AERA 2024, “A Racialized Organization Approach to Faculty Agency for Racial Equity Change Work,” aligns with this year’s AERA theme because I applied a critical race organizational lens to synthesize the literature on faculty agency. Specifically, I reviewed the literature on faculty agency to understand the organizational components that empower and hinder faculty members from enacting their agency to advance racial equity. Focusing on faculty members’ agency within the context of organizational change highlights the interconnection between organizational learning, agency, evaluation contexts, and racial equity. For example, with leadership support, faculty members can change structures when they learn how their campus racial culture perpetuates racial inequity and how to implement equity-mindedness in practices. Moreover, faculty empowered to change structures can align campus-level policy with department-level practices that centralize equity-mindedness in evaluation contexts (Liera, 2020a; 2023). However, I have also found that without accountability structures, faculty, especially those with identities associated with low organizational status (e.g., pre-tenured women of color), encountered challenges related to the intersectional relations of power, race, gender, tenure, and discipline (Liera, 2020b; Liera & Hernandez, 2021). For these reasons, my manuscript on faculty agency to advance racial equity responds to this year’s AERA call to dismantle racial injustice and create educational possibilities. 

LtC: What are some of the ideas you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work related to practice, policy, and scholarship?   

RL: I hope my research provides theoretical and practical guidance for administrative and faculty leaders to strategize how to best empower faculty to enact their agency to advance racial equity across various organizational units on campus. Specifically, I hope understanding faculty agency as an organizational structure highlights the importance for administrative and faculty leaders to understand how their university’s racial hierarchy hinders racial equity change efforts. Thus, equipping faculty members to advance racial equity requires an assessment of campus racial culture, accountability structures, and leadership support.

Equipping faculty members to advance racial equity requires an assessment of campus racial culture, accountability structures, and leadership support.

About the Interviewees:
Heather McCambly is an assistant professor of critical higher education policy at the University of Pittsburgh and a faculty affiliate at the Office of Community College Research and Leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As a critical organizational scholar, she uses multiple analytic methods to examine the role of funders, policy, and politics in shaping more (or less) racially just futures in postsecondary education.

Krystal Villanosa is a learning scientist who studies education practitioners’ conceptualizations of racial and educational equity. Drawing from multiple theoretical and analytical traditions, she attends to the consequences and material impacts of practitioners’ beliefs and attitudes about equity on how they design and implement interventions to remediate educational inequality.

Aireale J. Rodgers is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Anna Julia Cooper Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Drawing on frameworks from critical race studies and the learning sciences, Dr. Rodgers’ scholarship seeks to illuminate how people’s everyday (mis)understandings about race and racism shape learning across various higher education ecologies. Currently, she uses qualitative techniques to study faculty development programs, graduate student socialization processes, and classroom teaching and learning to better understand how educators can facilitate learning that advances critical race consciousness for faculty and students in postsecondary institutions.

Brittney Pemberton is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Her research explores the role that intimate relationships (e.g., friends, family, romantic partnerships) play in Black women academics’ work/health (im)balance. By calling attention to systemic and institutional barriers that negatively affect the well-being of Black women in academia, Brittney’s work seeks to implement policies and practices that support Black women’s ability to thrive both inside and outside of the academy.

Jackie Pedota is a Doctoral Candidate and incoming Postdoctoral Scholar within the Educational Leadership and Policy department at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s had a wealth of professional experiences across the P-20 educational pipeline, including roles in K-12 instruction, non-profit management, educational technology, and higher education administration. Jackie’s research agenda examines how DEI efforts function within racialized organizations, and her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, like the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, and highlighted in new outlets such as Inside Higher Ed.

Joy Esboldt is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender in the School of Education and member of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Designated Emphasis at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on teachers’ learning about race, equity, and power in classrooms, schools, and society. Esboldt is a former public school teacher and a current NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow.

Román Liera is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University. He designs his research program to study racial equity and organizational change in higher education. His current research projects focus on understanding how racism operates in doctoral student socialization, the academic job market, faculty hiring, reappointment, tenure and promotion, presidential hiring, and racial equity professional development. 

References:

Anderson, L. (2019). Private interests in a public profession: Teacher education and racial capitalism. Teachers College Record, 121(6).

Bensimon, E. M., & Malcom, L. (2012). Confronting equity issues on campus: Implementing the equity scorecard in theory and practice. Stylus Publishing.

Bensimon, E. M., & Malcom, L. (2012). Confronting equity issues on campus: Implementing the equity scorecard in theory and practice. Stylus Publishing.

Dowd, A. C., & Bensimon, E. M. (2015). Engaging the “race question”: Accountability and equity in U.S. higher education. Teachers College Press.

Dowd, A. C., & Liera, R.(2018). Sustaining change for racial equity through cycles of inquiry. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 26(65), 1-46. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.26.3274. 

Ellis, V. (2018). Transformation: What exactly does it mean? Retrieved from https://vivellis.org/2018/04/15/transformation-what-exactly-does-it-mean/

Griffin, K. A. (2020). Institutional barriers, strategies, and benefits to increasing the representation of women and men of color in the professoriate. In L. W. Perna (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (Vol. 35, pp. 1-73). Springer Nature.

Griffin, K. A. (2020). Institutional barriers, strategies, and benefits to increasing the representation of women and men of color in the professoriate. In L. W. Perna (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (Vol. 35, pp. 1-73). Springer Nature.

Horsford, S. D., Scott, J., & Anderson, G. L. (2019). The politics of education policy in an era of inequality. Routledge.

Kezar, A., Holcombe, E., Vigil, D., & Dizon, J. P. M. (2021). Shared equity leadership: Making equity everyone’s work. American Council on Education and USC Rossier Pullias Center for Higher Education.

Leonardo, Z., & Esboldt, J. (2023). White woman: Or, the abused abuser’s role in U.S. educational stratification. In R. J. Tierney, F. Rizvi, & K. Erkican (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education (Fourth Edition) (Fourth Edition, pp. 93–103). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.08012-X

Liera, R. (2020a). Moving beyond a culture of niceness in faculty hiring to advance racial equity. American Educational Research Journal, 57(5), 1954-1994. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219888624

Liera, R. (2020b). Equity advocates using equity-mindedness to interrupt faculty hiring’s racial structure. Teachers College Record, 122(9), 1-42. 

Liera, R. (2023). Expanding faculty members’ zone of proximal development to enact collective agency for racial equity in faculty hiring. The Journal of Higher Education, 94(6), 766-791. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2023.2195769. 

Liera, R., & Dowd, A. C. (2019). Faculty learning at boundaries to broker racial equity. The Journal of Higher Education, 90(3), 462-485. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1512805. 

Liera, R., & Hernandez, T. E. (2021). Color-evasive racism in the final stage of faculty searches: Examining search committee hiring practices that jeopardize racial equity policy. The Review of Higher Education, 45(2), 181-209. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2021.0020. 

Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. New York, NY: Routledge.

McNair, T. B., Bensimon, E. M., & Malcolm-Piqueux, L. (2020). From equity talk to equity walk: Expanding practitioner knowledge for racial justice in higher education. Jossey-Bass.

Philip, T. M. (2019). Principled improvisation to support novice teacher learning. Teachers College Record, 121(6).

Philip, T. M., & Benin, S. Y. (2014). Programs of teacher education as mediators of White teacher identity. Teaching Education, 25(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2012.743985

Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26-53.

Souto-Manning, M. (2019). Transforming university-based teacher education: Preparing asset, equity, and justice oriented teachers within the contemporary political context. Teachers College Record, 121(6).

Vossoughi, S., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2014). Studying Movement, Hybridity, and Change: Toward a Multi-sited Sensibility for Research on Learning Across Contexts and Borders. National Society for the Study of Education, 113(2), 603–632.

Zeichner, K. (2014). The struggle for the soul of teaching and teacher education in the USA. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(5), 551–568.

This week, Mohammad Shefatul Islam describes the recent roll-out of a platform to support the implementation of a new competency-based assessment system in Bangladesh. In the first part of this two-part interview Islam talked about how he first got involved in edtech as a tutor and then describes how his work leading the development of several edtech platforms evolved during the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic. This interview was conducted in November of 2023, shortly before the rollout of the platform to support the competency-based assessment system.

Islam is a civil service official within the Ministry of Education, with primary responsibilities as a Lecturer in Economics in government colleges. For the past few years, he has been on assignment at the Ministry of ICT and Telecommunication working on a program known as a2i, a collaboration between the Ministry of ICT and the Ministry of Education to help shape the future of education in Bangladesh. Islam has been a leading architect of the development of three different education platforms in Bangladesh: The Teachers Portal was established in 2013 to support blended learning and the development of teachers’ digital skills. Teachers can share presentations and teaching materials on the platform and access an online repository of multimedia materials. With over 600,000 registered, 60% of teachers from around the country have joined the Portal. Following the development of the Teachers Portal, Muktopaath was created as an e-learning platform for education and professional development. In 2018, attention shifted to students and Konnect was founded as an “edutainment platform” to support the development of youth (13 – 18) through access to a safe digital environment that connects them to online and offline activities, educational materials, mentoring, advice, games and competitions. (K stands for Kishore, youth in Bengali.) This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Hatch (TH): This year, you have been working to create an online platform to support the shift to competency-based assessments. Can you tell me about that shift? When did that work start?

