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 Introduction
With increased funding from such agencies as National Science
Foundation, U.S. Department of Education and the World Bank, the
College of Education is conducting comparative and international
research of unprecedented scope and importance as well as much
internationally-oriented teaching and public service. The number
of comparative multicountry studies is particularly important,
given the long-standing criticism of comparative education for
relying too much on single country studies and not enough on truly
comparative research. For example, MSU is known throughout the
world for its leadership in the IEA cross-national studies of
educational achievement. This includes most notably the Third
International Mathematics and Science Study, an empirical study
of curricula, teaching practice and student learning, which by
the time the follow-up repeat data collection is finished, will
have involved nearly sixty countries. In addition, the college
continues to build its track record of grassroots and policy research
and development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Just within
the last two years faculty have done this work in Brazil, Burkina
Faso, Cambodia, China, Dominican Republic, Guinea, Indonesia,
Mexico, Mozambique, Myanmar, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand,
Vietnam and Zimbabwe. This year South Africa received particular
attention, including MSU’s hosting an international conference
on partnerships with South African institutions of post-secondary
education and sending Lansing area K-12 teachers for a month long
study trip in summer 1999.
Multicountry
Studies and Other Work Spanning More than One Continent
Comparative Research on
the Curricula, Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Science.
At MSU, the U.S. National Research Center for the Third International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) continues to carry out analyses
of the data gathered earlier on the relationship between curricula
and achievement in varied cultural contexts. One recent product
examines U.S. performance and curricula in such a context (Facing
the Consequences: Using TIMSS for a Closer Look at U.S. Mathematics
and Science Education, a book published by Kluwer Academic Press).
William Schmidt and other staff made many presentations
throughout the U.S. in person and in newscasts, such as the NBC
Tom Brokaw and ABC Peter Jennings nightly
news. One particularly important spin-off of this work is the
Center’s involvement with Achieve, an organization composed
of governors and business leaders who are working with ten states
who have agreed to create a middle school syllabus and state assessment
which parallels the curriculum of the top achieving countries
in TIMSS. The Center has also recently received an additional
multimillion grant from the National Science Foundation for TIMSS-R
which is a repeat of the original TIMSS achievement test for eighth
grade and which is taking place in approximately 40 countries.
Within the U.S. approximately 20 school districts and states are
participating and treated in the analysis as additional “countries.”
The Center continues to be directed by William Schmidt
(Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education). Other
key staff include Jacqueline Babcock, Leland
Cogan, Richard Houang, Kathleen Wight and most recently
Hsing Chi Wang, who just received her Ph.D in science
education from the University of Southern California (all are
from CEPSE). In a related development Lynn Paine
(Teacher Education) has served on a committee of the National
Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, to examine the
professional development implications of TIMSS. The committee’s
report has passed NRC review and is in publication; professional
development guides for use of TIMSS are also being piloted. Still
another faculty member, Aaron Pallas (CEPSE)
is currently doing secondary analysis of TIMSS data on the relation
between class size and achievement while Michael Rodriguez
(Educational Administration) has recently completed a
dissertation based on TIMSS data.
Comparative Research on
Teacher Induction.
A study funded last year by the National
Science Foundation is under way to examine teacher induction across
countries and to find out how educational systems in selected
countries enable prospective and beginning teachers to bridge
from academic subject matter and pedagogical knowledge acquired
during preservice education to the reality of classroom instruction,
from “knowing” to "doing.” The focus is
on science and mathematics teaching in the middle school years.
In 1998-99 countries were identified for which there is evidence
of successful support structures for beginning teachers’
learning as well as high student achievement in mathematics or
science, namely, Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Korea,
New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan. Scholars
from each of these countries were interviewed and four countries
selected for intensive case study. To carry out these case studies,
MSU is collaborating with the National Center for the Improvement
of Science Education and is responsible for fieldwork in China
and France. The MSU team is composed
of Lynn Paine (director), Dan Chazan,
David Pimm and Suzanne Wilson (all from
Teacher Education).
Comparative Research on Values Education.
Teresa Tatto (Teacher Education) has been one of the
principal coordinators for an eleven-country study of values education.
It deals with the need for values education as well as whether
and how values are taught in schools. She also arranged for collection
of data for this study in the U.S. and Mexico. The Mexican data
is based on a survey of policy makers and educational elites in
six different states in Mexico. Currently, she is co-editing the
book on the results which will include her chapter titled “Values
Education in Mexico: the Construction of a National Identity under
Centralized Leadership.”Comparative Research on Civic Education.
