CERC is proud to announce its new Special Interest Group (SIG) on Comparative Studies in Educational Traditions by holding an inauguration event of a roundtable discussion. Details of the event are as follows:

Time:   18 April, Tuesday, 2023

             2:00 pm -3:30 pm Hong Kong Time

Venue: Hybrid (Runme Shaw #206 and Zoom) 

Registration link: https://bit.ly/3nqnAue

 

With gathering human connectivity, there is an urgent need for truly respecting and understanding differences and diversity to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts caused by ‘clashes of civilizations,’ as warned by Huntington in the 1990s. Education can play an essential role in achieving this goal. However, the intellectual mind in nearly all education systems is almost exclusively Euro-American, with a huge loss of rich and beautiful non-Euro-American traditions. While the entire human community is at a critical historical point to seriously reflect on our approaches to differences to search for ways to live together, education, and especially comparative education, is particularly well placed to achieve such a goal. Calls for intellectual pluralism and epistemic diversity are increasingly loud and clear within and beyond academia, demonstrating a decolonial desire to challenge the Euro-American discourse hegemony and incorporate diverse educational traditions in global research and education practices.

Against this background, a new Special Interest Group (SIG) is now established at Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) in the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong focusing on comparative studies in educational traditions. An essential mission of this new SIG is to establish a platform for ongoing research and conversations on comparing and bridging different educational wisdoms and traditions, searching for approaches to facilitating intellectual pluralism, and by extension to respond to global common challenges.

As the inaugural event of the new SIG, a panel of speakers, including past and present directors of CERC, who are seasoned experts in comparative education, will come together to exchange ideas and insights on three major questions. These questions can be essential to conducting comparative studies of educational traditions and bringing multiple educational traditions into education and research practices:

• What are educational traditions?
• What sorts of comparative studies of educational traditions can be conducted, and how?
• What contributions can comparative studies of educational traditions make to knowledge and educational practices?   

The panel discussion will kick-off continuing dialogues between diverse educational traditions and conversations on incorporating non-Euro-American educational traditions into global research and educational practices. It also hopes to facilitate discussions on how to conduct comparative research in educational traditions, and on how to pursue intellectual pluralism and epistemic justice in education and research.

Speakers:  

Mark Bray, Liz Jackson, Anatoly Oleksiyenko, Yang Rui

Opening and closing remarks:  

Nutsa Kobakhidze

Conversation moderator:  

Yang Lili

For more information, please see the attached poster.