Shefatul Islam (SI): The new curriculum process started in 2017. We reviewed over 100 countries’ curricula and policy documents like the Sustainable Development Goals. We also took into account the government’s National Education Policy, National Development Plan, and the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 which addresses the fact that as a flat, low-lying country, only about a meter above sea level, we are extremely vulnerable to climate change. We took all of these things into account – the changes in the environment, in the economy, in the future skills needed – and we conducted several years of integrated research and extensive stakeholder consultations.

We also started piloting project-based learning activities within the existing curriculum, and that was a big part of my work. In 2018, students were assigned to a project called “Banganabdhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Muktijuddho ke Jani”  to interview elderly people in their region about our liberation war in 1971. Teachers took student groups to historical sites, homes, even hosted events to honor the war heroes and do the interviews. As a small experiment, we added a way for students to add a recording to their project pages on Konnect. The students could record the interviews on their mobile phones, and they could share their experience: How they found their interviewees, the time, the place. It was like the story of the whole process. We received over 300,000 submissions from different schools, each about 20-25 minutes, all with a different story because each person had unique experiences. Some of them had family members that were murdered or raped. Some of them had lost fingers or eyes. It was very emotional. Students recorded these powerful stories and after completing projects, uploaded them onto Konnect website, YouTube, or Facebook. Teachers assessed the projects and collected the school’s best, and then picked one to send to a committee at the sub-district level. Those committees chose the top 100, that had the best stories, that were also properly recorded; the sound was clear; the image was clear; and then they sent those on to the district. This way, we collected all the content from local level, and finally picked the top 100 content at the national level.

TH: That’s fabulous! When was the new curriculum rolled out?

SI: The new national curriculum first rolled out in 64 pilot districts in 2022 before we expanded it with one sample school per district. Now in 2023, it has spread across the country for grade 1 and grade 6-7. Next year, we’ll add Grades 2-3 and 8-9. By 2025, it will include all grades with the first public exam from the new curriculum in 10^th grade.

TH: Can you tell me about the new app you created to support the new curriculum?

SI: Before talking about that, it can help to have some idea of the old and new curriculum. Before, we had a structured curriculum. At the secondary level, we had about 36 subjects. Some subjects were mandatory and some were optional. This led to some disparities because boys used to take agriculture and girls used to take home science; students from the high levels took sciences and students from the lowest level to humanities. From that curriculum, we have moved to a more comprehensive curriculum so that up to grade 10 there will be only 10 subjects: Language (Bangla and English); Maths; science; social science and history; religion, with four religion textbooks (Islam, Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist). Then four new subjects came up: Digital Technologies, Life & Livelihoods, Arts & Culture, and finally Wellbeing. This includes the most demanded skills and competencies for life and the 21st century across grades 1-10.

Then before launching this curriculum country-wide, we trained our teachers first online through Muktapaath. 100% of the teachers from primary to secondary, received online training to understand the new curriculum and the major changes. After giving the schools all the materials and learning aids, like the teacher guides and the textbooks, the teachers were given five days of face-to-face training.  Of course, this training is not sufficient because this is a huge transformation, but in the previous curriculum training took place over one or two or three years. They took lots of time to complete the whole cycle and to train everyone. Now, we can leverage the technology so that we can have 100% training within a very short time.

Another thing we did is that we transformed our schools into training centers. Before, teachers went to the teacher training colleges and stayed at a hotel for five or ten days of training.  Instead, this time, we used local schools so the venue is nearby and the teachers don’t need to stay overnight. They can come in the morning and just go back to their home, and we don’t need to spend so much money. Now, the major challenge now is the assessment. Teachers can’t relate it to the previous system that used different percentages, and the parent also were used to exams at different level. From the shift from a summative assessment system to a formative assessment system there is a lot of turbulence.  Parents were very anxious about what their kids are learning. Their kids are not coming back with lots of assignment at home. They are not reading out loud. They are not memorizing; they are not going their own personal private tutors. “What are they doing? What are schools doing? Are the students even learning anything? Where are the grades? You are not giving us any transcript. What are their achievements?”

Parents were very anxious about what their kids are learning. Their kids are not coming back with lots of assignment at home. They are not reading out loud. They are not memorizing; they are not going their own personal private tutors. “What are they doing? What are schools doing? Are the students even learning anything? Where are the grades? You are not giving us any transcript. What are their achievements?”

It was also not very easy to develop this this formative assessment strategy because we studied the approaches in a lot of different countries practice, but we never found anything appropriate for us. So we tried to make it our own. There was a huge group involved in the development of this assessment strategy: the universities, the pedagogues, and the assessment specialists within our country, and we created our own solution.

TH: Now what does the app that you’ve developed to support the new curriculum and the new assessments look like?

SI: We actually just started on the platform a few months ago. Although the platform could have done many things easily and automatically, we wanted to make sure the teacher understood the assessment process and the rules and principles behind the design of the platform. So in September of 2023, we did the first assessment training offline and introduced the new materials and tools. We also went through the key steps of the evaluation process: What are the areas teachers have to keep track of and record? How can they collect the evidence and how can they process those performance indicators into differences in students’ performance? We put in place a “three-dimensional” process to break down the different competencies into performance indicators and then levels of performance: Is it good? Is it best? Is support still needed?  These are the levels. We moved away from percentages and numbers and now just have these statements. Previously it was one sheet where in Bangla you have got 80%. But what does 80% mean? Does it mean you understand 80% of the subject? But now we can understand a students’ level from the performance indicators.

We developed this assessment strategy for each of the subjects, for each of the grades, and now, as of, September of 2023, I was appointed to develop this online application for it all. It has been a roller coaster ride developing a national level platform within just one or two months. That’s when the Minister said “this has to be done.” But it was a bit lucky for me because I was involved from the very beginning in the development of the curriculum, so I could imagine what I had to do and what I had to deliver. I told them “I understand what I have to do. Let me try. Don’t expect it be perfect the first time. It will be a very comprehensive platform at the end, but I need to have some time.” And I had several conditions that I negotiated with my supervisors. I asked them, “please allow me to hire my own team. I need the experts from this country or from outside the country, no matter what.  I need the money to hire them and to engage them. Everyone should be properly incentivized. I don’t care how much they want for this work, I need the best.” And they agreed, and they also gave me a separate office. So for the last two months, I moved away, and I developed a new team of about 70 people. This work includes managing many things from the servers to the transformation of pedagogical information. And the security of the system is very important because this is the information of very young students, and you have to keep in mind that the scale of this product is the whole country: It’s like how can you build a product that is born and then immediately you are walking and running?

The scale of this product is the whole country: It’s like how can you build a product that is born and then immediately you are walking and running?

We also found lots of new things that I’ve never encountered before. Each and every day we’ve found new demands, and everyday we’ve done user tests.  Normally, it should take at least 2-3 months to understand the demands and requirements, and then we have to present that to the policymaker so they understand it, and then they can approve our plans. Then the design; then the development; then the testing. But this time there is no “then” at all. We have done everything simultaneously.

We also have a very complex education system and that created other challenges. In the same school, under the same registration, there are different versions of the school, a Bangla and an English version, and there are multiple shifts, in the morning and in the evening. Then there are different boards. We have two boards – Madras Education that is religious education and general education. Then more complexities come if some students change their religion, and we also found that some students in the adolescent period their gender even changed. We never encountered these kinds of issues before. We to address these changes, otherwise how can you produce a transcript for the same person who now has a different identity?

We also encountered that the parents can change. In some cases, the biological parents don’t accept the child, so a different person becomes the child’s guardian.  We have to address that because our system uses the national identity number given with the birth certificate, but without the consent of the parents or guardians, how can we identify a child? To address these kinds of things, we have to cooperate with other Ministries like the Ministry of Law and with the municipalities.  We never anticipated all these challenges, but luckily, I got the right team, and they produced the app within the timeline. It’s called NOIPUNNO and now teachers can find it in the google play store and use to record students’ performance and progress.

The soft launch was already done with the prime minister, and all the schools in Bangladesh will have to register with the system. They have to put in all the teachers, with each of the subjects and the class sections and then the students. This registration process will run for one week. Then the teachers will get the real time assessment application in three formats: a mobile app in two versions IOS and Android, and there will be an offline version, a desktop version, that they can just download it. Then everything will be updated, so there is also a browser version online. They can use it online everywhere. They can roam anywhere in the world. But we keep the geolocation of the teachers so that we can identify that they are the right person. For that, we have to take the biometrics of the teachers so that they can easily navigate the system and easily log-in every time.

