Transversal Competencies in Asian Countries and Beyond

This volume provides an overview of the themes and challenges in curriculum thinking and practice that currently engage policymakers and practitioners across the East Asian and Southeast Asian region. It addresses issues of policy development and implementation, and considers the notion of transversal in a broader sense, including whether the implementation of non-academic concepts can indeed traverse disciplinary, cultural and contextual boundaries.
Consisting mainly of contributions by authors from ASEAN and neighboring countries, the volume reflects a distinctly regional perspective and provides a view of national and smaller-scale initiatives, as well as chapters setting these initiatives in an international context. It touches on policy and curriculum development, teaching and learning materials, teacher development, and skills assessment, thereby implicating broad definitional issues as well as specific implementational aspects.

Aaron Benavot is Professor of Global Education Policy at the University at Albany-SUNY (USA), with interests in comparative education research and international education policies. Aaron’s scholarship explores education issues from comparative, global and critical perspectives. Specifically, he has examined the historical expansion of primary education; the prolongation of compulsory schooling; the globalization of curricular policies; the diversification of secondary education; school differences in curricular implementation; the changing status of vocational education; the spread of national learning assessments and the emergence of global learning metrics; the conceptualization of adult literacy; the monitoring of adult education and lifelong learning; teacher enactment of mathematics curricula; the role of structured democratic voice in educational accountability; and the mainstreaming of education for global citizenship and sustainable development in policies and curricula. For eight years, Aaron worked at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris as Senior Analyst, and then as Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report. He has more than 100 publications, including three monograph books, and has guest edited four journal issues. He has internationally recognized expertise in global education policy, and the interplay between education and sustainable development. He currently serves on the advisory or editorial boards of a dozen education and social science journals.

Dr. Jean Bernard is Senior Partner and international education consultant at Spectacle Learning Media, where she consults on various topics in education and development, including curriculum and textbook design, teacher training, and education in emergencies. Her consulting work with the United Nations (UN), USAID, and other international organizations on projects to improve education and learning has taken her to a number of developing countries, including Tajikistan, Vietnam, Jordan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. She also works with community service organizations in the US on the co-creation of video and multimedia programming for distribution and use through web-based platforms. As a senior programme specialist in the UNESCO Education Sector (2004–09), Jean coordinated the development of global policies and strategies for integrating peace and human rights education into the design of textbooks and other learning materials. In this role, she coordinated the development of a global strategy for textbook policies and a set of international guidelines for developers and users of teaching and learning materials. As a co-convener of NISSEM, she has been actively engaged in several of the group’s projects, including co-editing Volume 1 of the NISSEM Global Briefs, and a chapter focusing on SEL in international contexts in SEL in Action (Guilford Press). She is also co-editor of a volume to be produced through a new joint initiative with the International Bureau of Education, ‘Strengthening social and emotional learning in hybrid modes of education’ (working title). Jean has received several honors and awards throughout her career, including the Alice Douglas Kellogg Award in American Literature from the George Washington University, as well as research grants from the Asia Foundation and the Association for Asian Studies.

Susan Iannuzzi has advised Ministries of Education on curricula, textbooks, assessment, and teacher development over the course of her 30-year career. Through consultancies for USAID, DFID, UNICEF, the World Bank, the United States Department of State, and Cambridge Assessment, she has worked with education professionals and ministries partners in the Middle East (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon), Africa (Eritrea, The Gambia, Rwanda), Asia (Turkey, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Vietnam), Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia) and Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador). She has also published dozens of textbooks, supplementary educational materials, teaching training materials in the field of English Language Teaching, for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Pearson (Longman), McGraw-Hill education, the US State Department, and numerous regional publishers. For NISSEM, she was a co-editor of Global Briefs Volume 4: Doing More with Language Teaching.

Professor Le Anh Vinh is Director General of the Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences (VNIES), and the Director of the National Center for Sustainable Development of General Education Quality. Vinh received his Masters of Education in International Policy and Ph.D. in Mathematics at Harvard University, USA. Before joining VNIES, he held several positions at the University of Education, Vietnam National University, including Dean of Faculty of Teacher Education, Director of Center for Educational Researches and Applications, and Principal of High school of Educational Sciences. His academic activities include: General member of Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota, US (Oct 2014 – March 2015), Junior Fellow at ICTP, Italy (Fall 2013), Visiting Scholar at University of Rochester (Spring 2011), Rothschild Scholar at AMRI, South Africa (Spring 2010), and Junior Research Fellow at the Erwin Schroedinger Institute, Austria (Spring 2008). Vinh is the Editor-in-chief of the Vietnam Journal of Educational Sciences. He has published more than 70 journal papers and 40 books, including textbooks for various levels, from primary to graduate. He has also secured many research grants and contracts with UNESCO, UNICEF, UNFPA, WB, European Commission, and is the lead researcher on developing the Vietnam Educational Strategy Framework 2021–2030.

Dr. Margaret Sinclair has worked on education in low- and middle-income countries since 1969, in the fields of education planning, education in emergencies and for refugees, protection of education from attack, and curriculum for social cohesion/learning to live together. Her institutional affiliations in this regard have included UNHCR (Head of Education Unit), UNESCO, and the Education Above All Foundation. She was honored with an honorary doctorate by the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her publications include the monographs ‘Planning education in and after emergencies’ (UNESCO IIEP), and ‘Learning to live together: building skills and values for the twenty-first century’ (UNESCO IBE). Given her experience of education challenges in situations of insecurity and post-conflict, she has worked with colleagues to create NISSEM, with its objectives of transforming textbooks and other education materials to support teachers in conveying social and emotional learning oriented to the SDG Target 4.7 goals such as respect for diversity, culture of peace, gender equality and responsible citizenship. With NISSEM colleagues, she plans to support this process in interested countries, through professional collaboration.

Andy Smart worked in educational and children’s publishing in the United Kingdom and Egypt after teaching English in Sudan and Egypt. For more than 20 years, he has specialized in textbook policy and development, as well as in early grade literacy, advising governments in Morocco, Rwanda, Sudan, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Tonga on textbook policy, development, and strategy. He is a children’s author and translator (mainly from Arabic to English, but also co-translator into Arabic of the international best-seller, The Gruffalo). He is the lead author of Textbook Policies in Asia (ADB) and vice-president of the International Association for Research on Textbooks and Educational Media (IARTEM), where he is the only non-academic member of the board. He is a founder member of NISSEM, which seeks to apply social and emotional learning to address SDG Target 4.7 through educational materials, in which capacity he has served as lead author for several publications by NISSEM, including the background paper for the recent report, ‘Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education’, published by UNESCO. With Margaret Sinclair, he is the co-editor of the NISSEM Global Briefs series.

Professor James H. Williams has worked in education since 1975, initially in Applied Linguistics/TESOL, and, since 1988, in education policy, planning and development. He has taught, initially in business, and then at undergraduate and graduate levels, and also served as editor of an educational newsletter at the Harvard Institute for International Development, as AAAS Fellow in the Africa Bureau of USAID, and, previously, as a social worker. He is currently Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development at The George Washington University. His teaching and research have focused broadly on policy and planning for education in low- and middle-income countries. He has written textbooks on educational planning and policy, a longitudinal study of lower secondary school drop-out in Cambodia, and a series of three edited books on the relationships between school textbooks and the development of national identity, membership or exclusion from national communities, and conflict. He is a co-convener of NISSEM and serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Education in Emergencies.