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Highlighted Session: Education and development in Central American and the Latin Caribbean: Global forces, local responses

Wed, March 13, 4:45 to 6:15pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Third Level, Merrick 1

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Historically, Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) have received insufficient attention from scholars. This is true both generally and when it comes to education research. This lack of attention is even more acute with regard to research that approaches education reform as nested within and contributing to larger (i.e., national and international) political economic forces. In order to address this gap, this panel presents original research from a forthcoming book, Education and development in Central America and the Latin Caribbean: Global forces, local responses (Bristol University Press). Before describing the papers that comprise this panel, we first provide a further characterization of the gap in knowledge to which this panel (and the underlying book) respond.

First, it can be pointed out that education literature on “Latin America” frequently fails to include any focus on the countries of CALC. Analysis typically attends to Mexico and then the countries of South America, particularly Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. A case in point is the otherwise excellent book by Rivas (2022), Examining Educational Policy in Latin America: Comprehensive Insights into Contemporary Reform. Another example is the recent volume by Ornelas (2019), Politics of Education in Latin America, which includes only one paper on a CALC country. And while the region has received attention recently, for example, through the publication of an edited volume entitled, Education in Mexico, Central America and the Latin Caribbean, the papers of this volume are more focused on describing the organization and operation of the region’s education systems than they are with analyzing the interaction of the global and local forces that impinge on them (Posner et al., 2017).

A second way to grasp the minimal extent to which international influence has been a focus of education research in the region is the scoping review conducted by Edwards (2018). This review examined the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. It retained studies that were explicitly attentive to the international political economy of education policy. Based on a review of results in English and Spanish from Web of Science, Google Scholar, and university holdings, a total of only 34 publications was identified as relevant. Given that this search was done without restriction of time period and with very broad search terms (e.g., the searches in Web of Science were conducted for each country with the country’s name and then the term “education”), it is surprising that there were not more studies of relevance. However, even with this sample of studies, what stands out is that they tend to be limited in the sense that they focus on (a) short time periods, (b) individual international organizations, (c) local-level implementation of international trends, or (d) the internal politics of national ministries of education. Together, the papers on this panel seek to go beyond these limitations.

A third way to draw attention to the relative paucity of research on CALC countries is to look at the frequency with which they are the subject of presentations at the conferences of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) of the United States. For example, according to the 2020 CIES conference report, a total of 1017 formal paper presentations were accepted (Silova et al., 2020), of which, only 11 (or 1.08%) were about CALC countries. If this statistic is any indication of overall trends, it can thus be argued that the CALC region receives very little attention at CIES—and that even fewer within this sample focus explicitly on education from an international political economy perspective.

The above examples highlight a dearth of scholarship that approaches education and education policy as nested between the global and the local, as affecting and affected by the larger political-economic trends and forces shape the development experience of the region. This gap in research and scholarly attention leads to two consequences: first, a lack of (or a simplistic) understanding of the dynamics that confront the region generally and its education systems specifically, and, second, a lack of insight into the contextualized solutions to educational problems that are being pursued by a variety of actors.

This panel responds by bringing together scholars from the region and with long-term engagement there. The papers that follow look explicitly at a range of education policies that have emerged in the CALC region, with the analyses presented being the result of research that has been guided by an explicit concern with the relationship between international influence, national politics, and local agency. With that said, the structure of the panel is as follows:
• Panel chair: Introduces the book project out of which this panel has emerged and characterizes the gap in the literature to which this panel responds.
• Paper 1: Focuses on decentralization reform in Honduras, with particular attention to the tensions between the World Bank and the Honduran government—and the way that this interaction has become “ritualized” (so as to avoid making any significant changes to the status quo in terms of the assignment of resources and control within the system).
• Paper 2: Focuses on remote learning technology in Panama during the context of the COVID pandemic. In so doing, the paper is attentive to the role and influence of international technology companies.
• Paper 3: Presents an experience in rural El Salvador where a group of teachers dedicated themselves to ensuring that their students continued learning throughout the pandemic. This locally-driven initiative not only was supported by an international NGO but also ran counter to global trends related to literacy development.
• Paper 4: Presents analysis that is cross-cutting in nature. It provides insight into the dialectical nature of education reform in CALC region. It does so by drawing on examples from across the papers contained in the book on which this panel is based. This final paper additionally offers reflections on ways forward for theory, policy, and practice, based on the findings presented in the other papers.

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Chair

Individual Presentations

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