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There is limited evidence about teacher leadership during education emergencies, such as that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with 70 teachers and education stakeholders in parts of Africa and Latin America, this exploratory study investigates grassroots examples of teacher leadership during COVID-19 school closures. The findings indicate that teachers worked individually and collectively to find high-tech and low- or no-tech solutions to ensure learning continuity. In addition, teacher-led efforts often prioritised student and community well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic by building and maintaining social connections with students and families, supporting student mental health and physical health, and protecting students from heightened risk factors early marriage, adolescent pregnancy and child labour. Teachers also acted by taking the lead as community mobilisers - educating local communities about COVID-19 risks and prevention. The paper discusses barriers and facilitators to teacher leadership in low-income contexts. It concludes by identifying emerging lessons to strengthen teacher leadership and recommendations to activate teachers as a central pillar of resilience in education systems during crises.

Building on the reflexive tradition within the social sciences, this article takes up one of the longest-standing concerns in our field—the right to education. The article provides a critical look at the history of the Education for All movement and the global aid architecture that has evolved to support it. It also reflects on the contributions of the field of comparative education to the Education for All movement. The term “leaning in” is used throughout the article as a trope to weave together these institutional histories with the author’s own career journey, which has included both academic and practitioner roles in international educational development—including as the chief technical officer at the Global Partnership for Education, an organization created to deliver on global commitments to the right to education.

The World Bank's involvement in education policy and reform has grown substantially since the 1960s. For an organization that originally had no mandate to work on education, the Bank has become perhaps the most powerful and hegemonic of the international organizations operating in the education for development field. The Bank is the largest single international funder of education for development in low-income countries, and its technical and knowledge-based resources tower over those of other international institutions. This article develops a heuristic framework for understanding agenda-setting processes in international organizations (IOs), and applies it to analyze how the World Bank work in education has evolved with the passage of time. The framework focuses on three dynamics as keys to understanding the Bank and education: the political opportunities created by geo-political and ideological shifts among the most powerful member governments; the IOs relationships with borrowing (or “client”) countries; and finally the internal dynamics and organizational culture of the IOs own bureaucracy as it aims to reproduce itself and manage shifts in the previous two dynamics. These three dynamics and their interaction are explored over four key periods: from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, when the debt crisis exploded in many developing nations; from 1981 to mid-nineties, a period marked by structural adjustment lending and the reorganization of the Bank's education sector activities around basic education; from the mid-nineties to 2008, when the Post-Washington consensus emerged; and from 2008 to present, a period characterized by significant shifts in power in the world system and an accompanying rise of strategic uncertainty at different levels within the Bank.

In this article, we explore how the World Bank operationalizes its focus on poverty alleviation in one of the most controversial arenas of educational change: the expansion of privately provided schooling. We argue that the Bank's role in promoting private provision has been far more complicated than most critics have discerned. It has involved several distinctive forms of policy entrepreneurship alongside very limited investment and lending. Policy talk, policy decisions, and operational activities have diverged in ways that raise real questions about the functioning and efficacy of the Bank. Drawing on organizational sociology, this article identifies several distinct disjunctures among Bank activities related to private educational provision and characterizes these disjunctures as forms of organizational hypocrisy.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector financing arm of the World Bank Group, is currently the largest multilateral investor in private education in developing countries. Drawing from staff interviews and programmatic data, this paper provides a brief overview of the IFC and its mandate; examines the stated purposes of the IFC's work in education; reviews the IFC's portfolio of investments in education; and looks at the linkages between the IFC and the World Bank's lending arms. The paper concludes by questioning the IFC's contribution to the World Bank Group's poverty alleviation mandate.

Driven by a growing awareness of the need to better understand complex problems in the era of globalization, the shift towards a knowledgebased economy has resulted in a common interest to strengthen the value of research among governments, research producing agencies, funders, and the broader public. Rising demands on limited resources and a general culture of accountability have produced, at least in much of the industrialized world, a political climate emphasizing the need for “evidence-based“ policy and practice in all public service sectors. The result has often been to integrate research into policy and practice across various disciplines and public service sectors, including education.

Emerging trends in reforms of education-sector plans indicate a shift not only in how foreign aid is disbursed, but also in how civil-society actors engage in new policy and advocacy roles. This contribution examines these changing civil-society roles in four countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. While sector-wide approaches have created new opportunities for civil-society participation at the national level, this research suggests that sector reforms have also presented significant challenges for engagement with government and donors. This research emphasises the need for a transparent, regularised, and democratic process for the inclusion of civil-society organisations at the policy table.

Author(s): Aaron Benavot, David Archer, Stephen Moseley, Karen Mundy, Felix Phiri, Liesbet Steer, David Wiking Reviewed work(s): Source: Comparative Education Review, Vol. 54, No. 1 (February 2010), pp. 105-124 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Comparative and International Education Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649052 . Accessed: 28/10/2011 16:00

The Life Skills course is offered to Namibian students in grades eight through twelve. It includes lessons on HIV/AIDS, imparting information and equipping them with the necessary psycho-social skills to assist in reducing the risk of becoming infected. Teachers are the impetus for the success of the course. As such, research was undertaken to understand the knowledge, attitudes, and concerns of Namibian Bachelor of Education students in order to be effective HIV/AIDS educators. Findings determine a gap in knowledge about HIV/AIDS-related issues. Moreover, many students indicated reluctance and a lack of self-efficacy to properly implement HIV/AIDS education.

