Highlighted Session: International Organizations and Education Policy: Crisis, Collaboration, and Coloniality

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

In the current context of rapid transformations taking place due to technological, political, and environmental changes, the roles of international organizations (IOs) and their priorities for education have become increasingly relevant. In their responsibility to promote and reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), IOs have been among the most vocal in supporting educational advancements in order to attain the targets laid out in SDG4: Quality Education. Therefore, in the context of the CIES conference theme, Envisioning Education in a Digital Society, it is necessary to interrogate the roles and impacts of IOs, their educational policies and programming, and the power they wield to drive priorities within national education systems.
This panel explores several major international organizations (IOs) through various lenses, with a focus on how their education policies respond to crisis, their work with other agencies, how they negotiate with governments, and implications for marginalized populations. Through five separate paper presentations, the authors seek to examine and understand how IOs shift and respond to different educational contexts and issues, for instance the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental crises, armed conflict, gender inequities, and related to all, colonial hierarchies. Each 12 minute presentation will provide an empirical analysis of a different facet to IO educational policy and practice.
The first presentation will provide an analysis of three IOs—UNICEF, UNHCR, and the World Bank—and discuss how the organizations frame different educational crises in their media and policies, through a comparison of education for those forcibly displaced from Venezuela and Ukraine. This critical policy analysis based on documents and interviews finds stark differences in how IOs depict the two crises and each affected population. The second presentation offers a comparative case study that examines how education policies in Egypt frame the problems and solutions related to teachers' work. The paper presents the preliminary findings of a critical discourse analysis of policy documents of the main IOs involved in the reform: UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Egyptian Ministry of Education. The third presentation compares the World Bank’s financing portfolio in education during the last 5 years with its portfolio during the era of structural adjustment, asking how the Bank’s projects/operations have changed across these two time periods. The paper also explores how the Bank’s education sector portfolio has begun to take on new challenges of climate, COVID-19, and conflict. The fourth presentation focuses on the Global Partnership for Education and the Education Cannot Wait Fund with an analysis of organizational change and continuity, as well as the motivations, logic, and evidence informing the work of each IO in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. An inductive thematic analysis approach is used to interpret data from two sources: document review and key informant interviews with ECW and GPE staff and leadership. The fifth presentation focuses on the case of Colombia and the establishments of the RAPID framework, a collaborative effort by multiple international organizations, including the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Based on an analysis of interviews with domestic policymakers and officials from local IO offices along with document analysis, the study’s findings disrupt prevailing narratives that focus exclusively on the authority of IOs as drivers of education policy within middle and low-income countries.
Following the paper presentations, the chair will facilitate a discussion between the audience and the panelists, encouraging a dialogue on how IOs shape education policy and programming.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Chair

• Francine Menashy, OISE, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Global Recommendations and National Realities: The Translation of the RAPID framework in Colombia - Claudia Milena Diaz-Rios, OISE University of Toronto

• International organizations and framings of crisis: A comparison of organizational discourse on Venezuela and Ukraine - Francine Menashy, OISE, University of Toronto; Yara Abdelaziz, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

• Examining the Coloniality of Gender in International Organizations’ Educational Policies: A Comparative Case Study on Teachers' Work in Egypt - Yara Abdelaziz, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

• Complicated Crises: How the World Bank’s Approach to the Education Sector is Changing - Karen Mundy, University of Toronto

• COVID-19 Education Emergency Response: A Comparative Analysis of Education Cannot Wait and the Global Partnership for Education - Caroline Manion, OISE, University of Toronto