Back in our system, we will be using artificial intelligence because we will have lots of information including basic information about day-to-day learning, like the progression and the achievements of the students. In addition, if students are absent from class, the evidence will be there. Assignments and performance records will also be submitted. We are accepting four different kinds of content from the teachers: images, document, PDF and videos. They can upload their own documents into the system for the evidence of the students’ performance. It will store the materials for at least a students’ life cycle, so there will be 12 years of records. The students can find their learning progression throughout that time.

We are accepting four different kinds of content from the teachers: images, document, PDF and videos. They can upload their own documents into the system for the evidence of the students’ performance. It will store the materials for at least a students’ life cycle, so there will be 12 years of records. The students can find their learning progression throughout that time.

TH: So the teachers are uploading the evidence from the different activities in which the students are involved, but they’re not doing it every day? 

SH:  Yes, it depends on the design of the learning experience. Completion may be five to ten classes, depending on the intensity of the experience. The teacher will collect all the evidence after the completion of the experience, but they will use this platform for attendance every day begining in 2024. We will also do cross checks to ensure reliability and build trust with the parents. Because if you do not attend a particular class, how can you produce this evidence? So there will be crosschecks like this at different points. Otherwise there will be blame issues. In Bangladesh, parents with powerful families may say “why isn’t my child getting this grade?” – even if they are not in school!  That can be happen. So these are some crosschecks so that the teacher can feel safe and so the evidence can support them.

TH: Can parents go on this platform, and see the evidence?

SI: The output will be like a report card for each of the subjects. Each student will get one report card. The teacher can download it and send it to the parents, e-mail it or print it. We are planning to share one ID for each student, but the parents will access it in Konnect where each student will have their own profile where they get the results as per policy guidance from ministry of education. But  no one can see it in public;  it will be a personalized sharing of the report card, and parents can see it from them there.

TH: How often do the report cards come out?

SI: Twice in a year. Summative assessment usually takes place in June and then the second assessment is after the annual exam in November and December; but meanwhile, there will be lots of continuous or formative assessments in the different subjects. But these summative assessments will be different from the previous ones. There won’t be any sitting and paper pencil -based examinations like before at the secondary level.  We have also conceptualized this summative assessment following formative assessment theories. There will be experiences, and each subject will get one day for a performance or they can arrange a fair; or they can arrange a panel discussion. They can showcase their project. There are lots of way they can demonstrate their performance.

TH: So the November, December period is a time when students will be involved in showcasing what they’ve learned in 10 different subjects?

SI: Exactly, but there will also be some preparation days as well for each subject. You might have a demonstration on the next Friday, and there will be two days reserved for preparation. Each of the subject usually gets three days of assessment, with two days of preparation. Those preparation days will also like tracked by the teacher – are the students taking the preparation well? That is part of the assessment as well because the collaboration, problem solving, and participation are also important. It’s not only about the final output. That is about a month for the performances. Before it was thirty to thirty-five days because there were many more subjects.

TH: There’s so much to talk about, but one thing I want to make sure I understand is that this is all obviously very dependent on the teacher, right? What is the situation of teachers in Bangladesh?

SI: The teacher is key.  In Bangladesh, I don’t think teaching is the preferred job for everyone. Most of the time, if someone doesn’t find a job, particularly in a decent area, they might come into the teaching profession. probably Its same In most part of the world even In the richest country like Finland!  The financial condition and the social status is not very high or low, but it’s in between, and I don’t see many of the teachers who are happy with their profession or their working hours, but as long they are living in their own neighborhood, it can compensate for some of the issues. In some jobs, you have to move from your city or your village, but in teaching, the government has said you can choose your own area where you can live, so you can work where you’re born or where the cost of living may be low. This is the good part. But the motivation is still very low and there are lots of changes coming up that need a higher level of motivation to implement. We can only hope that will happen because otherwise the system will collapse.

Fortunately, I have shared earlier that with the COVID response of our teacher they were like superheroes, so I hope they will embrace the change. Now we’re also developing this application that has been built-in monitoring mechanisms so we can track if any teacher falls behind; if they need support; if they need training; and we’re supporting them with more training online than ever. There are still the challenges in terms of socioeconomic condition that are not in our hands. It depends on lots of things – the politics, the economy, the rate of income, all the externalities –so we can just hope it will be okay in near future. But what is in our hands in the system we are hoping that the teachers will embrace it well.  But there are also some social pressures from the parents’ community who are not well aligned so we need to work on different avenues, like promoting awareness, and building the commitment of the parents and community towards the schools. There are lots of trust building issues remaining to work on, so I think the challenge is still there.

One interesting fact, though, is that most of our education institutions in the secondary level are private. 96% of the schools are private. They were established through local community fundraising. So there is a tendency of the community to contribute to the school. I hope if we can properly disseminate our plan and help people understand what the students will get through the curriculum changes, the community will be more involved, more responsible, more cooperative than ever.

TH: But is the platform for the private institutions as well?

SI: Yes! This platform is for all. There are some schools that are not even registered in the government system, and there are some teachers that are not regular teachers, but the school is just taking them in and sending them into the classroom, but our mission is to like include everyone. Our governments provides free textbook for all students until grade 10. So if any student gets any textbook, for any school, they should be evaluated or assessed by a teacher. We shouldn’t care whether this teacher is from government, from private, from NGO or is a regular staff member or not. If schools allow them to take a class, we allow them to be assessed. And the main operation will be done within these schools not above them. The policy level like ministry officials will just get necessary reports. They will have no control over the assessment, only the subject teacher can change or alter the assessment indicators if they want until certain time. This is how the system is developing from the ground up.

This week, Mohammad Shefatul Islam discusses the development and roll-out of online education platforms in Bangladesh. In the first part of this two-part interview, Islam talks about how he first got involved in edtech as a tutor and then describes how his work leading the development of several edtech platforms evolved during the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic. The second part of the interview will explore the recent roll-out of a platform to support the implementation of a new competency-based assessment system this year. Islam is a civil service official within the Ministry of Education, with primary responsibilities as a Lecturer in Economics in government colleges. For the past few years, he has been on assignment at the Ministry of ICT and Telecommunication working on a program known as a2i, a collaboration between the Ministry of ICT and the Ministry of Education to help shape the future of education in Bangladesh.

Islam has been a leading architect of the development of three different education platforms in Bangladesh: The Teachers Portal was established in 2013 to support blended learning and the development of teachers’ digital skills. Teachers can share presentations and teaching materials on the platform and access an online repository of multimedia materials. With over 600,000 registered, 60% of teachers from around the country have joined the Portal. Following the development of the Teachers Portal, Muktopaath was founded as an e-learning platform for educators and other professionals including doctors, police, and government administrators. In 2018, attention shifted to students and Konnect was founded as an “edutainment platform” to support the development of youth (13 – 18) through access to a safe digital environment that connects them to online and offline activities, educational materials, mentoring, advice, games and competitions. (K stands for Kishore, youth in Bengali.) All three platforms are featured in HundrED’s Global Collection of Innovations. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Hatch (TH): Can you first tell us a how you got involved in education?

Shefatul Islam (SI): I started my education career when I was an economics student at university. At the time, I was tutoring high school students in subjects like biology, chemistry and physics to help them prepare for their national exams. In some cases, the students had trouble understanding the material because they hadn’t had any experience with it, and they didn’t have the lab facilities to explore it. For example, it was hard for many students to imagine what’s happening inside our bodies – what happens to the pancreas when it’s infected? These concepts were really abstract for the students, and they would often ask me if there were more visual ways to explain the topics. I used to go to YouTube to look up some of these things, so then I thought, “why not develop these videos in our own language?” So I reached out to some of my friends and some of my professors who were working with creative technologies and multimedia, and I started creating my own audio-visual educational content and my own YouTube channel, “Science in our grip.” I’m not managing it anymore, but the content is still very relevant because I made it like “micro-content,” not so much following the curriculum, but focusing on basic ideas from different subjects like “how do our organs work?” and “how do x-rays work?” It got quite popular and then I got an offer from the Prime Minister’s Office to submit a proposal and get some funds to expand my work. They gave me a grant for about $20,000 (USD) so I was able to develop content for all of Bangladesh. That really started my passion for education.

After I graduated with my Masters in Economics, I joined the civil service. In the civil service, there are several career options, such as administration, police, taxation. There are also four technical fields: doctors, teachers, agriculturalists, and civil engineers. Initially, I worked at a degree college for nine months. Then I was appointed as attached officer at the a2i programme, which is a flagship program for digitalization under Prime Minister’s Office. Then, at a very early stage of my career, I joined the Prime Minister’s Office. Usually that takes about twelve years or a certain level of seniority, but they already knew my work, so I was able to overcome a lot of things. I was given the instruction “you have no protocol to follow, you are licensed to innovate.” This is how everything happened from there.

Right now, I am on assignment at the Ministry of ICT and Telecommunication, where I have joined a2i (Aspire to Innovate). a2i started in about 2008 as a program within the Prime Minister’s Office, but it grew as part of the development of the “Digital Bangladesh Campaign” which began in 2009. Over the next ten years, there have been several campaigns like this that have contributed to the development of a lot of the components for the ICT infrastructure, but they were developed in isolation and weren’t really connected.