Jack Schwille (International Studies in Education) continues
to serve on the international steering team responsible for the
design of IEA civic education research, which consists of qualitative
national case studies and quantitative student-level studies of
what young people learn about democracy, national identity and
social cohesion/diversity in 28 participating countries. A book
on the first phase of 24 national case studies has just been published;
Schwille was one of the editors and co-author of one
of the chapters.Comparative Research on Teacher Work and
Professionalism. David Labaree (Teacher Education)
is a national co-director for US participation in this international
project (Professional Actions and Cultures of Teaching or PACT),
which focuses on the work of teaching, teacher practice and teacher
professionalism in nine different countries. In January 1999,
the full PACT group met in Hong Kong for a conference on “The
New Professionalism in Teaching: Teacher Education and Teacher
Development in a Changing World.” Labaree’s paper
presented at the previous PACT conference in Oslo, Norway, was
published in Educational Research in November 1998.
Comparative Research on Education
and Choice.
David Plank (Educational
Administration), who has done much previous research on decentralization
and choice in such countries as the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa,
is organizing an international conference to be held at MSU in
March 2000 that will include comparative case studies for publication
on the impacts of newly-introduced school choice policies in eight
countries: Australia, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, New Zealand,
South Africa, Sweden, and the U.K. He and Gary Sykes
(Educational Administration) recently visited Australia for three
weeks to make presentations on these issues in two Australian
states. All this dovetails with current research by Plank and
Sykes on the impacts of school choice policies on the educational
system in Michigan.
Graduate Studies in Education Overseas.
Under the guidance of the Office of Outreach (Susan
Melnick, director; Sandy Bryson, program
manager; and Bob Martin), MSU’s College
of Education provided outreach to approximately 350 international
school educators, 100 Master’s degree candidates and 40
Teacher Certification candidates. In 1998-99 a total of 42 courses
were taught through GSEO by 26 professors in 10 different countries
in Africa, Europe, South America and Asia—countries as diverse
as Brazil, China, France, Indonesia, Madagascar and Thailand.
As part of this effort an MA in Curriculum and Teaching is offered
in collaboration with the Department of Teacher Education through
two summer centers in Valbonne, France and the Eastern Seaboard
of Thailand. In June 1999 GSEO, in cooperation with the Department
of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education,
launched a new overseas MA at a third site in Switzerland. Nineteen
students participated at this site in the first summer session
counting toward a Master’s in Educational Technology and
Instructional Design. In June, Dean Carole Ames, Associate Dean
Cassandra Book and Director of Outreach
Susan Melnick traveled to Thailand where they visited
the GSEO summer center and met with numerous Thai educational
leaders and MSU alumni, including Surat Silpa-Anan, Chairman of
the Thailand Educational Reform Committee and Permanent Secretary
of the Ministry of Education, who earlier had received a distinguished
alumni award at the May MSU commencement.Other U.S. WorkPrestigious Student Fellowships. Of five
Margaret McNamara Fellowships awarded by a World Bank organization
in the United States, two went to doctoral students in the College
of Education: Thidziambi Phendla, South African
doctoral student in educational administration, and Letina
Ngwenya, Zimbabwean doctoral student in science education.
In addition, three of the four Nelson Mandela Fellowships, which
are awarded to outstanding new South African students at MSU,
were given to College of Education graduate students: Thuthu
Jita, M.A. student in Science Education; Vuyusile
Msila, M.A. student in Teacher Education; Zandile
Myeni, M.A. student in Adult and Continuing Education.
LATTICE Outreach to Lansing Area
School Districts.
First developed in 1995 as an international
education partnership, the project Linking All Types of Teachers
to International Cross-cultural Education involves three school
districts (East Lansing, Haslett and Lansing) as well as the College
of Education, the African Studies Center, the Asian Studies Center
and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. It fosters
international perspectives among area K-12 teachers through a
study group which brings teachers together with selected MSU international
students on a monthly basis (25 teachers or administrators, 25
international students, plus a smaller number of MSU faculty and
staff). Participants engage in cross-cultural study and discussion
of cultural identity, language and culture, childhood, school,
families and work, all within their larger cultural, social and
historical contexts. This year the group gave special attention
to emerging South Africa connections (see below) and began to
form links with schools in Xian, China. The project also received
a Peace Corps Disseminator Grant for 1998-99 and a Kellogg Foundation
grant to fund several international artists in residency at the
participating school districts. Sally McClintock
(ISE) is the founder and principal leader of this group. Margaret
Holtschlag, Haslett fourth grade teacher and 1999 Michigan
Teacher of the Year, has also been a leading member of the group
since its inception.
