EdFix Episode 13: International Education, Globally Speaking

"Global education” builds cultural competencies, encourages the exchange of ideas and people, and develops human capital. Could the policies and practices of other countries shed light on ways to improve our own schools and colleges, especially in the neediest communities? Drs. James Williams and Laura Engel discuss lessons learned from abroad, how the U.S. is faring compared to other countries, and whether the rise of nationalism is leading to the end of the golden age of internationalization in education. 
 

TRANSCRIPT

LAURA ENGEL:
There's a reference that international education is the best form of grassroots diplomacy. I think that's part of the interest in mutual learning is that we can learn about ourselves and we can learn about others.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm Michael Foyer, and this is EdFix, your source for insights about the practice and promise of education. Welcome to Studio T. It's a pleasure to have Dr. Jim Williams and Dr. Laura Engel, who are both faculty members in our international education program here at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development. Jim Williams is a professor. He chairs the GW UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development. Jim's research covers issues regarding policies to improve education in low and middle income countries, the effects of education on conflict and social cohesion, and predictors of socioeconomic gradients.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Laura Engel is also a member of the faculty in international education, co-chairs the GW UNESCO Chair with Jim. And her work, which is funded by the National Geographic Society and other sources, focuses on such matters as the impacts of our DC Public School Study Abroad Program and Laura is also doing very interesting work on issues related to international comparisons of education. So welcome to EdFix. What are we preparing our students to be able to do when they come out with a degree that says education with a specialization in international education?

LAURA ENGEL:
Certainly. Well, thank you for having us. International and comparative education is about the cross-cultural exchange of ideas, of individuals. It is a focus on insights that we can get from comparing educational planning policy and practice across systems. It is the incorporation of global and cross-cultural perspectives into education, but I also think of it as... Well, international education is not an armchair field. It's a field of doing, it's a field of practice, it's a field of action. So I like to think about it as what our students do with this degree. We work in international education here at GW in three buckets. First is international higher education, so issues of study abroad and exchange at the higher education level.

LAURA ENGEL:
International education for development, which Jim could speak more eloquently about, has to do with education planning, policy practice in low and middle income countries. And the last bucket we could call K-12 global education, has to do with internationalizing schooling systems.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
As Laura mentioned, I'm particularly interested in the issues of helping education systems improve in a sense policy kinds of issues in poor countries and what can be done to assist but also to share experience and build up capacity. But there are as almost probably as many definitions of international and comparative education as there are international and comparative educators. There is a theoretical side to it informed by social science disciplines and other other things. But we tend to emphasize the practical.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Over the years, any kind of trends in the... first of all, in the attitudes of American born, American US students toward what's going on in other countries and an interest in this, quote unquote, 'internationalization' and the expansion of their own perspectives on the world. And similarly, whether you've noticed any kind of trends in the ways in which students from other countries think of American higher education and the attractiveness of coming here and spending some time.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
We get people who have had a significant international experience, high school and college travel gap year. Almost everyone that we get has had some international experience that... changed their lives is a bit strong, but that had a heavy influence on them. And so it's hard to tell if American students in general have shifted. Certainly our group is quite idealistic, quite passionate about the various things they want to do. So that's a hard one. And we also were in Washington, we're at an international university in many ways and so it's a little difficult to see the... In terms of international people, I would say the US higher education system is quite... from my observations, is quite attractive.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
But it has lost a bit of it's appeal. I'm told that some students in China, while many come to the US, many think carefully about the... They balance the career options they're likely to have, the quality of Chinese universities, of having the networks that help one get a job and such. And so those calculations are becoming more prominent I believe in different places. I spent a year in Southeast Asia recently on a Fulbright and they had indicated an interest in US higher education but a certain feeling of abandonment in terms of both foreign policy and higher education. And so there was... sure we're interested, but where are you?