TH: You’ve been involved in the development of several major online education platforms, what were they?

SI: First, we developed the Teachers Portal, and then we worked on another product called Muktopath – it’s a capacity development and e-learning platform for teachers. We started it after gathering teacher input on their professional development needs. Then we saw the need for a student platform with academic and entertainment content, and we created Konnect. Now, we’ve tried to integrate everything into an ecosystem where each platform supports the others.

My current team is called “The Future of Education” at a2i in Bangladesh. From this team, we support the Ministry of Education in curriculum development and the development of various educational platforms and tools like manuals, and other resources.

Recently, we have developed a blended education master plan for the whole government, including 13 ministries that support the Ministry of Education in learning, training, and capacity development. After COVID hit, we started collaborating with each ministry, leveraging their support for the education system, and this is how we are operating as a catalyst within the government. 

TH: Can you talk about how your work evolved during the COVID school closures?

SI: Even before the onset of COVID-19, we were developing a Business Continuation Plan (BCP) for Bangladesh. We recognized the potential risks when COVID-19 initially emerged in China and began spreading rapidly. Before it reached Bangladesh, government leaders, including the Prime Minister, [Sheikh Hasina] and her ICT affairs advisor [Sajeeb Wazed Joy] urged the Ministry of ICT to create a business continuity plan in case everything shut down. We were in the process of developing that plan and creating some kind of support system so that students and teachers could communicate, but we were never able to complete that plan before COVID struck Bangladesh. We only had about a week after the school shutdown to take action, so we developed television class content and broadcast it through the National Parliament’s television “Sangsad” TV channel.

We converted three schools in Dhaka into television studios including Dhaka Residential Model College, Cambrian School and College, and the Mohammadpur campus. These schools provided all the classrooms, the screens, and other necessary facilities. They also provided food since there was no food available in the restaurants. All of them were shutdown. There was no outside support at all. It was like fighting a war. Every day, we recorded content and then in the night we edited it for the television. And in the morning we would take the tape by bike to the national broadcasting center and just put in the cassette – it wasn’t even digital – and it would be live at 9 AM. The struggle was tremendous, but the commitment from the teachers was unprecedented. And the Minister of Education said, “Do whatever you need to do. I don’t care what it takes. The system should run.” 

It was like fighting a war. Every day, we recorded content and then in the night we edited it for the television. And in the morning we would take the tape by bike to the national broadcasting center and just put in the cassette – it wasn’t even digital – and it would be live at 9 AM.

TH: How many teachers were involved in producing the televised lessons?

SH: From primary to secondary, about 200 teachers were involved in taping the lessons for different subjects, and, on any given day, we had studios set-up at three schools where we were simultaneously recording educational content in different rooms. We recorded about 50 events a day, because, within each school, we were recording in different rooms. For example, we started at 8:00 AM, for every two hours, one class was recorded. Teachers were so fluent that they never needed any scripts. The just stood before the camera and started the class with the interactive smart board. It was very easy after two or three days because they became used to it. What inspired them most was recording the classes and they’d be very tired at the end of the day, but then they’d see themselves on television the next morning, and they became superstars in the country. After that we didn’t have to ask them again, they just kept coming. We also got a lot of requests from teachers who said “I can do this too!”

For example, one of our very influential teachers who had just retired shared her experience with me after she conducted a live session. She had lived in Dhaka her entire life and she’d taught thousands of students. She realized after appearing in the taped sessions that tens of thousands of students were joining her from different parts of the country. They were saying “Ma’am show me this,” “Ma’am tell me this,” and she was crying when she was telling me “I’ve never felt this kind of respect before. I didn’t realize I could be so influential.” It was very emotional.

TH: What happened after you got the televised classes up and running?

SH: Then we had all this recorded content, but the television station couldn’t store it, so we started putting it online. Konnect was our key platform and we repurposed it to make it a repository. After the broadcast, if a student had missed they could just watch it from the platform. During the broadcast, in the newsline, at the bottom of the screen, we would include the information showing how to find the class on the Konnect platform. There was a big challenge at the time, with huge traffic from the all around the country, and our platform shut down for a few days, it was ready for all. We overcame that challenge, but that’s another story.

Then we thought of another plan to convert all our physical schools into online schools. To do that, we developed a framework for creating a school page that could be operated by teachers so every school could have its own page with its own name on Facebook. This way the teachers could offer live classes within structured times, and students could be seated at home and could join their different subject classes online. Teachers could then take these recorded classes and connect it to the Teachers Portal network so if any schools failed to provide live classes, their students could access the online classes from other teachers.

Konnectt’s  facebook page served as the central hub where we shared the daily class schedules for all subjects. Within this framework, we instructed schools on how to proceed, recognizing that we couldn’t reach everyone through a single page. Each school had its own set of students, teachers, and parents, along with established communication networks. So, we advised all schools to create their own parent communication channels and encourage them to share our classes. Alternatively, schools that were ready could conduct their own live classes on their pages. After about a month, most schools had set up their own pages, and they were using various platforms to communicate with their students. Not only Facebook, but they used Zoom, they used WhatsApp. They used Google Meet and lots of platforms to leverage the time during the school closures.

But not all teachers were ready. Not all of them had the necessary data, phones, or expertise, and after a couple of months, we saw that many students still remained untouched and unsupported. So we went through a blended process from online to also offline and we provided some assignments from the National Curriculum Textbook Board (NCTB). NCTB shortened the curriculum for that time to focus on essential skills and competencies for each subject. We developed some problems and assignments and broadcast those again on television and social media; we also sent messages to parents by SMS; and some teachers wore suits and masks to go door-to-door to find students who weren’t engaged in online activities. We did a lot of online training using our Teachers Portal platform. For that, the faculty from the Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) in Bangladesh were our key partners. There are fourteen of these TTCs in different parts of Bangladesh. They are very respected in their communities plus high school teachers generally go to them for training, so these faculty have influence over schools and teachers in their region. We distributed responsibility to the training colleges to train teachers in their own regions on what we called “online pedagogy” for the COVID-19 pandemic.  

First, we instructed the faculty because most of them were not ready either. Every night we discussed, “what processes could work?” and “what innovations were being done around the world or anywhere in the country?” After a short time, we developed a small synchronous online course and around 500 people joined from around the country. We also opened up what we were doing in the central office. People were watching what we were doing on Konnect and Facebook and they were asking “How are you managing these things?” It was never written anywhere, but we shared our experience, like “you can position your camera this way,” “don’t talk too much,” and “you should have someone assist you.”

We had three different strategies. The first was high-tech using the internet and television. The second was low-tech using radio and SMS messaging. Third was no tech, sharing the assignments and instructions for students to do on their own.

In the end, we had three different strategies. The first was high-tech using the internet and television. The second was low-tech using radio and SMS messaging. Third was no tech, sharing the assignments and instructions for students to do on their own. But it wasn’t just about rote memorization, it was about: what is happening around you? How is your family’s wellbeing? What can be done in the future? We used their context, their wellbeing, and their imagination as their assignment. Not “read chapter 1.” The context was very important to the assignments, following the standards and the competencies of each grade.

Next Week: “Supporting a shift to competency-based learning Bangladesh“

This week, the discussion of the evolution of the Olympia Schools continues with a focus on the school’s development since it moved to a new K-12 campus in 2010. Established initially as a small kindergarten in 2003 by Ms. Minh An Pham and several other parents, Olympia has grown to encompass a kindergarten and a primary, middle, and high school with a combined enrollment of 1,200 in Hanoi. The post is based on a conversation between Thomas Hatch and Minh An Pham (Co-founder, Board of Directors), Quoc Dan Tran (Head Of Mathematics Department, Vice-head of Academic Council), Dr.Thuc Anh Vo (Head of Foreign Languages Department; English teacher), and Thanh Ha Le (Head of Science & Technology Department). Last week’s post, The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam, covers the first part of this conversation.

This discussion builds on previous posts documenting the founding and evolution of a variety of different schools and educational programs including the development of the ETU School in China (Beyond Fear: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create New Schools), the Citizens Foundation in Pakistan (Expanding to Say “Yes”: The Ongoing Work of The Citizens Foundation in Pakistan), Second Chance in Liberia, (Accelerating Learning in Africa: The Expansion and Adaptations of Second Chance), and Fount of Nations in Malawi (Building equal learning opportunities for differently-abled children in Malawi: An interview with Patience Mkandawire on the evolution of Fount for Nations). Taken together, these post show how powerful educational experiences, often ones that deviate from conventional and “accepted” practice, can take off in all kinds of contexts.

