The Role of Funders in Advancing Educational Equity Across the Globe: Fostering Critical Research in Comparative and International Education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

As demands for educational equity reverberate across the world, it is increasingly evident that addressing injustices in education necessitates critical research that is commensurately global. Yet, geographic asymmetries continue to shape educational research in ways that tend to privilege perspectives from the US and/or the global North. This is exacerbated by inequities in research funding. Such state of affairs weaken our collective capacity to advance educational justice at a global scale. Against this background, we propose this panel as an opportunity to deepen grant-makers’ engagement with comparative and international perspectives toward transformative education across geographic scales.

In this panel, we will bring leading funders of international education research into conversation with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other attendees at the 2024 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual conference. The panel will feature two private foundations that fund education research globally—the Spencer Foundation and the Jacobs Foundation —alongside their respective grantees. The panel will 1) provide insight into the application and review process from both the grant-seeking and grant-making side and 2) engage in a robust dialogue about how to better support critical scholarship in the global South. Program staff from each foundation will present their approaches to research funding and will consider the implications for international scholarship. Grant recipients will draw on their experiences navigating the grant process and provide insights on how we can collectively foster critical research in international contexts.

Our goal is for this session to advance educational equity across the globe by a) enabling dialogue between funders and researchers outside of the global North, b) deepening transparency about grantmaking, especially as it relates to the international scholarship. In doing so, it is our hope to foster cutting-edge future research on equity and education in global contexts.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Rhoda Freelon

Chair

• Rhoda Freelon

Individual Presentations

• Funders' perspective: the Spencer Foundation - Tafadzwa Tivaringe, The Spencer Foundation

Discussant

• Tafadzwa Tivaringe, The Spencer Foundation