Announcement

CERC is delighted to announce the appointment of a new leadership team at the Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong (CESHK). Liz Jackson, a former director of CERC, has been elected as President of CESHK, while Nutsa Kobakhidze, the current director of CERC, has been elected as Vice-president. The executive team also includes David Sorrell as Treasurer and Gordon Tsui as Secretary.

The CESHK was founded in 1989 and provides a forum for the exchange of views, development of partnerships, and shaping of new initiatives. Among the activities of CESHK is the annual conference. Through this, and other activities such as seminars, workshops, and the society’s journal, CESHK brings together scholars from various institutions. CERC has been closely collaborating with CESHK over the years, and the two institutions will continue partnership under the current leadership.

On February 15, 2023, CERC announced the addition of a new member to its leadership team. Dr. Jisun Jung has been elected as the new elected member, replacing Dr. Peter Cobb, who has moved to the Faculty of Arts. The management committee members expressed their appreciation towards Dr. Cobb for his support and dedication to CERC over the past few years. They also conveyed their good wishes to Dr. Jisun Jung for her tenure as the new elected member. Her expertise and commitment are expected to benefit the CERC community in the years to come.

The current full list of the Management Committee Members can be seen here.

On 28 June, 2022, at the management committee meeting CERC’s elected members announced a change in leadership – Dr. Nutsa Kobakhidze has become CERC’s new Honorary Director, replacing Dr. Anatoly Oleksiyenko. The management committee members expressed appreciation towards Dr. Anatoly Oleksiyenko for his leadership that took place under crisis circumstances due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The management committee members wished Dr. Kobakhidze success in her tenure as a new CERC Director.  

CERC is pleased to announce that a new research project “Parental demand for shadow education: Contexts, processes, determinants and outcomes” secured funding from the Czech Science Foundation in which Dr Nutsa Kobakhidze will collaborate with the Principal Investigator of the project Dr Vít Šťastný.

This marks the continuous collaboration between CERC and the Institute for Research and Development of Education, Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague. One of the recent outcomes of this collaboration is Orbis Scholae’s special issue “Throwing Light on Shadow Education” in 2020 which was edited by Dr Vít Šťastný and Dr Nutsa Kobakhidze. Full text of the special issue can be found here https://bia.is.cuni.cz/data/casopis/1201/Orbis%20Scholae%202020_Shadow%20education%20final.pdf.

Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC)/ Springer

Editors:
Anatoly Oleksiyenko & Liz Jackson

Freedom to teach and freedom to learn (Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit) have become imperatives of research universities that followed the Humboldtian model of higher education and shaped the benchmarks for reputational performance, competition and hierarchical stratification over the last few decades. Freedom and responsibility have become a conflictual dichotomy in the studies of higher education as markets and hierarchies became two major domains shaping and distributing status goods in most societies. Defining a good in the context of international higher learning has become also problematic as freedoms of mobility, inquiry and argument implied strategizing often in disregard of ethics, politics, and social discourses. The literature in the field of global mobility and higher learning has provided a range of examples where advantages for some have been raising anxiety and competition for access to status goods worldwide. Alas, the literature has provided little insight into how freedom of teaching and learning comes into play with social responsibilities in various cultural domains and political systems.

With increasing influence of illiberalism, freedom should not be considered or interpreted lightly. Academic freedom, for example, has never been challenged as much as it is today when the post-truth societies primarily make universities battlefields of politicized emotions and expressions. At the same time, with intelligence commodified, reified or marginalized, the freedom of mobility can entail a fight for entitlements or an escape from local responsibilities. The decline of academic freedom or the absence of forces to defend it are related challenges. These challenges grow as the competition of ideas, sometimes under the rubric of academic freedom, often implies the power struggle and questioning of statuses in the so-called “marketplace of ideas”. Competition per se becomes more important than human dignity, which was originally supposed to expand and strengthen under freedoms to teach and learn. What had been happening to these freedoms across different subject positions and cultures of higher education, remains largely underexplored.

As the waves of globalization encourage rethinking the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn, this project will engage scholars from around the world to rethink the currency of ideas, concepts and practices related to dignity, freedom, independence, and responsibility in higher education. Are there sufficient freedoms to teach and to learn in modern colleges and universities these days? Are they linked effectively with academic responsibilities? Do these freedoms as they are perceived and/or practiced within and across diverse geographic contexts align effectively with requirements to enhance human dignity? How do freedom to teach and freedom to learn get shaped by relationships of students and scholars to each other and to structural aspects of higher education and the marketplace of ideas? What is still missing in the current discourse and applications in classrooms, online spaces, etc.? What are the implications of the presence or absence of these freedoms in the post-truth world, and the expanding illiberalism and hybrid wars? Developing critical responses to these and other questions through comparative research, will enhance our insight into how tensions between freedoms and responsibilities are managed and resolved in this “brave new world.”

We are inviting scholars of comparative and international higher education to participate in the CERC/Springer publication project. We look forward to receiving extended abstracts (circa 800 words) by August 1, 2019.