On Feb.22th, 2011, Prof. Heidi Ross continued to bring us a wonderful academic lecture, and the topic is "A Story, Not a History A Collage, not a Canon: Understanding and Teaching the Field of (North American) Comparative and International Education", Prof. Wu Xueping, the Head of Department of Education, presided over the lecture. Associate Prof. Gilsun Song, the head of teaching and research section on Comparative Education, together with graduate students and Ph.D. students, participated in the lecture.
In the first part, Prof. Ross put forward overview and questions for our consideration, such as "What is comparative education in North America?""How does the field differ between the U.S. and China?" In the second part of lecture, Prof. Ross gave an analysis of CIE in North America in details, including agreeing and disagreeing across a century of scholarship. Moreover, Prof. Ross introduced the human capital theory in the 1960s and the neo-Marxist, dependency, world systems and post-colonial theories during the 1970s and 1990s. Three dimensions of CIE, namely scientific dimension, pragmatic dimension and global dimension were also introduced. In the third part of the lecture, Prof. Ross further pointed out the expansion of CIE with the development of the modernization theory, dependency theory and conflict theory. Besides, Prof. Ross illustrated the users of CIE research, and she also emphasized that we should alert to the “abuse” phenomenon of CIE research results. Finally, Prof. Ross used picture of curved river to describe the fluid boundaries of CIE, and concluded that CIE is a loosely bounded field of bricoleurs and bridge builders. After the lecture, Prof. Ross and students had an in-depth discussion about the definition of CIE, the funding sources of CIE researches, the essence of critical pedagogy, and so on.
The content of Prof. Ross’s lecture is very rich and she shared her teaching experience of CIE with all the participants, which benefited them a lot.
Recorded by Ph.D. student Yu Hao
Feb.24th, 2011
College of Education, Zhejiang University
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