UNESCO Chair Book Talk: Time in Education Policy Transfer
Monday 15 September 2025
4 to 5.15 pm CEST / 10 to 11.15 am EST
Hybrid: RH 306, The Goodman Room, TC College, New York (USA), and Online (Zoom)
This event is organised in partnership with Teachers College, Columbia University, the KIX EMAP hub and the UNESCO Chair in Comparative Education Policy.
Time in Education Policy Transfer. The Seven Temporalities of Global School Reform
This open-access book investigates a topic underexplored in policy transfer: time. Drawing on well-known theories from comparative education, public policy studies, political science, and sociology, but written in an easy-to-understand language, the author discusses seven temporalities of policy transfer: historical period, future, sequence, timing, lifespan, age, and tempo. The temporal dimension helps us understand when the current school reform, known as the school-autonomy-with-accountability reform, developed into a global script, why it conquered the globe, and how it was selectively adopted and translated into each local context. Also, for the first time in this book, the author demonstrates what exactly diffused and what “stuck,” that is, which features of the reform were eventually institutionalized. Internationally renowned for her seminal work on policy borrowing, the author systematically applies a comparative, transnational, and global perspective to capture the role of the OECD and the World Bank in advancing and accelerating the reform’s worldwide diffusion.
Speakers:
- Chanwoong Baek, Academic Director, NORRAG, UNESCO Co-Chair of Comparative Education Policy at the Geneva Graduate Institute
- Tomás Esper, PhD in International and Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
- Iveta Silova, Professor and Associate Dean, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University
- Gita Steiner-Khamsi, William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, Honorary UNESCO Chair of Comparative Education Policy at the Geneva Graduate Institute
- Arushi Terway, Senior Lead Research Associate, NORRAG