LAURA ENGEL:
I was thinking about, with internationalization patterns, when you look at history of study abroad through much of the 20th century, it was an elite practice. It was to be cultured and civilized. You had, I'm thinking of some of the elite boarding schools in the '70s and '80s opening up study abroad, term abroad at the K-12 or secondary level. That has shifted in many respects. You think about post 911, internationalization was no longer an institutional opportunity but became in many respects, a national priority in a sense that we needed to develop cultural global competencies. We need to accommodate for flows of people.

LAURA ENGEL:
There is more of an acceptance for hybridity, multiple experiences, multiple belongings, multiple identities. It's an interesting time to be focused on international education with all that I've just said. And yet at the same time, the rise of nationalism and thinking about some of the resistance to these global orientations. And so some have started to question whether we're at... the golden age of international education has lost, I think that was the headline, has lost its sheen. So it's being debated right now.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
I totally agree. And I would say that for many countries, international study, it depends on which countries. The wealthy countries tend to see international study as a finishing, a compliment, a development of these global competencies and that sort of thing, an enrichment. Whereas poorer countries tend to see it more, individuals and the countries themselves, as human capital formation, as a way of enhancing skills and knowledge for individual or national advancement. And so I think those are complimentary. They're both important still, but China has higher ranked physics departments than the US and so the US preeminence is being challenged in some ways.

LAURA ENGEL:
And there's some really interesting research on the rise of the global middle-class, which is looking at international education and that might be an IB, international baccalaureate school or it could be an international experience, an abroad experience as a way to give their children a competitive edge in an increasingly globalized environment. And so there's some really interesting research around the ways in which this has facilitated or maintained a sense of elitism and the gaps of inequality that we clearly see existing in many countries.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And it makes me wonder whether part of the benefit of an international education program is that we can learn from developing countries what to do in some of our most impoverished cities and localities here. Do you find that that's something that students get interested in also?

LAURA ENGEL:
I think there's a great interest in coming to international education for mutual learning opportunities. There's a reference that international education is the best form of grassroots diplomacy. I think that's part of the interest in mutual learning is that we can learn about ourselves and we can learn about others. So there's a diplomacy element to this. So I do think that students are very open and interested to learn about themselves, their own education system, whether that's the compulsory or higher education sector as well as other countries. There's a great openness to that.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to ask about the UNESCO Chair.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
The UNESCO Chair is a designation by UNESCO.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It stands for...

JAMES WILLIAMS:
United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was established along with the other UN systems at the end of World War II or after the end of World War II. US played a major role in establishing UNESCO, and it's the flagship organization dealing with education for the UN. UNICEF also plays a role in an education, but for children and much more narrowly focused in some sense. UNESCO has a broad, broad mandate. The UNESCO Chairs, they're probably seven or 800 around the world in various specialties. Some are in education. We are the second in the US related to education. But there are others related to international organizations, to climate, to just all manner of subjects.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
Education, cultural science, cultural and scientific covers quite a lot of space. And so these Chairs do not bring a direct financial contribution from UNESCO. Part of that is that UNESCO is not terribly well funded in part because the US and other countries have withdrawn, but it does provide the designation, the contacts, the linkages with other chairs, a bit of a name and so the funding is provided quite generously by the various universities that put in an application for Chair.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And we have as part of our UNESCO Chairs Program, been able to send some of our students to be fellows of some sort in various locations. Say something about that.

LAURA ENGEL:
Since the launch of the Chair, we've sent cohorts of students abroad every summer to be placed in UNESCO field offices and institutes around the world. We have now just, or we're actually just now sending the fifth cohort who are going to really across the world, Myanmar, Thailand, Germany, France, Chile, Indonesia, and they're really working at the front lines of UNESCO and its work. They are working on issues related to gender equality, to education for sustainability and climate change education, to education for global citizenship. So a range of social and education policy issues that are being championed by UNESCO. It's very exciting.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It's very exciting. And of course they come back and then they've had one of these conceivably transformative experiences. How long do they spend in these places? Two, three months?