English Universities Participating
in MSU Mathematics Education Project. T
he Mathematics
Assessment Resource Service (MARS) is an NSF funded project based
at MSU. In addition to the other U.S. universities involved (Harvard,
Berkeley and National-Louis of Evanston, IL), two English universities
(Nottingham and Durham) provide large-scale and classroom-based
assessment services to such clients as the Northern California
Mathematics Assessment Collaborative; school districts in New
York City, Hartford and New Haven; and classrooms in Detroit,
Las Vegas and Colorado Springs. Sandra Wilcox
(Teacher Education) is the director of this project.
Japanese Saturday School (Lakeview
School District, Battle Creek).
This is the eleventh
year of the Battle Creek Japanese Saturday School. Through support
from the Japanese Ministry of Education, MSU, the Michigan Department
of Education and the Battle Creek community, the school’s
educational programs have focused on teaching Japanese language
and mathematics and helping Japanese students now attending American
school systems to maintain the study skills which will be required
upon their return to Japan. Eleven Japanese MSU graduate and senior
students serve as teachers in the Saturday School. This support
is coordinated by Sandy Bryson. In fall 1999
this experience will be used on campus as a case study of the
implications of globalization for the lives of children and young
people in the teaching of TCC 305 (Growing Up and Coming of Age
in Three Societies) by Magane Koshimura (Educational
Administration).
Teacher Education Task Force on
Study Abroad.
The Department of Teacher Education appointed
a task force, chaired by Brad West (Teacher Education),
to consider study abroad options for students in the teacher preparation
program. The task force concentrated this year on defining and
discussing the options, including possible fifth year internships
with American-International Schools abroad, collecting data on
the international dimensions of teacher preparation programs at
other U.S. institutions, and preparing to survey undergraduates
regarding their interest in these options
Other Africa WorkConference on Academic Partnerships
with South Africans for Mutual Capacity Building.
More
than 240 persons participated in the October 1998 conference on
building partnerships to enhance the capacities of institutions
in South Africa and in other countries to address the many global,
regional, and local challenges facing higher education. The goals
of the conference were to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses
of current academic partnerships and exchanges, to define new
models of cooperation between South African institutions and those
in North America and Europe, and to explore strategies for mobilizing
financial resources to support these linkages. The South African
organizations which cosponsored the conference with MSU were the
Committee of Technikon Principals, the Historically Disadvantaged
Institutions Forum and the South African Universities Vice-Chancellors
Association. In addition to representatives of the South African
Ministry of Education and Parliament and various funding agencies,
half of South Africa’s 37 universities and technikons were
represented as well as 70 institutions of higher education in
the U.S. and a smaller number in Canada and Europe. Moses
Turner (Educational Administration) was the initiator,
organizer and chairperson of this conference, planned in collaboration
with a university-wide committee and with assistance from Joan
Eadie (Education Dean’s Office), Robert
Glew (ISE), Titus Singo (Educational
Administration) and Rebecca Jost (Educational
Administration) in the College of Education. Christine
Root wrote the conference report.
Research on South African Higher
Education.
Ann Austin (Educational Administration)
spent calendar year 1998 in South Africa as a U.S. Fulbright Fellow
at the Center for Organizational and Academic Development, University
of Port Elizabeth, where she worked with the university’s
management staff on issues of university transformation. She also
visited 12 other universities or technikons to carry out research
and present seminars on organizational change and transformation
in higher education. This research with the University of Port
Elizabeth as its main case study concentrates on strategies for
transformation and the staff development needs of academic personnel.
In addition, Austin has been appointed to the Board of Advisors
for the South African Journal of Higher Education. Upon returning
to the U.S. Austin hosted a group of eleven South African higher
education leaders who visited MSU in March 1999. She also returned
to South Africa for a follow-up visit in June.
Special Relationship with University
of Durban-Westville, South Africa.
Anne Schneller (ISE)
spent calendar year 1998 at the Faculty of Education at the University
of Durban-Westville. She worked with Dean of Education Jonathan
Jansen in developing a component of community service
for undergraduate education students at UDW, and assisted in the
supervision of student teachers in several schools in the Durban
area. She also worked closely with the Faculty of Education in
developing areas for future collaboration with MSU. James
Gallagher (Teacher Education) spent three weeks at UDW
in September 1998, where he designed and presented a workshop
on ethnographic research methodology in science education. Participants
in this workshop were science educators from universities and
teacher education institutions throughout KwaZulu-Natal province.