Since 2010:  The “school of change”

In describing the Olympia School’s development since its move to a new campus, Ms. Pham and her colleagues called it “a school of change.” Every summer, they seem to be making repairs and improvements in their classrooms in the school environment, but they are also constantly changing and improving their curriculum. As I talked with Ms. Pham and her colleagues, however, I began to get a sense that Olympia could be termed “a school of incremental change” – a school striving to make a series of small changes and adaptations every year rather than radical leaps. Dr. Vo, Head of the Foreign Languages Department, described the steps toward interdisciplinary project-based learning since her arrival in 2015. “Every summer,” Dr. Vo told me, “we’ve been working on improving the program while teachers are on holiday.“ At first, she explained, English teachers might take 2 hours out of the 7 hours a week they spent with in class with their students; but gradually, they began working with other teachers to pursue a project where they might try to integrate another subject into the English projects. More recently, however, their project-based approach has grown as teachers from a number of different subjects work together to create projects that are truly interdisciplinary, pursued across subjects, in and out of school.

To illustrate, Dr. Vo described a sustainable development project organized around critical questions like: “Should we build more hydro-electric plants?” and “is hydro-electric power sustainable?” In the process, students explored issues in natural science, history, and geography by looking at how electricity is delivered to different communities in Vietnam and how the factories affect local life.  Students worked in a group to do a report – which they also had to write up in English. For math, students calculated costs and benefits. For economics, they had to develop a sustainable idea to present to their peers and teachers in a kind of competition (inspired by the show “Shark Tank”). Over the years, what might have begun as a project carried out in a subject like physics, has expanded to engage the whole school, culminating in an entire day devoted to sustainable development with a showcase where students at many different levels can share what they have learned.

Olympia has now reached a point where the process of developing a theme and guidelines for school-wide projects has become an integral part of their planning for the year. That planning includes collaborative meetings during the summer – and through weekly collaborative meetings throughout the school year – among all the teachers who look together at the national curriculum requirements, the school requirements, and the student needs in order to pick a theme for the year.  They then decide which over-arching questions to ask, which products to produce, and what kinds of assessments to have. Recently, they have begun engaging the students in the selection of the themes as well.  Last year, they selected the theme “learn smart, be happy, and go global.” As part of that effort, students designed a variety of different products including a “floating house” to help farmers deal with flood season and model of a ”smart home” with an alarm system for fire safety (which was covered on the VTV News).

Changing time

The school has also made some critical structural changes which have helped it to use time to support both students’ academic development and their wellbeing. For example, during the COVID-19 school closures, they planned their schedule taking into account both the content they needed to cover as well as concerns about the amount of time students needed to spend on their screens. Aided by the fact that the Vietnamese government reduced some of the requirements for content coverage, to reduce screen time, they decided to start the students’ day later and end earlier than normal; instead of scheduling periods back-to-back, they also gave students a break in between classes. In addition, they made room for movement activities in both the morning and the afternoon. Although many aspects of the schedule shifted back after the closures ended, the school has created a period after lunch when students can get more one-on-one support from their teachers and advisors. 

In order to meet the demands of the national curriculum and to prepare students for the entrance tests and university admissions requirements in the US, the UK and other countries, the school has also shifted their ninth grade – normally the last year of lower secondary school in Vietnam – into the first grade in high school (similar to the US).  As Ms. Pham explained, that move gave their 9th graders a chance to get acquainted with their high school program and to build a strong academic foundation; but it also created time in their schedule to take a number of elective courses and to choose an academic specialization in a subject of interest like social studies, psychology, or economics before they graduated high school. This arrangement enables students to prepare both for college entrance tests like the SAT or IELTS used in other countries and for the Vietnamese national exams in mathematics, literature, foreign languages, and natural sciences or social sciences (which can also be used for admission to Vietnamese universities).

Ultimately, this arrangement makes it possible for their students to participate in the school’s three different programs of activities: their academic program; an art, music, and physical education program (that is also reflected in their extra-curricular offerings); and their LIFE program (focusing on student wellbeing and social-emotional development).  With these changes, Olympia has now had thirteen graduating classes, with last year’s class including 76 graduates.

Managing resistance?

With such an unusual educational approach, some resistance and friction in a conventional system is to be expected, but the school has found ways to work with the larger system. Those efforts have included participating in some of Vietnam’s early efforts to explore competency-based learning as an alternative to “textbook-based” teaching in 2013. As part of a pilot project, the school’s science teachers began looking at how they could make their classes more experiential and active. Although they did not know it at the time, that project set them up well for the government’s announcement in 2017 that the whole country would shift to a competency-based curriculum.

Not surprisingly, the emphasis on testing and exams in the Vietnamese system has presented some constraints. In Hanoi, in particular, at the end of 9^th grade, students have to take an exam in Vietnamese language and in Mathematics to get a certificate to graduate and enter upper secondary school.  Naturally, many schools focus specifically on preparing their students for those tests. At Olympia, however, given that the 9^th graders are already part of the high school and almost all continue on to 10^th grade they submitted a proposal to the municipal government to use their own 9^th grade assessments in place of Hanoi’s 9^th grade graduation exams. Olympia’s approach included formative assessments such as projects and writing portfolios used throughout the year along with some traditional, summative exams at the end of the year. When Hanoi agreed to that proposal, Olympia was able to admit their students directly to Olympia high school without taking the city’s test. Since that time, many other private schools have followed suit with their own assessment approaches.

Olympia’s older students still face some exam pressures, but perhaps not as much as in some other systems because in Vietnam students are now allowed to use their grade point average for college admissions and, in some cases, they can use scores from the SAT’s or the IELTS for both entrance to college in Vietnam and in the US and elsewhere. In addition, students who began at Olympia in primary school have had instruction in English throughout their school year, and, as a result, are often able to take and pass the national exams in English well before their final year, further relieving some of the exam pressure that often coalesces at the end of students’ high school experience.

Even with a long record of getting their students into university in Vietnam and other countries, some resistance from parents, particularly those who are used to more conventional approaches, is inevitable.  As Ms. Pham described, “It’s very difficult to make all of the people satisfied. Some parents want to reduce the burden for their students, and others want to make sure their students are getting enough academics, and they want the teacher to make sure the students are doing their work and aren’t playing games.” In response, the school regularly spends time helping families understand what they school is doing and why. Those efforts include ongoing workshops for families that are designed to help parents learn how to support their children through different developmental stages and how to support them academically. “It’s only when parents don’t understand that they resist.,” Ms. Pham says, “and whenever we roll something out, we have a lot of meetings and workshops so we can listen to each other and work together to find a solution. We have a lot of opinions, but we agree that the teachers need support for the children.”

On to the next stage…

“This is a time for the school to enter a new stage. We’ve been through the “setting up” stage; we’ve made changes to the curriculum; and now it’s time for a focus on innovation and improving our quality.” 

When our conversation turned to the next steps for the school, Ms. Pham and her colleagues pointed to deeper learning as a critical point of emphasis. As she put it, they want to see students applying their knowledge and really understanding what they are learning and why they are learning it. As part of that emphasis, the teachers are working on developing interdisciplinary projects and on learning how they can use ChatGPT productively to help teachers teach the content and to be more student-centered at the same time. Ms. Pham summed it up this way: “This is a time for the school to enter a new stage. We’ve been through the “setting up” stage; we’ve made changes to the curriculum; and now it’s time for a focus on innovation and improving our quality.”

This week, IEN features a conversation with Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves about their new book: The Age of Identity: Who Do Our Kids Think They Are . . . and How Do We Help Them Belong?. Shirley is a Professor recently retired from Boston College and a scholar of educational change who helps schools around the world to improve teaching and learning. Hargreaves is a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Research Professor at Boston College in the US, he advocates for equitable and inclusive education, a strong teaching profession, and positive educational change worldwide. For previous conversations with Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves see Five Paths of Student Engagement: An Interview with Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves on “Moving: A Memoir of Education and Social Mobility.”

IEN: Why this book, why now?

Dennis Shirley & Andy Hargreaves (DS/AH): Our book started with collaborative research we conducted in the Canadian province of Ontario when the Ministry of Education had for the first time made student well-being and inclusion a policy priority. We were surprised by how frequently educators brought up the topic of students’ identities as part of the way they were promoting well-being.  Educators told us that they were transforming their pedagogies and curricula to address the needs of their Indigenous, learning disabled, and LGBTQ+ students, in particular. As we were in the throes of starting to write the book, there was then an outbreak of culture wars and identity politics. We had been studying something inclusive that, in some ways, had become divisive and we now realized that our research had something of value to say about all this. We hope that our book will help us get beyond the polarized time of outrage and indignation in which we now find ourselves.

IEN: What did you learn in working on this book that you didn’t know before?

DS/AH: We already knew that it always matters to engage with those who are different from us. What we weren’t entirely clear about is just how complex identity issues are for young people now.  It’s inevitable that when dealing with issues of representation, there will be some box ticking, or homi\ng in only on the oppressed aspects of people’s identities. However, that just scratches the surface of identity matters today.