LAURA ENGEL:
Between three to six months.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Three to six months. Yeah. So-

LAURA ENGEL:
And they get a chance to see what it's like to work for a multilateral organization as well as what it's like to work in international education development within one of these multilateral organizations.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Is it still fair to say that comparisons on international educational measures of performance can be one of the most compelling elements in a nation's education policy, rhetoric and the politics of education?

LAURA ENGEL:
I think, yes. I think it's certainly true for some countries. I'm not sure about the United States. Maybe in the media and in rhetoric there is a drive to use international comparisons of educational performance as a stick for reform or as a rationale for reform. But beyond that, I'm not sure if we see real critical education policy uses. Critical meaning looking at the data and producing secondary data analysis that's considered appropriate for education policymaking. I think in other countries it's very seriously considered and can shape educational reform in big ways. And there are -

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Examples.

LAURA ENGEL:
I mean, there are some systems that do not have national or local assessments, so the international assessment might play a very important role in shaping education policy.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
To me at least, the international comparisons are more useful when one of... We did a special issue of a journal a couple of years ago on this and one of our authors contrasted the use of international assessments as a stick as Laura mentioned, or as a thermometer. And in my view, they're much more useful. They're probably useful to mobilize attention as a stick. But soon thereafter, I would hope that it would turn to the thermometer. And the third might be something like a gold star or a grade. And it seems to me that's the least useful. It's good to mobilize public opinion and political action, but then looking at it as a thermometer, what's going on in other systems? How are they managing this as opposed to we won, we lost? It's a kind of a binary that's not so very helpful.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
But there is an argument to be made for a policy analysis of the uses of international comparative assessment.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
Absolutely.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And I know that's something that you've both been interested in and involved in. Didn't you just did a paper recently on the costs and benefits of something like the US continuing to participate in these kinds of things? What led you to wonder about that?

LAURA ENGEL:
Well, exactly. This question was writing a paper on education policy uses in the Federal US where a number of states in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment or PISA funded themselves to participate. So all states participate. But a small number, three states in 2012 paid an additional sum of money to the OACD to have results specific to the state level. And I was very interested in their motivations for participating in PISA as well as the uses of PISA at the state level. And what I initially envisioned was a simple and straight forward question. I wonder what... Because I knew at the state level what was being paid to the OACD.

LAURA ENGEL:
But I began to wonder, well, what does a country pay to participate? And I thought it was a very simple and straightforward question, easily answerable with a phone call to the Department of Education. And about a year and a half later, we came to write an article that was published recently about what the US pays to participate. There is the overhead to the OACD. There is the national implementation costs. And then there's the time burden, which gets calculated actually as a real cost. And so that led us, a coauthor and myself, to begin to think about what it means to divulge the costs of an international assessment.

LAURA ENGEL:
And anytime you talk about the cost or the value, people ask whether it's worth it. And so there was this conversation around costs and benefits, which would be extremely challenging to do in my assessment, to actually do a full cost-benefit analysis of international assessments. So we've been having some discussions about that. In the end, what I learned is that publicly available information is not always easily accessible.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to ask now about what it is that got you both into this line of work?

LAURA ENGEL:
It does relate to some of my own upbringing, Norwegian homesteading great-grandparents, some German roots and what it meant to be Americanized. But when I think of a childhood and how it shaped my interest in international education, my father is a scientist who has pursued international fieldwork research in much of the Southern Hemisphere. So I had early travel experiences and my mom is a school teacher. And so I think the combination of their careers and how it shaped my early upbringing meant an interest in languages, an interest in travel, an interest in teaching, and that set forth in motion an interest in studying abroad, pursuing language learning.

