SPRING 2000 ARCHIVE Click the links below to read about events at CIE during Spring 2000: Spring 2000 Master's Project Presentations Kinsey Dialogue Series Max Eckstein, Former CIES President, Visits CIE CIE Well Represented at CIES Conference CIE Members Present at Ethnography Conference CIE Members Present at CIES-NE Global Horizons Workshop: Making Books About Ancient Civilizations Entrepreneurship for Educators Workshop Spring 2000 Photo Archive CONGRATULATIONS!!! SIX CIE MASTER'S CANDIDATES COMPLETED THEIR PROGRAMS THIS SPRING Six Master's candidates presented their theses and projects to the CIE community during the final two Center meetings. The candidates (from left to right according to the picture) and the titles of their presentations are: Maki Kato "My Learning Voyage in the Sea of Information: Education and Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) for a Sustainable Future" Samia Mafal "Somali Refugee Women: Settlement and Adjustment Problems" Dwaine Lee "Our Seductive Fascination: An Analysis of the Use of Technologies for Teacher Education at a Distance in Developing Countries" John Phillips "Spoken English Acquisition: Teaching Modules for Asian Students" Christine Ashley "Wake-Up Art: A Means of Collective Action and Transformation" Jenny Genge "Dialoguing about a Conceptual Curriculum Framework for Rural Education in Quechua and Aymara Communities in the Highlands of Bolivia" top of page Kinsey Dialogue Series Eileen Kane, anthropologist and development practitioner,spoke on April 7 for the 2nd annual Kinsey Dialogue. Kane focused on Participatory Research and Action (PRA), exploring the current status of PRA and its epistemological roots. Drawing on gardening metaphors in honor of David Kinsey, Kane asked if participatory research was a sunflower, a weed, or "a rootless creation, a carbuncle grafted on the the convential trunk of research?" Participatory research, Kane argued, has evolved from earlier systems of participatory rural appraisal. She outlined the contribution that participatory approaches have made in creating more inclusive forms of participatory rural appraisal. She outlined the contribution that participatory approaches have made in creating more inclusive forms of knowledge production. Because of its practicality and appeal, PRA has grown popular with development agencies throughout the world, yet it is often practiced without deeper reflection on its complex, and perhaps competing, philosophical underpinnings. Kane described three different worldviews: positivist, phenomonological, and critical. While some PRA approaches stem from a phenomonological worldview, others can be traced to positivist positions. It is important, Kane believes, for practitioners to understand the differences in such positions and be reflective about their methodological choices in the field. By surfacing deeper assumptions about particular tools, the tools can be challenged, improved, and modified for various cultural contexts. Participatory research is a hybrid that calls for continued work in the garden of ideas. Workshop On Saturday, April 8: Eileen Kane led a workshop on participatory research for the CIE community. The workshop focused on several PRA tools, including seasonal calendars, pie charts and matrices. Kane led participants in the use of the tools and discussed related research issues. Each tool has many possibilities for effective use as well as limitations which must be carefully considered. Kane also showed a video of participatory research in the Gambia. Workshop participants discussed relationships of agency agendas to village-level priorities, the role of outside researchers, and the position of participatory research regarding controversial cultural practices. Eileen Kane facilitating a workshop on participatory research for the CIE community ABOUT EILEEN KANE: Eileen Kane is an Irish anthropologist who has worked around the world on participatory research, especially applied to gender and education of girls. She founded the first department of anthropology in Ireland and was professor there for 20 years. She has worked extensively with organizations such as the World Bank, as well as working with PRA and development with Robert Chambers. She then founded her own organization which is a gender-focused research and development organization called GroundWork. She has been working on some of the theoretical and philosophical foundations of participatory research and PRA and pushes at the edges of the thinking about these trends. top of page Max Eckstein, Former CIES President, Visits CIE Professor Eckstein spoke at a Center meeting in late April. He was introduced by professor emeritus George Urch. Drawing on his recent book Doing Comparative Education : Three Decades of Collaboration, Max reflected on the history of Comparative Education from the perspective of his career. He traced the evolution of comparative education from a journalistic approach, through the scientific approach advocated by himself and Harold Noah in two books published in 1969. More recent developments included the integration of comparative education with the more applied disciplines of development education and the emergence of post-positivist perspectives on understanding education in society. A lively discussion ensued covering topics ranging from accountability and testing to the influence of ideology in doing comparative studies CIE Well Represented at CIES Conference CIE was well represented at the 44th annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society in San Antonio, Texas in March, 2000. Presentations included a panel discussion on Girls' Education in India by professors David Evans and Gretchen Rossman, as well as CIE member John Hatch (Ed. D. 1973; jhatch@usaid.gov). Also on the CIES program were: Greta Shultz: (Ed. D. 1999) greta.shultz@the-spa.com Slippery Signifiers and Fertile Discourse: How do we know the "Subjects" of (Education For) Development? Sangeeta Kamat skamat@educ.umass.edu Educating for Globalization: Comparing Policy Reform Discourse in the U.S. and India. Beverly Lindsay (Ed. D. 1974) Women Executives in Higher Education Creating a Global Perspective. Also seen at the conference was Don Graybill (Ed. D. 1989; don@caii-dc.com). top of page CIE Members Present at Ethnography Conference March 3 & 4 - Five CIE members working with the CIRCLE project presented a paper at the 21st Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in Phildelphia. The paper was focused on ethnography, critical pedagogy, and participatory action research as related to the CIRCLE model with immigrant and refugee youth in Western Massachusetts. Mike Simsik, Vachel Miller, Cole Genge, Shekhar Regmi, and Sally