For instance, in a recent Canadian presentation that one of us made, there was one black person in a room of white people. Having his racial identity affirmed mattered to him, but he is also a gay American photographer living in Canada who restores old Lambretta scooters with his partner.  In circumstances like this it is essential to create openings where people can reveal and share their identities on their own terms.The Age of Identity adds to the literature on intersectionality with the idea of “conflicting intersectionality.”  This refers to the ways one can be an oppressor in some respects and oppressed in others. It means that dividing groups rather than actions into mutually exclusive categories of oppressors and oppressed can be misleading and often provokes a backlash.

[D]ividing groups rather than actions into mutually exclusive categories of oppressors and oppressed can be misleading and often provokes a backlash.

IEN: What’s happened since you completed the book?

DS/AH: A lot. The October 7 terrorist attack in Israel, the ensuing war in Gaza, and the horrific casualties have polarized educators and pushed yet more identity issues onto the front pages. It’s easy to reduce the conflict to simple binaries:  Jews versus Arabs, Judaism against Islam, Israelis versus Hamas, colonizers versus the colonized, and so on. This has led to all kinds of demonization, reciprocal name-calling, and silencing in our schools and higher education institutions.

At the same time, reason and reconciliation show some signs of breaking out in other parts of the world. Following the advocacy of a Conservative politician who lost her son to suicide, the Canadian province of Ontario, has made mental health a compulsory subject in the high school curriculum. Meanwhile, the Conservative government in England has issued Draft Guidance on Gender Questioning Children for schools that is being broadly received as promising and practical, if not yet perfect, because it makes determined efforts to reconcile the rights and concerns of different groups. These efforts include the security and integrity of transgender students, the protection of safe spaces for cisgender girls, and parents’ rights to know about their children’s movements towards transition and self-identification in school.  The guidance also supports educators’ professional judgments about when and how best to inform parents, while alerting school staff to circumstances where parents and other caregivers may be abusive, neglectful, or transphobic.

Our challenge in these times is to try to see past the simplifications and the caricatures that have spread intolerance in our school and college campuses, to acknowledge the full humanity of others. There’s more to everyone than meets the eye.  Education has a key role to play because it should assist us all to open our minds and our hearts to one another. We hope that our book makes a contribution to this effort.

Our challenge in these times is to try to see past the simplifications and the caricatures that have spread intolerance in our school and college campuses, to acknowledge the full humanity of others.

IEN: What are a few of the key implications for policy/practice?

DS/AH: We need new narratives of inclusion and new tools that create a sense of belonging. Many approaches focus too much on who or what is responsive to this group or that group and not enough on the idea that what is essential for some kids is often good for all of them. Likewise, a lot of culturally responsive teaching can devolve into promotion of particular identities, rather than adopting the larger principle of embracing the whole child in a whole school. In general, we advocate much more self-determined learning, in which students can discover for themselves what’s important to their own and each other’s identity. In the book, we provide strategies and tools that will help educators understand colleagues, parents, and students who are different from them more effectively. It’s essential today to manage debates and differences about identity issues with civility and dignity.

IEN: What’s next — what are you working on now?

DS/AH: We are working with groups and systems to help them address identity issues and to increase students’ sense of belonging in their schools. There’s a lot of good work going on by dedicated professionals, even in those US states where educators’ freedom to teach about racism and sexism is circumscribed. We hope that by opening up space to talk about the full scope of what it means to be fully human that we can find ways of addressing controversial topics and promoting students’ identities at one and the same time.

We hope that by opening up space to talk about the full scope of what it means to be fully human that we can find ways of addressing controversial topics and promoting students’ identities at one and the same time.

We also have other projects that we’re working on.  Dennis is writing up research on the interaction of educational change, technological innovation, and the future of work that he conducted as a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. Andy is starting on a second edition of Professional Capital, with Michael Fullan, and is continuing to lead the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory, an international network of policy makers, educators, and researchers committed to advancing human rights in education.

In spite of the many challenges, we find this to be an exciting time to be in education.  We continue to draw inspiration from the many colleagues and students around the world who are drawn to our indispensable profession.

This week’s post features the work of Phương Minh Lương and Tine S. Prøitz. They are two of the participants in this month’s issue of Lead the Change, which brings together interviews with four members of a virtual convening on Education System (Re)Building for Equity and Social Justice in Teaching and Learning organized by Amanda Datnow, Vicki Park, Don Peurach, and Jim Spillane, with the support of the Spencer Foundation. Next week’s post will feature interviews with two other participants, Amelia Peterson and Maria Teresa Tatto. The convening, with virtual meetings in May and June of 2023, was designed to help establish “a cross-national community of scholars whose members take appreciative, critical, and practical perspectives on advancing educational access, quality, and equity by (re)building education systems.” To continue the discussions begun during the convenings, we invite those attending Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April to join the conversation with Minahil Assim, Thomas Hatch, Phương Minh Lương, Don Peurach, and Tine Prøitz at a symposium for AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group – Equity and Educational Transformation in a Cross-National Perspective. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.

Phương Minh Lương

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” Can you tell us how your work on educational transformation responds to this call?

Phương Minh Lương (PHL): I have contributed to Vietnam’s educational transformation for the past 23 years as a researcher, teacher and social activist. I have participated in a number of studies addressing educational reform and equity in educational access for disadvantaged children including Research on Improving System of Education in Vietnam (2017-2023) and a national study on developing high-quality human resources for ethnic minorities in Vietnam through pre-service and in-service training systems (2023-2025). These research projects involve close collaboration with policy makers from the Ministry of Education and Training and have informed the country’s educational policies and contributed to curriculum and intervention programs for educational quality improvement, particularly for disadvantaged groups.

I have also drawn on this research to develop equity-driven curriculum with an emphasis on achieving Sustainable Development Goal No 4. This work involved specific efforts to educate both master’s students and undergraduates to become agents of change through courses like human rights and national policies, human rights and social justice, civil society organizations, community development, and world of gender. 

As a social activist, I have initiated a series of community development projects and a field research internship for both Vietnamese and international students. These projects have been conducted in cooperation between Hanoi University and some non-government organizations such as Aid et Action, Plan International, and Action on Poverty. Via these projects, we have gradually fueled students’ sense of responsibility and accountability of securing wellbeing for less advantaged communities in Vietnam and worldwide.

As a teacher educator, I have provided in-service training courses for teachers at different educational levels. With funding from International non-government organizations like ActionAid International Vietnam, Save the Children, and UNICEF, we have jointly developed culturally relevant teaching methods and textbooks for ethnic minority students in disadvantaged areas in Vietnam.  All in all, social justice and equity are deeply imbued in my work. The intersection of research, teaching and service-learning projects has supported the achievement of access to a more equitable, inclusive, and quality education for disadvantaged students in Vietnam.

The intersection of research, teaching and service-learning projects has supported access to a more equitable, inclusive, and quality education for disadvantaged students in Vietnam.

LtC: How do you define and operationalize equity (and/or social justice) in your work?

PHL: Recognition means treating cultural claims as if they are a question of morality and justice. In this sense, education needs to ensure that all students’ claims of respect, dignity, and esteem are seen as equal individual rights. Here, recognition is treated as “one fairly specific form of moral and political relations between the state and its citizens” (Patten, 2017, p. 163). The paradigm of recognition can encompass not only movements aiming to revalue unjustly devalued identities but also deconstructive tendencies rejecting the “essentialism” of traditional identity politics (Fraser & Honneth, 2003).

Redistribution concerns the distribution of economic opportunities and resources considering cultural identities and differences. As such, it “encompasses not only class-centered political orientations… but also socioeconomic transformation or reform as the remedy for gender and racial-ethnic injustice” (Fraser & Honneth, 2003, p. 12). Accordingly, inequity includes both deprivation (being denied an adequate financial resource) or marginalisation (being confined to an undesirable or poorly allocated budget). Representation encompasses authoritative engagement and active participation in decision-making for a certain group in society. Recognition is reflected in the ‘representation’ dimension in which claims and power positions of different individuals and groups are acknowledged equally by having their voices heard and by their participation in any policies and programs related to their benefits and rights (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). This means that representation can be examined in terms of sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and location of participants in the education system.

Although equity and justice are recognized in Vietnam’s legal framework at the institutional level, they have not been operationalized effectively at the organizational and individual levels.

From this perspective, the concept of justice is seen to secure sustainable equity for all in systems where those in power are held accountable for equal treatment for all, while rights-holders are empowered to actively claim their deserved equal rights and opportunities.

With this understanding of equity and justice, I’ve undertaken research, teaching and development projects with a constructivist and human right-based approach. In that approach, both those in power and rights-holders are empowered to address the structural inequities in the system in terms of redistribution, recognition and representation, and the development of their personal commitments and capacities.

LtC: What is a core issue/challenge you are grappling with in your work related to systems and/or equity and social justice?  

PHL: Although equity and justice are recognized in our legal framework at the institutional level, they have not been operationalized effectively at the organizational and individual levels. At the organizational level, for example, the Educational Management Information System (EMIS) has been quite weak in Vietnam. As a consequence, it has been difficult to collect and analyse the ethnicity related information/data needed to address equity in terms of financing/ budgeting and investments/ procurement/ bidding procedures. This situation makes it difficult for me and others to carry out research that generates adequate knowledge and data for developing effective policies and practices related to equitable access to quality and inclusive education.

