"Reframing humanism: UNESCO and the future of education"
Data: 17 Maggio 2021
COMPARATIVE EDUCATION SOCIETY IN EUROPE
"Reframing humanism: UNESCO and the future of education"
CESE virtual seminar, Thursday 27 May 2021: 15.00 – 16.30 (CET)
Per ottenere il link scrivere a Stephen Carney:
As part of CESE’s program of activities during 2021, we shall be hosting a virtual seminar to discuss UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative. As part of that initiative, the International Commission on the Futures of Education has released its Progress Update which aims to inform discussion globally on how education, learning and knowledge can be re-imagined for a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and fragility. UNESCO has engaged in its own extensive consultation process but there are also issues and concerns that are specific to higher education and educational researchers in general as well as for comparativists in particular. For example, what is the future of humanism in a world shaped by technology? Can profound ecological change take place when humanism in education has often been framed by a harmful human exceptionalism? What of the rise of populist nationalisms? What, for example, might be the implications of any movement towards universal measures of citizenship and wellbeing? Ultimately, will any broad vision that leads to policy change be able to resist the familiar demands for relevance, efficiency and effectiveness?
The Commission recognises such challenges, suggesting that education and schooling must change fundamentally if it is to become a ‘space of positive change, peace, and sustainability for individuals, societies and the planet’ but, also, that any future ‘educational commons’ will be under pressure from ‘structural discrimination and exclusion, privatization of information, knowledge and education, forced reliance on proprietary digital technologies, abusive use of intellectual property rights, and the commercialization of educational data’. To facilitate a deeper engagement with the Report, we will be joined by Prof. Noah W. Sobe who currently works at UNESCO supporting the Futures of Education initiative. Two discussants - Dr. Maren Elfert, King’s College London and Prof. Zsuzsa Millei, University of Tampere - will respond with time for general discussion as well. The seminar will be conducted via zoom at the following link: Topic: Reframing humanism: UNESCO and the future of education Time: May 27, 2021 03:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna Link: contact Stephen Carney for details:
Speakers:
Noah W. Sobe is Senior Project Officer in the Future of Learning and Innovation section at UNESCO headquarters in Paris where he helps to lead on the new flagship Futures of Education: Learning to become initiative. He is past president of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and co-editor of the journal European Education. His scholarship crosses the fields of history of education and comparative education and he holds a faculty position as professor of cultural and educational policy studies at Loyola University Chicago, USA.
Maren Elfert is Lecturer in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London, and a 2018 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research focuses on global governance of education and the influence of international organizations on educational ideas and policies, and she has authored the book UNESCO’s Utopia of Lifelong Learning: An Intellectual History. She is also submissions editor of a UNESCO-associated academic journal, the International Review of Education. Zsuzsa Millei is a Professor of Early Childhood Education at Tampere University, Finland. Her research addresses child politics by exploring how politics (power, government, nationalism and ideology) intertwines with childhood and children’s everyday life in child institutions. She studies more recently the socio-biological child and the potentials that metaphors of the microbiome and immunity theory offer to rethink political life in early education during the Anthropocene. She conducts comparative ethnographic studies and explores memories of childhood in (post)socialist societies.