Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer

Instructors

Iveta Silova

PhD from Columbia University, Professor and Director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at ASU. Her research has focused on the study of globalization, post-socialist transformations, and knowledge production and transfer in education. More recently, Iveta has been exploring the intersections of post-socialist, postcolonial, and De colonial perspectives in comparative education to envision education beyond Western modernity.

Jeremy Rappleye

PhD from University of Oxford, Associate Professor at Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University. He has previously taught and studied in mainland China (Yale-China Teaching Fellow, Zhongshan University) and Taiwan (National Taiwan University). His early work focused on the politics and processes of educational transfer in East Asia, situated within wider debates over neo-institutionalism (world culture theory). More recently, his research aims to overcome divisions between philosophy and empirical social science on the one hand, and Western (predominantly Anglo-American) perspectives and non-Western perspectives on the other.

Course description

Over the past four decades, the dominant understanding of education policy has shifted dramatically.  In the past, education policy was seen as a product and reflection of particular historical, social, economic, and cultural configurations of a given country. Today, policy is increasingly understood as heavily influenced by global forces, so much so that policies ‘elsewhere’ are seen as possible reform options. Nevertheless, purportedly ‘global forces’ most often find their origins in Western historical contexts, institutional arrangements, and cultural scripts. While some education researchers have recognized the problems inherent in such Western-centric assumptions-turned-approaches, few attempts have been made to imagine how to move beyond the Western horizon in education policy studies. This course aims to explore how we might reimagine education policy research beyond the Western horizon, with the aim of generating new genres of education policy work and new perspectives on our global world.

Following a brief historical overview of dominant approaches to education policy studies, we will offer students a new framework for policy transfer research that encourages engagement with values and implicit visions about the future. In particular, we will build on the work of Mignolo (2011) and other relevant texts to explore educational policy research in the context of five alternative future trajectories, including (i) re-westernization, (ii) de-westernization, (iii) global reorientation to the left, (iv) decoloniality, and (v) spirituality. Course readings, discussions, and assignments will draw on the work of philosophers, social scientists, and education researchers from both Western and non-Western contexts, combining empirical studies, case-studies, ethnographic and historical research. The primary goal of the course is to initiate a discussion about how to rethink the theme of global circulation of ideas (i.e., educational transfer) beyond the Western horizon and, in doing so, reflect on the often implicit values that underpin our own research.

Course Outline

Sign up for the course through the following two-dimensional code, we will distribute reading texts to students enrolling in this course.

Department of Education, East China Normal University

April 22nd, 2019