At the individual level, we need a better professional development and pre-service and in-service teacher training system so that teachers can learn how to secure equity and justice in their work. For instance, as lecturers, we have not been trained to use formative assessments effectively to make sure students from different backgrounds, particularly those from disadvantaged groups, do not fall behind. As a result, it is understandable that our policy makers and practitioners in the educational system do not have the capacity to put the legal framework of equity and justice into practice effectively.

LtC: What can researchers and practitioners of educational change learn from your work?

PHL: In Vietnam’s educational system, we promote equity and justice in ways relevant to our socio-cultural & political context. One of the most effective ways to transform our system is to engage policymakers and concerned stakeholders in our research, teaching and community development projects. For example, my research on equity in educational access for children of migrant workers in the industrial zones in Vietnam provides findings for my courses like “Human Development and Sustainable Development Goals” and “Social Policies.” Within these courses, we cooperated with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to deliver a Responsible Business Communication Campaign to advocate for companies to secure the equal right to quality education for children of their migrant workers.

I am also active in networks with international scholars from the USA, UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan in research and teaching related to equity and justice issues on both a national and global scale. These collaborations enable me to see equity and justice from different perspectives and in different contexts and helps me to develop a socio-culturally relevant concept of equity and justice within Vietnam’s context. This puts equity and justice forward as principles and goals that can be achieved with collective action in a synergy and socio-cultural ecology of concerned stakeholders.

Tine S. Prøitz

Lead the Change (LtC): You were a participant in a recent convening to share and examine work around the world on equity, social justice, and educational transformation, and The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” Can you tell us how your work on educational transformation responds to this call?

Tine S. Prøitz (TSP): My work relates to the conference theme through investigations of how education systems are developed in education policy and in practice with an aim to provide equal educational possibilities for all students. My work primarily focuses on the education systems of Norway and Sweden that have traditionally been associated with welfare systems characterized by universal rights including free access to public education. These countries rank high on comparative measures on equity in education (Blossing et al., 2014) and are considered successful in equal access to education and learning opportunities for all (Frønes et al. 2022). Even so, international studies show that the Nordic countries are experiencing increasing inequalities along several dimensions where socio-economic status and other background factors influence student’s academic achievement (Frønes et al 2022). As a result, many are asking if the Nordic countries can maintain a ‘School for All’ in the face of increasing diversities and social inequalities, globalization and other changing conditions (Lundahl, 2016; Telhaug et al., 2006).

Can Nordic countries maintain a ‘School for All’ with increasing diversities and social inequalities, globalization and other changing conditions?

Furthermore, the differences among the Nordic countries in terms of the degree of privatization, demographic characteristics and the governing of schools indicates that a rise in inequality relates to complex issues. In an ongoing comparative and mixed method research project (CLASS-Comparisons of leadership autonomy in school districts and schools) I am working with colleagues in Norway, Sweden and Germany to look into some of the complexity. We focus on how the relationships between education leaders in municipalities, school districts and in schools open or close education opportunities for all. By studying how educational leaders work with inclusion and assessment can help to reveal how education opportunities for students are constructed differently under varied framings of education systems.

We are also studying structures for collaborative knowledge development in education. Here equality is interesting in terms of how actors in education in different contexts can become involved in the nexus between education policy and practice (Prøitz et al. 2023). I am currently looking into new ways of working in research practice partnerships (RPPs). In these studies, we are exploring how to challenge traditional asymmetrical power relations and hierarchical structures by, for example, valuing practitioner´ experience-based knowledge equally with research based knowledge without compromising scientific quality.

We are exploring how to challenge traditional asymmetrical power relations and hierarchical structures by, for example, valuing practitioners´ experience-based knowledge equally as research-based knowledge without compromising scientific quality.

LtC: How do you define and operationalize equity (and/or social justice) in your work?

TSP: Taking a systems perspective involves the investigation of what education systems consist of and also how different system elements can influence what practitioners do, in terms of creating and limiting opportunities for action. From such a perspective, equity can be understood: as equity in terms of opportunity and choice; access and admission; results and outcomes; and treatment and adaption. In the Nordic setting, historically, equity has been viewed as everybody being the same, but today’s approach to equity tends to treat everyone as unique, with a focus on equivalence and the appraisal of individual autonomy, diversity, and merit (Aasen 2007; Prøitz & Aasen 2017). In the CLASS-project, we are looking at what approach to equity is promoted in policy and  in the practice of education leaders.

In the Nordic setting, equity in education has traditionally been understood as everybody being the same, while today’s understanding of equity tends to consider everybody as unique and is more of a question of equivalence and the appraisal of individual autonomy, diversity, and merit.

In the context of RPPs we are emphasizing the concept of equality in participation and involvement between all partners of the research practice partnerships. Equal here refer to having the same powers to be involved in decision making about common aims and goals, but without having to be involved in all parts of the research activities. Partners in RPPs often have different roles and competences of varied relevance in the stages of the work of the RPP (Prøitz & Rye 2023).

LtC: What is a core issue/challenge you are grappling with in your work related to systems and/or equity and social justice?  

TSP: The recent developments in the Nordic countries challenge basic ideas of the Nordic education model as a universal welfare good for all students (Telhaug et al. 2006); it also  puts the “one public school for all” principle under pressure and thereby the national curriculum and the national quality development system as well (Dieude 2023). Consequently, our research takes as a core issue how public education systems develop and handle education opportunity for all under changing circumstances. These changing circumstances include more heterogenic and diversified populations with new expectations, more individual rights-oriented students and parents, teachers striving to handle more complex student populations with varied needs, and governments with different focus and shifting conceptions of equity. Our CLASS-studies of education leader autonomy, so far shows how the recognition of a growing number of individual rights challenges education leaders´ autonomy as they try to secure the rights of all students. Preliminary findings also show that education leaders experience more autonomy when it comes to supporting the involvement and participation of all students in schools, an issue high on the agenda in both policy and in practice and one that takes a lot of education leaders´ time and attention. Issues that I grapple with right now in these concrete studies include the classic question of how today’s public education system can balance the needs of the individual with the broader needs of the collective and the society. From a more long-term perspective, although I highly value the idea of a public education systems for all, I wonder: is a public education system for all a realistic idea for the future? If so, what will it take to sustain it?

Is public education systems for all a realistic idea for the future? If so what will it take to sustain it?

LtC: What can researchers and practitioners of educational change learn from your work?

TSP: I hope that the work I’ve shared in publications and in meetings with scholars, teachers, school leaders, administrators, and policymakers can inspire a renewed discussion of what education systems we construct and what we need to do to build sustainable systems with education opportunities for all. I hope to raise awareness and debate on what we mean by equity as well as by equivalence in today’s education systems. Building on the Nordic model’s more traditional meanings of equity in terms of opportunity and results does not seem to meet the challenges of today. Identifying further steps and potential solutions for more equitable education systems will require collaborations between researchers and practitioners. I hope that the work on RPPs may contribute to ways of working more closely together for educational change.

About the Interviewees:

Phương Minh Lương is a lecturer and coordinator of the Master Program of Global Leadership of Vietnam Japan University (Vietnam National University). She is also a collaborating researcher with the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences (Ministry of Education and Training). Her expertise and work focuses on Education, Development and Sustainability, specifically, securing human rights, equity and social justice, wellbeing and sustainable development for People, Family, and Community through theories of recognition, agency development, and socio-cultural ecological transformation. She has been a trainer of teachers and educational managers related to teaching methods and sustainable development issues for the past 18 years for several international non-governmental organizations. Her publications have primarily focused on internationalization and intercultural competence in higher education, green skills and labour market, equity, justice and sustainable developments.

Tine S. Prøitz is a professor of education science at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her research interests are in the fields of education policy and education practice, education systems studies, and comparative studies with an emphasis on actor relations and actor collaborations. Prøitz is currently the principal investigator of the CLASS-Comparisons of leadership autonomy in school districts and schools project and she is the vice dean of research at the Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Sciences.

References (PHL):

Fraser, N. (2003), Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition, and participation. In N. Fraser & A. Honneth (Eds.), Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange (pp. 7-109). Verso.

Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (Eds.). (2003). Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange (pp. 7- 109). Verso.

Patten, A. (2017). Equal recognition: The moral foundations of minority rights. Princeton University Press.

References (TSP):

Aasen, P. (2007). Equality in Educational Policy: A Norwegian Perspective. In Teese, Lamb & Duru-Bellat (eds.) International studies in educational inequality, theory and policy (pp. 460-475). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Blossing, U., Imsen, G., & Moos, L. (2014). Nordic schools in a time of change. In U. Blossing, G. Imsen, & L. Moos (Eds.), The Nordic education model. A ‘school for all’ encounters neo- liberal policy (pp. 1–14). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Dieudè, A. (2023). Private school policy and practice in Norway: Governing private schools: State funding and standardisation. Phd-thesis University of South-Eastern Norway.

