IOE Researchers Speak at 2017 CIES Conference in Atlanta

On March 5–9, 2017, the U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia hosted the 2017 Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). Seeking the most diverse engagement in the venue’s multiple opportunities for expertise exchange, debate, and academic networking, a representative team of experts with IOE’s leading research & advisory centres joined this year’s CIES event. Presentations were given by Isak Froumin, Oleg Leshukov, Elena Minina, Pavel Sorokin, Zumrad Kataeva, Martin Carnoy, Tatiana Khavenson, and Andrey Zakharov.

As part of the CIES Conference 2017's most dynamic and topical agenda, HSE Institute of Education professionals gave a comprehensive outline of IOE’s forefront research outputs in an array of domains, thus contributing to more advanced and meaningful discussions of today’s major global and local university processes, the underlying drivers and challenges to tackle, as well as expected outcomes and implications for academics, practitioners, policy leaders, and other stakeholders.

IOE academic supervisor Isak Froumin and researcher Oleg Leshukov spoke about IOE’s recent cross-country study delving into university environments and federalism. To provide evidence-based guidelines for further improvements in higher education governance & legislation, this research tracks and compares federal–provincial practices, relations, and models in educational landscapes of the world’s eight major federal states (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Russia, the USA, etc.). An inspiring discussion that followed Oleg and Isak’s presentation was devoted to legal factors and mechanisms to foster transparent, cohesive, and higher-payback interagency cooperation at federal and regional levels.   

Reports by research fellows with the IOE International Laboratory for Education Policy Analysis were mostly dedicated to various pressing issues of education inequality and life trajectories. In particular, the Lab’s director Andrey Zakharov talked about school principals and teachers’ views of the academic & life imperatives, values, visions, and missions their respective school settings cultivate and endeavour to communicate to the students, as well as on how these life-course guidance and education patterns correlate with overall welfare standards in communities where a particular school is located (data from a total of 30 Russian schools was analyzed).

Further exploring the domain of socioeconomic disparities and inequality in education, the Lab’s researcher Tatiana Khavenson gave a presentation on ways in which family background, livelihoods, and individual academic achievement all impact schoolchildren’s perceptions and choices of further learning strategies (i.e., vocational / university training, format of study, etc.).

In his talk entitled Education, Agency and Labor Market Mobility in a Transitional Economy, the Lab’s academic supervisor Martin Carnoy focused on evaluating ‘returns’ on investment in one’s learning & development, i.e., opportunity & welfare gains that higher-level and more prestigious education can generate.          

IOE has participated in the Comparative and International Education Society annual gatherings since 2015. Over these years, the CIES venue has come to play a significant role in advancing IOE’s global outreach and building sustained partnerships with leading international hubs for education-centered R&D. Incidentally, the CIES 2017 Conference featured IOE expert Tatiana Khavenson’s report on the results of research into linkages between social capital, school environment, and student achievement that she had carried out in close collaboration with Pennsylvania University fellows.