The workshop included observations and videotaping of classes
in schools in the Durban area; interviews with students, teachers
and parents; analysis of observations, interviews, and videotapes;
and writing of proposals and reports. In this workshop, Gallagher
worked closely with Loyiso Jita (Teacher Education),
a South African doctoral candidate at MSU. Later in October 1998
Dean Jansen visited MSU to discuss additional areas for collaboration.
As a result of this visit, Doug Campbell (Teacher
Education) was invited to spend three weeks at UDW in summer 1999.
He presented seminars and worked with staff members and students
on the methodology of qualitative research. Campbell also consulted
with the Faculty of Education at UDW on the relationship between
the university and local schools and teachers, using MSU’s
Professional Development Schools as a model. Also in summer 1999
Jairam Reddy, former vice-chancellor at UDW and
chair of South Africa’s National Higher Education Commission,
came to MSU as a visiting scholar to do research on higher education.
South Africa Fulbright Group Projects
Abroad.
The LATTICE Project developed a special relationship
with elementary and secondary schools in the Richards Bay area
of South Africa and obtained a Fulbright Group Projects Abroad
grant to send 13 Lansing area K-12 teachers to South Africa for
one month in summer 1999 with special advance preparation to work
on projects on some aspect of South African education. The group
was accompanied by Sally McClintock and Anne
Schneller (both from ISE). In turn a multiracial, multicultural
group of South African secondary school students from the same
area will visit the Lansing area in fall 1999. A LATTICE type
project has been established in the Richards Bay area by the South
African principal who, having visited LATTICE at MSU last year,
believes that the LATTICE approach can bring diverse educational
leaders together for better understanding in her country.Zimbabwe Study Abroad.
In May-June 1999 John Metzler (Teacher Education)
and Anne Schneller offered for the sixth summer
a six-week study abroad program in Southern Africa. "Education,
Society, and Learning in an African Context: Zimbabwe" attracted
18 students from MSU and four other universities. This year as
in every other year, this program had one of the highest rates
of minority participation of any MSU study abroad program. Highlights
of this year's program included a visit to commercial farms. Commercial
agriculture, with nearly one million employees, is the largest
employer in Zimbabwe. However, schooling opportunities for children
of farm laborers are grossly inadequate. For the second year,
the MSU students participated in a work project at a rural primary
school where they painted four teachers’ houses while living
with rural families.
Special Education in Africa.
Susan
Peters (CEPSE) has spent most of the summer 1999 in Zimbabwe
in order to finish her book with Robert Chimedza (MSU
Ph.D. from CEPSE in 1999), which she expects to be published within
the next year. It is entitled Special Education in an African
Context: Different Voices. She is also working on a web site to
be used by teacher education students in Zimbabwe.
Guinea Small Grants Staff Development
and School Improvement Project.
This World Bank funded
project provides organizational support and incentives for teams
of teachers to carry out their own professional development and
school improvement projects in Guinea. MSU is now in the fourth
year of a five-year contract with the Government of Guinea to
provide external technical assistance for this project. Jack
Schwille and Martial Dembele (an MSU
Ph.D. from Burkina Faso) are the principal external consultants.
They collaborate in capacity building activities for national
and regional staffs of ministry personnel who in turn organize,
facilitate and evaluate the teacher teams and grant competition.
To date, almost 2000 preliminary proposals have been written by
teams of teachers and 448 have been selected for funding. In other
words, over half of the primary school teachers in the country
have been involved. This year six regional dissemination conferences
organized and led by Ministry personnel (one conference for each
region with implemented projects) are being held for the teachers
to report on and discuss what they have done.
Other Asia WorkSocial Forestry, Education and Participation
Project in Thailand.
This innovative project links small
rural primary and lower secondary schools in Northern Thailand
to their communities in new ways. Students study local problems
related to forest management and work with villagers on small-scale
social forestry projects to address identified problems. Changes
towards more learner-centered teaching and learning, improved
student learning, community participation in the curriculum, improved
school-community relations and improved forest management practices
represent positive outcomes of the project. Team coordinator Christopher
Wheeler (Teacher Education) with James Gallagher
(Teacher Education) and Maureen McDonough (Forestry)
visited Thailand in March to discuss expansion plans with Ministry
officials, teachers and funding agencies. The three MSU faculty
members also completed an analytical videotape on key components
of the project. The tape is intended for worldwide dissemination
to donor agencies, Ministries of Education and Forestry, schoolteachers
and NGOs. Wheeler and McDonough also published a monograph on
lessons learned from the community component of the project: Toward
School and Community Collaboration in Social Forestry: Lessons
from the Thai Experience.