LAURA ENGEL:
I taught for a while, I taught Spanish and English as a second language in the Chicago land area, a landscape that has changed dramatically in terms of flows of people, the economic shifts that have affected Chicago. And so what I was always missing in working on bilingual education, multicultural education, was this broader global perspective. And so that ultimately, I think shaped my own interests in international education. Much like most of our students, I found my intellectual home in international and comparative education. And so that's what's brought me here.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
Well, I grew up in the South, the American South, which at that time was very literally black and white socially. And my grandparents had been medical missionaries in China before World War II. And so there were little Chinese things that my mother brought back lying around the house, and nothing big but tortoise shell boxes and that kind of thing. And that planted a seed of, oh, there's something beyond this place in my mind. So that coupled with in high school, I grew up in the late '60s and that was a time when schools were being challenged in a lot of ways by reformers within the US. And so I became very interested in education reform at that time.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
And so I went away down to graduate school. There was an opportunity to study in Japan. China was closed to Americans at that time and Japanese had the advantage of not having tones, which Chinese had. And so I took the easy route and went to Japan. When I got there, I found a place that was quite well-developed economically and socially and hadn't gone through the enlightenment, all of the things that at one time were thought to be necessary for a country to grow economically. And that was interesting to me, a parallel world in which the society had developed differently. And that was interesting.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
I went back to stay. It was transformative in that sense. I went back, stayed for a while, got a master's in English, TESOL, taught and-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
TESOL meaning teaching of English-

JAMES WILLIAMS:
To speakers of other languages.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
To speakers of other languages. Right.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
And I was there for a while and I got a bit bored in that Japan is a wonderful place, but it's also rather peaceful at least on the surface. And I was watching all of the social, political, economic transformations taking place around the world and thought, that looks more interesting. And so I went back to doctoral study and got involved in international education for development as a result of that. But I still retain my first love country of... I think the first country one goes to leaves a deep, deep impression. And so I still have a deep affection for Japan despite everybody's thoughts.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I want to ask you to wrap this up by answering one simple question, each of you, if you were stopped on the street and someone said, "What's the biggest education problem we face and what's the most promising set of lessons we can learn from global cooperative learning?

LAURA ENGEL:
You asked the biggest problem facing American-

LAURA ENGEL:
... let's say the American education.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Yeah.

LAURA ENGEL:
My response would be inequality. I don't actually think we... Well, we have much to learn from other countries, but one part of my answer would be that we could learn a lot from looking at some of our local initiatives that have furthered equity of access to learning opportunities that are valuable, such as the DC Public Schools Study Abroad Initiative, which sends over 400 middle and high school students abroad every summer and has done so with a mission toward equity. And I think four years into the program, there have been some really powerful lessons learned about how to do work, which could actually further elitism and further the gaps between different groups of students along racial and social class lines has actually done some incredible work in shrinking those gaps.

LAURA ENGEL:
And it's unique in the US landscape, so that is what I would say to the person on the street.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Perfect. Terrific. Very inspiring and very hopeful. You have another answer, Jim?

JAMES WILLIAMS:
Well, another answer, another perspective would be the greatest problem, I would note inequality and I would link it with inequality, identity, cohesion and the common public good. Those pieces I would put together in balancing the various dimensions there seems to me a really important thing for us to be working on and in a sense the investment education, thinking of it as an investment, it's not only a human capital thing, but it's an important dimension of human capital. And if you'd look at our federal budget, we spend, what is it? Huge amounts of money on various kinds of security, military security, homeland security, social security.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
We spend much less on the investment side of... And I think that would be what I would learn from the rest of the world is the importance of investment.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well, this has been a real treat. Even though I've known Jim and Laura for 10 years or thereabouts, I have again, learned some more new and interesting things and things that give me great hope for the future of American higher education and American education because there are people like Jim Williams and Laura Engel who are working on this stuff and I hope you have safe and successful continuing travels. So with that, I want to thank you both Jim Williams and Laura Engel for being part of EdFix today. And to our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to our EdFix Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Player FM, or wherever you might listen to podcasts.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
We also have a lovely website called edfixpodcast.com, and you are welcome to visit that website and learn more about what we're doing here, not just in global education but more generally. Thank you again, Jim Williams and Laura Engel. And thanks to our great executive producer and all purpose studio manager, Touran Waters.

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