In the last half decade, a rising literature has focused on the idea that processes of economic, political and social globalization require analysis in terms of governance at the global level. It is argued in this article that emerging forms of global governance have produced significant challenges to conventional conceptions of international relations. Educational multilateralism is an area that has been significantly affected by such challenges, but to date there have not been many efforts by education scholars to sum up the relative impact and total effect of the various clusters of change affecting educational multilateralism. The article argues the importance of engaging with the most directly critical conceptualizations of the role played by education and educational multilateralism, while still maintaining a focus on the potential for positive forms of educational governance at the global level.

Over the past decade, the achievement of universal primary education, under the somewhat misleading rubric of ‘Education for All’ (EFA), has steadily built momentum in international forums as a focus for discussion and action. The present study looks critically at the evolution of consensus about EFA within the international community. The first section of this contribution provides an overview of ‘education for development’ in the form in which it has been inherited from the 20th century. The second describes what has changed in the context, rhetoric and practice of such ‘education for development’. The final section reflects on two questions: ‘Why has EFA now moved beyond international rhetoric to action?’; and ‘What can our experience with EFA tell us about the prospects for multilateralism and global governance in the 21st century?’

In this paper we consider the negotiating positions adopted by the US and Japan for the liberalisation of trade in educational services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). We argue that the US adopts a position of hegemon and freerider in the development of a liberalisation regime in education. The aggressive character of the US position is profoundly influenced by: (1) a strong federal government level faith in service liberalisation; (2) high levels of domestic privatisation in the fields of higher education, training, testing and evaluation; (3) active lobbying by educational services providers. Nonetheless, the US is cautious about allowing foreign competition into domestic education markets. This stems in part from active resistance of the public education sector; and in part because of the delicate jurisdictional questions it would raise given the constitutional right of states to control educational policy. Ironically, US reticence also seems to be related to the relatively hig...

L'objectif des auteurs de cet article est double. Il s'agit d'une part de presenter une etude exploratoire sur les tendances actuelles temoignant de l'emergence d'un nouvel activisme non gouvernemental dans le champ de l'education et d'autre part de dresser un cadre analytique afin d'evaluer l'importance de cet activisme, en elaborant des concepts bases sur les recherches ayant porte sur les nouveaux mouvements sociaux et les debats theoriques actuels a propos de la societe civile mondiale.

This paper provides a critical re-valuation of Unesco's work in education over the last five decades, updating this story to include the most recent decade of crisis and reform within the organization and within the United Nations more broadly. Drawing on interviews within Unesco, a wide range of Unesco documentation and secondary sources, the paper addresses two main questions. First, what can Unesco's 52 years of experience in the field of education tell us about the possibilities and limits of multilateral cooperation in education? Second, how (and how successfully) has Unesco adapted to changes in world order over the last two decades?

Cet article retrace vingt annees de recherche dans la cooperation internationale educationnelle par des etudiants en education comparee. L'auteur pose les fondations d'une reflexion critique sur le sens d'une education multilaterale dans le contexte des schemas de pouvoir et d'inegalite d'un monde en rapide mutation. Il en explore la contribution et les reponses a la large reorganisation des reformes internationales politiques, economiques et sociales depuis 1945.

This insightful book brings together both academics and researchers from a variety of international organizations and aid agencies to explore the complexities of public private partnerships as a resurgent, hybrid mode of educational governance that operates across scales, from the community to the global.

In January 1989, I was fresh from three years of work as a secondary-school teacher in rural Zimbabwe and from a round-the-world trip home that had culminated in a six-week, cross-country visit through pre-Tiananmen Square China. I was returning to graduate school at the University of Toronto and had enrolled in my first course, titled “International Academic Relations,” offered by Professor Ruth Hayhoe. There I arrived dressed in baggy jeans and clunky boots bought at the new tourist market in Beijing, with self-cut hair and no particular career aspiration. I viewed the masters degree as a short period of respite, providing space for my reintroduction to Canada and time to make sense of the experience I had had of being a volunteer expatriate educator, working for a foreign government in a part of the world that was scarred by colonialism, civil war, and many iterations of “development.”

Formed in 1999, the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has emerged over the past decade as the globally recognized voice for civil society actors on the issue of “Education for All” (EFA). From its early founding by a small cluster of international nongovernmental organizations, the GCE has grown enormously. Today it has affiliated members in over 100 countries, including the participation of major international and regional non-governmental organizations, Education International (the international federation of teachers’ unions); three regional umbrella bodies (ANCEFA in Africa, CLADE in Latin America and the Caribbean, and ASPBAE in South-East Asia),5 and a growing number of nationally-based coalitions (76 at most recent count, up from 37 in 2002).

The World Bank's new Education Sector Strategy 2020 (2011) points to an important role for private actors in the development of high-quality, high-equity education systems that effectively address poverty alleviation in low and middle-income countries. This chapter asks whether this emphasis on private participation is new, focusing in particular on Bank policies, research, and operations in K-12 education. It also explores some surprising disjunctures between the World Bank Group's official policies promoting privatization and its operational practices. To do so, the chapter draws on a separate research project for which we completed a review of the Bank's current portfolio of projects in K-12 education and a series of interviews with World Bank staff. We also look at the expansion of Bank activities beyond its traditional arms – the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA) lending facilities – by including a brief a review of the educational activities of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which directly supports the private sector in education.

This article questions some of the basic assumptions about literacy that emerged in the 1980s and that have helped to generate an international consensus about the centrality of mass literacy to development in Southern Africa. Using the national literacy policies and programs of Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Botswana as examples, it explores the way in which the international discourse on literacy efforts in the 1980s has tended to neglect emerging issues of critical importance to Africa's peoples. Ultimately, as the African Association for Literacy and Adult Education (AALAE) has made clear, what has been offered are a range of policy options and "solutions" to Africa's ills that are, at best, inadequate and, at worst, insulting. Thus AALAE angrily remarked in its critique of the World Conference on Education for All: "Basic education for all is not