Habana-Hafner prepare for their presentation! CIE Members Present at CIES-NE Nine CIE members from on- and off-campus participated in the Comparative and International Education Society's (CIES) Northeast Regional Conference on February 5-6, 2000 in New York City. This year's theme was "Equality of Educational Opportunity at the Dawn of the XXI Century." Paper Titles & brief abstracts for presenters are available below. Michael Tjivikua, tjivikua@educ.umass.edu David S. McCurry, mcmullin@monmouth.com Assistant Professor/Graduate Program Director, Monmouth University; Bonnie B. Mullinix, mcmullin@monmouth.com Millicent Fenwick Research Professor, Monmouth University; (also with Gill Garb) Many Paths, A Single Destination: Multiple Pathways to Educational Equity in Namibia Joanie Cohen-Mitchell, joanie@educ.umass.edu Mayan Language Literacy in Guatemala: Too Little, Too Late? Duong Van Thanh tvduong@educ.umass.edu Rethinking of Confucian Education Through New Lenses: A Case in Vietnam Confucian Education needs to transform itself to meet the challenges of the modern world. Several valuable insights in its learning pedagogy, e.g. learning for one's self, moral education and several related ethical issues, offer lessons for all educators. This paper includes four components: (i) What is said about Confucianism in our current time; (ii) Confucian principles; (iii) the dominance of Confucian education through the centuries: a case in Vietnam; (iv) a need for further research. Sue Tatten, statten@educ.umass.edu Democracy and Human Rights in Africa "Democracy and human rights" has been a catch phrase in the international development field for the last decade. Enormous resources have been directed at establishing multi-party constitutional systems in Africa but often overlooking the traditional systems of democracy that function for the vast majority of the citizenry. Local initiatives have recognized the need for adapting a perspective that melds traditional with modern democratic principles and practices. This presentation explored ways in which traditional governance structures and modern systems of governance are articulated and adapted at the grassroots level in certain communities within Ethiopia and Botswana. Implications for social justice, equity, and education were also explored. Sangeeta Kamat, Asst. Professor skamat@educ.umass.edu Deconstructing the Education Agenda of Globalization The neoliberal discourse on education reform elaborated under the aegis of the World Bank and IMF has centered around two principles - privatization and decentralization. Each principle has been positioned previously within opposing agendas of education. While privatization has traditionally always been located within an agenda of exclusion, decentralization has always been central to a politics of inclusion. Within the current discourse of globalization, these two principles have been articulated together as a unified whole. An analysis of the policy documents on education reform reveals not only the paradoxical nature of these principles but also the ways in which they are discursively represented as an integral whole - that is, each as a logical extension of the other rather than as contradictory. In this paper, I focus primarily on policy reform documents that pertain to Latin America to elucidate my argument. Gabriela Delgadillo gdelgadi@educ.umass.edu (with Yvonne Farino, Sangeeta Kamat and Thelma Belmonte-Alcantara) Interrogating the Globalizing Mission of Educational Reforms: Case Studies of Bolivia, Mexico and the U.S. This panel consisted of three comparative case studies of educational reform in the new millennium. The main focus was an analysis of current reforms in public education within the context of a globalizing economy. Three different scenarios were presented that highlighted this phenomenon in the U.S., Mexican and Bolivian context at different levels of the education sector (K-12, Higher Education, Teacher Education). Thomas Zschocke, zschocke@educ.umass.edu Designing Web-Based Instruction for International Use   top of page Global Horizons Workshop: Making Books About Ancient Civilizations On Saturday February 5th, 2000 thirty five teachers and educators from Western Massachusetts participated in a workshop sponsored by Global Horizons. The workshop, Making Books About Ancient Civilizations, was facilitated by Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord. The workshop focused on helping teachers engage their students in ancient civilizations through the art of making books. Teachers designing their own books The teachers learned about the variety of ways ancient civilizations preserved their knowledge and expressed themselves, from the clay tablets of Sumer, the scrolls of Egypt and the slat books of ancient China. Teachers made samples of the old forms, as well as newer examples such as an accordion mummy book and a pyramid book from ancient Egypt. Participants in the Global Horizons Workshop The participants were welcomed by Bob Miltz, Director of the Global Horizons Program. The workshop was coordinated by Nancy Sosnowski with help from Kelly O'Brien. The teachers had a fantastic time and requested that this workshop be offered again next year. Entrepreneurship for Educators - Winter Intersession Course Participants in NFTE course CIE doctoral candidate Tim Cohen Mitchell taught an intersession course titled "Entrepreneurship for Educators" (E4E) in January. Using the youth-oriented "Fundamentals" curriculum provided by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), participants created new lesson plans and participatory training and evaluation activities to be incorporated in future versions of NFTE curricula. All 16 participants became NFTE Certified Entrepreneurship Teachers and will receive their certificates in March, along with 8 participants in the Young Entrepreneur Society (YES) program in nearby Orange who will have completed the NFTE "Fundamentals" curriculum. YES works with at-risk and low-income young people, ages 14-26. Orange is among the most economically depressed communities in Massachusetts. E4E participants worked with YES students in Orange and at CIE, forging alliances that should benefit both communities in the future. For more information contact: Tim Cohen-Mitchell Valley Trade Connection Greenfield, MA 01301 vtc@shaysnet.com www.valleydollars.org SPRING 2000 PHOTO ARCHIVE   Azerbaijan Community Mobilizers Training Workshop University of Massachusetts - April 2000 Muskie Fellows with unidentified faculty member (back left) The Scrimmage! The Victor Congratulations to Mantina Who is translating for whom? The Web Master PAR  Methods course activities Would you vote for this man? Remembering top of page