Seminar

You’re cordially invited to the next CERC seminar on the coming Wednesday, 17 May 2017 from 12:45 – 14:00 in Room 203 of Runme Shaw Building:

India’s Aid and Soft Power in Africa: The Case of Education and Training

By Kenneth and Pravina King

Chair: Mark Bray

The core of India’s cooperation narrative with Africa is capacity-building. Though often termed an ‘emerging’ donor, its history of supporting scholarships and training for the ‘South’ goes back as early as 1946. Like China, its more formal mechanisms for supporting training date from 1964, and their academic institutions for the study of Africa and West Asia also, like China’s, date from the early 1960s. Eight years after China’s first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, India organized a series of India-Africa Forum Summits, providing ambitious targets for concessional loans, as well as for India- Africa educational partnerships. The presentation will examine several of these, along with a discussion of African students in India – a hot topic – and the absence of any Indian parallel to China’s 46 Confucius Institutes in Africa.

Kenneth KING is Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh, where he was Director of the Centre of African Studies for 20 years. Since 2006/7 when he was Distinguished Visiting Professor in HKU, Kenneth has worked with Pravina on China’s education aid and soft power in Africa. The book resulting from this research was China’s aid and soft power in Africa (James Currey, 2013)

Pravina KING was administrator of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies for 15 years, and organizer of Scotland-Africa ’97.

Date: Wednesday, 17 May 2017
Time: 12:45 – 14:00
Venue:
Room 203 Runme Shaw Building

The presentation is supported by the presenters’ research grant on “China-Africa University Partnerships in Education and Training: Students, Trainees, Teachers and Researchers” from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (RGC/GRF Project No.: HKU842912H).

By Bruce A Collet

Chair: Liz Jackson

To what degree might public schools play positive and supporting roles among migrant communities within which religion provides a sense of security? What do these roles look like? What defines the limitations that schools in liberal democratic states face in specifying and fulfilling these roles? In this talk I examine religion, culture, and the self within the liberal democratic state, with particular emphasis on examining the relationship between autonomy and religious affiliation. I then move to an overview of the social science literature on migration and religion, and the role of religion in integration. Finally, I synthesize the first two parts of the talk by examining lessons public schools might draw from what the social sciences tell us regarding religious security amongst migrant communities, and how school policies might be informed by this work while still remaining true to core liberal democratic principles.

Bruce Collet is an Associate Professor in Educational Foundations and Inquiry at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where he teaches courses in diversity and education, comparative education, and the philosophy of education, and serves as a core faculty member in Bowlinghkch Green’s Master of Arts in Cross-Cultural and International Education program. His main research focus concerns migration, religion and schooling. He is currently working on a book, Migration, Religion, and Schooling within Liberal Democratic States (forthcoming with Routledge, 2017). Dr. Collet serves as Chief Editor of the journal Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education.

Date: Tuesday, 14 February 2017

Time: 12:45 – 14:30

Venue: RM 202, Runme Shaw Building, HKU

Click here for the poster.

All are welcome!

By Simon Ceder

Chair: Liz Jackson

Over the last 15 years, there has been increasing interest in using posthuman approaches in edu-cational research, particularly in early childhood education, but also in research methodology and curriculum studies. This seminar presents an overview of this development. It also proposes ways to introduce post-human perspectives into two areas that so far have been fairly untouched by this approach, namely philosophy of education and education for sustainable development. This introduction will be performed using the example of human evolution.

Simon Ceder received his PhD in Education from Lund Uni-versity Sweden 2016 with the thesis “Cutting Through Water: Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality”. Before becoming a researcher, he was working as a high school teacher and teacher educator in questions regarding gender and equal treatment. Currently, Dr. Ceder is a senior lecturer at University of Skövde teaching educational courses and starting up a new research project with a focus on human evolution.

Date: Friday 16 December 2016
Time: 14.00 – 15.15
Venue: Room 204 Runme Shaw Building

All are welcome!

By Noah W. Sobe

Chair: Mark Bray

This seminar examines Marc-Antoine Jullien’s 1816/17 Esquisse et Vues Préliminaries d’un ouvrage sur L’Éducation Comparée in relation to European traditions of travel and global colonial expansion.  It argues that principles of colonial difference saturate Jullien’s proposal — notably in the ways that it enables and disables subjectivities and subject positions as well as in how it reifies social and contextual categories of analysis.  Jullien’s proposal did not found a discipline nor did it spark a continuous conversation, yet it is an instance in the establishment of the field that shows the stubbornly durable entanglement of educational comparison with colonialism.