Frønes, T. S., Pettersen, A., Radišić, J., & Buchholtz, N. (2020). Equity, equality and diversity in the Nordic model of education (p. 412). Springer Nature.

Lundahl, L. (2016). Equality, inclusion and marketisation of Nordic education: Introductory notes. Research in Comparative and International Education, 11(1), 3–12.

Prøitz, T. S., & Rye, E. (2023). Actor Roles in Research–Practice Relationships: Equality in Policy–Practice Nexuses. In Prøitz, T. S., Aasen, P., & Wermke, W. (eds.)From Education Policy to Education Practice: Unpacking the Nexus (pp. 287-304). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Prøitz, T. S., & Aasen, P. (2017). Making and re-making the Nordic model of education. In The Routledge handbook of Scandinavian politics (pp. 213-228). Routledge

Prøitz, T. S., Aasen, P., & Wermke, W. (2023). Education policy and education practice nexuses. In Prøitz, T. S., Aasen, P., & Wermke, W. (eds.) From Education Policy to Education Practice: Unpacking the Nexus (pp. 1-16). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Telhaug, A.O., Asbjørn Mediås, O., & Aasen, P. (2006). The Nordic model in education: Education as part of the political system in the last 50 years. Scandinavian journal of educational research, 50(3), 245-283.

In the second part of this 2-part interview, Hirokazu Yokota shares what he’s learned from his experience working on a municipality-led educational reform effort in Japan. In the first part of the interview, Yokota describes the background and key elements of the reform effort from his perspective as deputy superintendent and director for education policy at the Toda City Board of Education. In April, Yokota will return to his regular posting as a government officer at the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Yokota has previously written about his experiences as a parent and educator during the pandemic (A view from Japan: Hirokazu Yokota on school closures and the pandemic) and his work as a policymaker and government officer at Japan’s Digital Agency (A view from Japan (part 2): Hiro Yokota on parenting, education and the new Digital Agency in Japan). The graphics included in these posts are drawn from a slide show on Education Reform in Toda City.  For further information on the Today City reforms see the slide show or contact Hiro via Linkedin.

IEN: In the first part of our interview, you talked about the goals and key elements of the Toda City education reforms, but can you tell us a bit about what you learned in the process? 

Hirokazu Yokota: Through dialogues with educators in Toda City, I learned that they have a mixed feeling toward this aggressive education reform. Although change is necessary, some might regard it as the negation of their past – sometimes successful – practices. That reminds me of the PISA shock around 2003; when Japan’s ranking substantially fell in the midst of the implementation of a child-centered learning reform, and the addition of a significant amount of learning content with the revision of the Courses of Study (national curriculum standard). Rather than throwing away past things altogether, we should not forget the spirit of “continue past things and pioneer the future while developing them.”

For example, whether it’s ICT education or generative AI or anything new, teachers will not change their practices no matter how many times they are told by Boards of Educations or principals until they understand it’s necessary and beneficial to them. Therefore, we put so much effort into letting teachers actually use ICT in professional development opportunities and experience the merit of it. Then, they became strong promoters. 

Whether it’s ICT education or generative AI or anything new, teachers will not change their practices no matter how many times they are told by BOEs or principals until they understand it’s necessary and beneficial to them. 

Another important thing was that because there are more and more young teachers who tend to lack a common foundation for teaching and learning, we were faced with the need to re-emphasize the Subject Education (“S” of our SEEP Project). That’s why we created the Plan for Strengthening Subject Education in May 2023. The key concept here is that student learning is analogous to teacher learning. So, in order to realize individually optimized and collaborative learning for students, we, through professional development and other means, need to provide these learning opportunities for teachers.

The last big issue is absenteeism. The figures released last October show we hit a record high of 299,048 – with a remarkable increase of 22.1% from the previous year. In order to tackle this problem, in March 2022, we published the Toda-Version Alternative Plan, which aims at an education where nobody will be left behind. What we’re essentially doing is to prepare choices of various learning places. In the last fiscal year, because the number of absentees at the elementary level has been rapidly increasing, we set up in-school support rooms (“Palette Room”) in all the 12 elementary schools for students who are experiencing challenges in the classroom. Depending on their situation, they can choose to participate in classroom lessons virtually from the Palette Room or physically during the day. Also, when some students cannot stay in their classroom due to their developmental issues, they can visit the Palette Room to cool themselves down before returning to their classroom. I also saw an immigrant student, who cannot understand Japanese well, spend some time at the Palette Room to receive one-on-one instruction for a few months, and after then they can keep up with classroom lessons and stop using the Palette Room. In short, students, in consultation with teachers, have the freedom to use this room whenever it fits for them.

 Additionally, we expanded our education center and established a student support room that accommodates junior high school students in a high school. Furthermore,  with the help of a non-profit, we also set up an online education center in the metaverse for children who mostly stay at home and cannot go outside. Our policy measures are unparalleled to any municipal BOE in Japan, and have gotten a lot of attention from the media (including in Forbes, NHK News Web, and the MEXT website).

IEN: What advice do you have for others who might want to pursue a similar approach, whether in Japan or other parts of the world? 

Hirokazu Yokota: I understand that it is very, very difficult to change others. In order to make transformational change in education for students, we should be mindful that change must start with us adults. The typical relationship between the BOE and schools is resistant to these changes, with the board urging schools to make visible changes while educators in schools are fed up with new things imposed from above. We as a BOE wanted to change this image. Thus, the BOE changed first by going outside of the education circle and bringing new movements of the society into our office. This is because in order to implement our SEEP project (as is mentioned in the last post), there is no way but to collaborate with private companies, public sectors and research institutions. At the beginning, BOE officers stopped trying to provide all the contents by themselves, collected raw materials in collaboration with outsiders, “cooked” with these, and then, in a sense, provided schools with the “cuisine” (e.g. BOE reached out to private companies that have contents of programming education, created a curriculum in collaboration with them, and implement it in schools). Gradually, as principals understood that they can do these new things without being threatened, schools became cooks themselves with raw materials provided by the BOE (e.g. schools adjusted their annual curriculum plan so that they can provide programming education in a more coherent way). In this way, principals gradually began to see the benefits and started to change themselves, then this change also spread out to teachers and finally classrooms. Although one teacher can change his or her practice, when it comes to systemic change, I don’t think the transformation comes from the right to the left. It should happen the other way around – BOEs should change first. Additionally, I’m sometimes surprised by the fact that schools, in addition to being cooks, even prepare raw materials by themselves (e.g. some schools reach out to outside experts on programming education without BOE’s involvement, and invite them to their in-school professional development session) . Because there are so many “cooks” in the education governance, which means each stakeholder tries to intervene in school reform in an incoherent way, our approach of giving autonomy to schools while providing support is indispensable. 

In addition, what makes education policy complicated is its governance system. Also in Japan, there are many reformists who say “Our schools are broken. Let’s fix it.” However, as there are more and more cooks in the kitchen, making coherent and sustainable policies becomes more challenging. That’s why we as a BOE have so much respect for school principals and give them considerable autonomy so that they, with the deepest understanding of individual students, can be engaged in school reform themselves. I believe that school can be reformed only from within and truly important education reforms should happen from schools, not from MOE or BOEs. In order to realize that, management by BOE should shift from “one-size-fits-all control” to “individual support” and BOEs should be institutions that accompany schools and support their self-propulsion.

School can be reformed only from within, and truly important education reforms should happen from schools, not from MOE or BOEs. In order to realize that, management by BOE should shift from “one-size-fits-all control” to “individual support,” and BOEs should be institutions that accompany schools and support their self-propulsion.

IEN: What’s next? What are you working on or hoping to work on now? 

Hirokazu Yokota: When I had looked at this Toda City before I joined as a deputy superintendent, I had the impression that it’s essentially a top-down reform with strong leadership from the superintendent. However, after being assigned by the Education Ministry to work here, I realized that I was mistaken. Although the BOE was running alone at the beginning of this reform (Stage 1), we’re now in Stage 2 (accompaniment) – many people within the BOE and schools have the same reform vision as the superintendent, and the BOE accompanies schools so that they can do cooking with raw materials provided by the BOE. Now, I have a feeling that we’re stepping into Stage 3 (self-propulsion) in which schools can prepare raw materials from scratch. What strikes me is that all the 18 schools in our jurisdiction are becoming leading schools that welcome visits from outsiders, as opposed to only a few leading schools and many other old-fashioned ones.

Through a dialogue with schools, I noticed that there are many things that schools want to do if and only if they have more money. Actually, my division’s budget accounts for only 4% of the total education budget of Toda City. With this budget constraint, what I came up with is essentially fundraising by the BOE. We ask our schools to submit ambitious reform proposals, and rather than expecting individual schools to do all the fundraising for their initiatives, we as a BOE collect money for them. We collected 5 million yen in the last fiscal year, and we distributed it to each school to implement. Although an exception for now, I believe this approach will also spread gradually, as the financial condition of governments has become even more challenging recently, and it will continue to be challenging in the future.