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Monday, March 01, 2004 As of the new semester, the International Education Policy (IEP) Monday Seminar Series has a new look. Since its inception in 2000, the biweekly cohort reunions have brought preeminent practitioners of International Education and Development to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to speak about the course of their careers and the substance of their work, with the purpose of “engaging IEP students in professional and scholarly dialogue.” As the result of a consensus reached during the January 2004 IEP cohort retreat, IEP student volunteers will serve as “Student Ambassadors” for each of the seminars, allowing for increased dialogue between the cohort and the speakers. This entails having lunch with the guests prior to the seminars, introducing them to the cohort, facilitating both formal and informal discussions, and presenting a token class gift.. Joanna Durham and Zubair Kassam (both Ed.M. students in the IEP program) successfully ushered in the new format by hosting Dr. Jeff Puryear of the DC-based Inter-American Dialogue (IAD) on Monday, February 23. Puryear, who sought to join the Peace Corps in the 1960’s so that he could travel to Asia (“the farthest he could get from the US”), admits that he “was never particularly interested in education or in Latin America.” However, once he arrived in Colombia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, he became fixated with both Latin America and the importance of educational development. After completing his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago, he landed what he considered his dream job with the Ford Foundation. Although he claims he went about his post-graduate job search “all wrong,” he encouraged students to identify the people and organizations “doing the kind of work they that (they) want to be doing, and to actively seek them out.” Puryear spoke about his various positions on the private side of International Education Policy, including the top-level education policy reform goals of PREAL (Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas), the IAD initiative that he co-directs with a Chilean counterpart. PREAL, the IAD’s largest program, focuses on catalyzing educational improvements through working with civil society leaders in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Puryear also spoke at length about the relatively happenstance nature of his academic and professional development. “Expect the unexpected,” he advised the students in attendance, reinforcing a mantra that previous speakers engaged in international development careers have frankly stated as well. A week earlier, Professor Joaquín González Ibáñez delivered his presentation “International Human Rights in a Globalized World: the Challenge of Universal Access,” which served as the first IEP seminar of the Spring 2004 semester. González Ibáñez discussed the role of large international organizations like the UN and lofty initiatives like “Education for All” (EFA) in securing uniform and quality educational access in the neediest regions of the world. “Our world is mostly developing countries, in terms of size and number of inhabitants,” he pointed out, emphasizing the scope and importance of the task at hand. Providing an historical and legal context for which international treaties on social issues (and generallly non-binding) like education are established, González Ibáñez made clear that international law and treaties like EFA are only as effective as individual governments make them. He also pointed out that many of the target countries for EFA, which are largely concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, have signed into law the EFA principles, yet lack the democratic traditions to oversee their fair implementation. While this could be viewed as out “out of the hands” of the international community, González Ibáñez emphasized that increased globalization ensures that the problems and obstacles of underdeveloped nations – even the most seemingly remote – are becoming the problems of the developed ones, as well. González Ibáñez, who has taught International Relations and Law at various universities around the globe, is currently a Fellow at Harvard’s Real Colegio Complutense. For more information, please visit: The next IEP Monday Seminar will be on Monday, March 8th,
with Ronald Scheman, Director General of the Inter-American Agency
for Cooperation and Development Organization of American States (OAS). Michael Lisman, a part-time Ed.M candidate in IEP, works at LASPAU: Academic & Professional Programs for the Americas. |