Noah W. Sobe is Professor of Cultural and Educational Policy Studies at Loyola University Chicago, where he also directs the Center for Comparative Education.  Professor Sobe is President-Elect of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and co-editor of the journal European Education which is affiliated with the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE).

Date: Wednesday 7 December 2016
Time: 10:00 – 11:15 am
Venue: Room 203 Runme Shaw Building

By Mantak Yuen & Raymond Chan 

Chair: Mark Bray

This seminar will provide an overview of the existing policy landscape in Hong Kong and Japan. Key issues in school counselling will be identified in each region, and the rationale underpinning policies for school-based counseling will be discussed. The impact of policy on school practices is to be considered, and issues arising will be identified. Relevant research findings will be highlighted, and implications for future policy research considered. The seminar consists of three parts.

Part 1: School-based counseling in Hong Kong (Mantak Yuen, 25 mins)

Part 2: School-based counseling in Japan (Raymond MC Chan, 25mins)

Part 3: Open discussion (25 mins)

Mantak Yuen Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education, Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. His academic and professional interests focus on guidance and counselling, life career and talent development, gifted education, positive psychology, and special needs education.

Raymond Chan is an Associate Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. From 2005 to 2009 he served as the president of the Hong Kong Professional Counselling Association.

Please refer to the poster for detailed introduction of the speakers.

Date: Friday 7 October 2016

Time: 12:45-14:00

Venue: Room 202 Runme Shaw Building

All are welcome!

CERC was delighted to play a prominent role in the triennial Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) held in Beijing Normal University (BNU) 22-26 August 2016. The BNU campus looked magnificent as scholars gathered from around the world for an event with a distinctive Chinese flavour. Nearly 20 CERC members were registered for the Congress, including MEd and PhD students.

CERC has a long history of collaboration with the WCCES, having been the Secretariat from 2000 to 2005, and having been the home of two WCCES Presidents. Mark Bray was WCCES President from 2004 to 2007, and Lee Wing-On, CERC’s founding Director, was WCCES President from 2010 to 2013. Both participated in a highlighted panel of Past-Presidents on the opening day of the Beijing Congress. That panel mentioned the book of histories of the WCCES and its members published by CERC.

The Congress closed with announcement of N’Dri Assié-Lumumba (past-president of the US-based Comparative & International Education Society) as the new WCCES President, and of the 2019 Congress to be held in Mexico. The group photograph shows the WCCES leadership with the BNU volunteers in blue T-shirts who had throughout the event provided practical advice and a warm welcome.

Each year, HKU welcomes a new and dynamic cohort of students for the MEd programme in Comparative and Global Studies in Education and Development (CGSED). The 19 students in the 2016/17 are as dynamic as their predecessors. They come from 11 countries/jurisdictions, namely:

Cambodia

Canada

China Mainland

Hong Kong

India

Japan

Lao PDR

Malaysia

Mexico

South Sudan

USA

Seven are studying part-time (two years) and 12 are studying full-time (one year). CERC is delighted to welcome the group, and much looks forward to working with them.

By Ruth Hayhoe

Chair: Li Jun

This will be a preview of my keynote for the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies in Beijing (August 2016). I will share the ideas I am working with on what it means for China to move into a central position in global educational affairs. The presentation looks at three themes: China’s obligations, given its experience of receiving educational aid in the two decades after the Cultural Revolution, the emerging literature on key dimensions of China’s educational civilization, and the shape of China’s current educational aid to Africa and SE Asia.

Ruth Hayhoe is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.  Her professional engagements in Asia included foreign expert at Fudan University (1980-1982), Head of the Cultural Section of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (1989-1991) and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (1997-2002).  Recent books include Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation: An Untold Story (2016),  China Through the Lens of Comparative Education (2015), Portraits of 21^st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (2011) and Portraits of Influential Chinese Educators (2006). She is a longstanding Associate Member of CERC.

Time: 16.00 – 17.15

Date: Wednesday 4 May

Venue: Runme Shaw 202

ALL ARE WELCOME!