Planning for Vietnam Project.
The Rector and five other senior administrators and faculty members
of Canto University in the Mekong Delta visited MSU in March principally
to discuss a possible collaborative project with the College of
Education. Agreement was reached on plans for a project which
would link primary and secondary schools to communities through
local studies of key environmental problems. These school studies
(modeled after the MSU-Ministry of Education project in Thailand
focusing on forestry issues) are to be implemented with community
members and will provide the basis for small-scale school-community
projects to improve rice production. This visit, the first of
this importance since the Vietnam War, followed up earlier visits
by MSU representatives to Cantho, including Provost Lou
Anna Simon, Dean John Hudzik (ISP),
Chris Wheeler, Jim Gallagher and
Maureen McDonough.
Indonesian Teacher Education Exchange.
In January and February, 1999, the College hosted a study visit
by two lecturers from the secondary teachers' college at Gorontalo,
North Sulawesi, Indonesia; the visitors observed the operations
of MSU's teacher preparation program on the campus and in schools,
met with MSU instructors and collaborating teachers about the
design and conduct of the program, and explored the various uses
of computing and telecomputing in the program. In March, Tom
Bird (Teacher Education) provided five-day workshops
for the teachers' colleges at Padang, West Sumatra and Gorontalo,
North Sulawesi; each workshop served 20 lecturers and 20 schoolteachers,
and was designed to engage them in collaborative action research
aimed at the improvement of school and college teaching.
Other Latin America WorkInternational Dimension of Youth
Sports Research.
Robert Malina (Kinesiology)
received an NSF grant for research in Mexico. The project is in
part a follow-up of two communities Malina studied in the Valley
of Oaxaca, Mexico in 1968 and 1971, with a new component dealing
with physical activity and fitness of school children. Earlier
a survey of “Patterns of Sport Participation and Physical
Activity in Urban Mexican Youth” was completed as the basis
of Shannon Siegel’s (Kinesiology) dissertation.
Here at MSU the Youth Sports Institute hosted a conference on
“Organized Sports in the Lives of Children and Adolescents”
with participants representing 28 different countries. During
the year Malina also gave related invited presentations in Australia,
Germany and Portugal.
Research on Teacher Education.
In addition to the multicountry values education study described
above, Teresa Tatto (Teacher Education) has published
several articles this year on her teacher education research in
Mexico and has started research for the World Bank on inservice
teacher education in the Dominican Republic. She also gave invited
presentations in El Salvador and Costa Rica.
Other Notable Faculty Activities
Gene Brown (Kinesiology)
served as Vice-President for Awards of the International Society
of Biomechanics in Sports and also made research presentations
in Germany and Finland. Sharon Feiman-Nemser (Teacher
Education) edited a special issue of the European Journal of Teacher
Education on mentoring, which includes an article by her on “Teachers
as Teacher Educators.” Lynn Paine continued
to serve on the National Academy of Sciences Board on International
Comparative Studies in Education. David Plank
has continued as a member of the World Bank Education Policy Advisory
Board for Brazil and participated in the development and evaluation
of projects in Brazil and Mozambique. Jack Schwille received
the 1999 Ralph H. Smuckler Award for Advancing International Studies
and Programs at MSU. Chris Wheeler was a consultant
for CARE in Tanzania on issues of community management for quality
basic education.
Interdepartmental Core Faculty Theme
Group.
During the 1998-99 year the faculty theme
group with 40 members actively pursued its charge of promoting
international scholarship in the college, fostering an intellectual
community among members of the group, and preparing the way for
new projects and new funding. During the past year its regular
series of lunchtime sessions were organized by region so that
faculty members working in a particular region could reinforce
one another’s efforts and create additional opportunities
for other faculty members and the college in general. These sessions
focused on the theme group’s regional priorities with two
sessions on Southeast Asia, two sessions on China, three on Southern
Africa and three on Mexico. The group also made six research grants
as a result of the competition organized for members of the group.
Steering committee members for the year were Susan Peters,
David Plank (chair) and Teresa Tatto.
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For More Information Contact:
Jack Schwille , Assistant Dean
Anne Schneller, Specialist
Marlene Green, Secretary
517 Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: 517-355-9627
Fax: 517- 353-6393
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