Will Brehm 0:55
Liz Jackson, welcome to FreshEd.

Liz Jackson 1:02
Thank you so much for having me.

Will Brehm 1:04
I want to jump into education research and philosophy of education. One of the terms that we often use is this idea of “global,” and it can refer to so many different things — a global approach, globally circulating policies, the very idea of globalization, or kind of the opposite, where we talk about local. And then you hear some people use the idea of “glocal,” where they combine global and local together. How do you understand the various meanings of the term global in education?

Liz Jackson 1:32
I think you’re right. In education, there is a tendency to think of global in terms of what is international and the processes of globalization, which could be related to the importance of global influences in different regions. So a very geographical, nation-state-based perspective. But often this perspective somehow overlooks what remains local.

Another way to think about global is to think about the big picture of education. So by global, it could be a synonym for a holistic approach. With the rise of academic fields in education, we tend to think about education in terms of schooling, and in this case, we ignore what we would call today lifelong learning. We ignore vocational education, traditional education, apprenticeship, anything outside of schools — like the null curriculum, which we learn in society but not in schools. In my work, I discuss the media, I discuss emotions. The media educates, but it’s not part of schools. We learn about emotions, but that’s not part of the curriculum.

So when we look at the big picture, we can see that international differences are still important, while there tends to be this view that the global is what makes us all the same, if that makes sense.

Will Brehm 2:48
You could think of international education and the PISA rankings, which are school-based examinations of 15-year-olds around the geographic world where we think of nation states. But what you’re bringing up are slightly different ideas of how we might begin to think about education globally.

Liz Jackson 3:04
Right. So if we look at PISA, if we look at math education, secondary education, it somehow gives the view that we’re all the same, which makes it easy to compare things which are similar, but you then somehow hide the things which are maybe radically different.

Will Brehm 3:18
One of the things that you point out in some of your work is how there are these major handbooks and encyclopedias being produced by big publishers like Routledge, and they often have the term “international” in the title — the International Handbook of X or Y or Z. But if you look at who is actually contributing and writing in these books, these are often people from Western Europe or North America, and a lot of the references point to scholars from those same geographic areas. Why do you think this gap exists?

Liz Jackson 3:48
It’s a great question. And it’s one of those things that once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing it. But before you see it, you just sort of take it for granted.

It’s an important question because I think the leaders of the field are not being close-minded or disingenuous in their approach. And there could potentially be some differences here between philosophy of education and comparative education. But I think we tend to think of our field as the people we interact with. Comparative education, one thing that I appreciate about it compared with philosophy, is it tends to attract people who like to travel and learn from different locations. Philosophers tend to be more oriented towards the society they’re in. Historically, they don’t necessarily care about meeting with people from around the world. They might have a very deep argument with someone who lives in the same region. It’s a very conceptual argument. So they don’t necessarily realize they have to travel broadly.
If you think about the history of higher education, it’s only in the last 20 years that it became normal for a lot of academics to travel in certain regions of the world. And of course, we have to ask again — is it global or not? Well, probably not. Probably it’s only these wealthier countries where people were traveling around.

I think people tend to think about the field in terms of their conference — CIES, or the Philosophy of Education Society, a conference in the US or the UK. And they think of the international field in terms of the people who would travel to the US or UK for the conference. They can be quite oblivious that there are wonderful organizations based in Japan, based in Korea, based in other parts of the world, because they take for granted that the field is who they see and who they’re connected with. There’s really still a lack of global knowledge.

I think with the rise of the internet, there’s more awareness that there are conferences around the world, but people still tend to be regional in their thinking. There’s one person from Korea at my conference, there’s one person from China — that sort of ticks all the boxes. But if you’re in another part of the world, the field will look completely different.
And then you get into the problem of topics. Not only are references often based in certain parts of the world, but as a result of that, certain topics will be more popular. So Chinese scholars going to CIES might be interested in issues in US education, perhaps, rather than Chinese education. All of this kind of goes together to paint this picture that the global field and the Western field are basically the same thing.

Will Brehm 5:58
If you were to start looking more regionally, how do you begin mapping the different ideas you see in these different parts of the world? What ideas are prevalent today in the philosophy of education in North America and Western Europe? And how does that compare to other regions? Do we see similar ideas, or are the ideas quite different?

Liz Jackson 6:20
This is an interesting question, because it gets to the relationship between scholars in different regions, their relationships with one another, and the way they reflect on their own identities.

What I find when I go to a philosophy of education conference in Korea or Japan, for example, is there will be sort of international work, which is Western, and then work focused on local topics. And there will actually be a kind of divide between the two. I might like to see something like that at AERA or CIES — okay, this is the American section, this is the global section. But it’s more peripheral in the case of the US, isn’t it? Where if you’re not part of the majority, you look a bit out of place.

Part of this big picture too is the English-speaking world versus the whole world beyond English. In our Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong, we’ll have Chinese-language sections. My understanding in speaking with some colleagues who are really globally oriented in East Asia is that they’ll go to one session in Korean, talking about Korean philosophy and Korean schools, and then go to another session talking about European thinkers and so-called universal or global topics. But sometimes there is a gap between the two. You’re either locally focused or globally focused — and “global” seems to suggest Western, UK, US, and Europe, rather than Africa or South America.

Will Brehm 7:42
It sounds rather segregated, in a way.

Liz Jackson 7:45
I think it is. And one thing that inspired me to start reflecting on these issues was experiencing them for the first time myself and realizing: when I look at this handbook of the international field of whatever, they’re missing out on this whole other conversation. On the one hand, I can judge them and say, well, that’s really discriminatory or close-minded. But I think honestly, there are just these disconnects and gaps in the field. I feel sorry for those colleagues who don’t know that there are really interesting philosophical conversations going on in the world that they are simply oblivious to.

Will Brehm 8:18
There’s definitely an ignorance, I would imagine. But then to use the term “international” to claim that what you’re doing is international — that’s a bit arrogant, in a way.

Liz Jackson 8:28
I think so. I think philosophers really have to think through this. But comparativists also have to think through this. If you’re calling yourself global or international, and it’s only societies which are English-speaking or considered Western liberal democracies, then it sends a message — that the rest of the world is not part of the world, that the rest of the world is invisible and doesn’t matter. I don’t think those people are meaning to do that, but that is the result.

Will Brehm 8:52
What about higher education internationalization, where students have been circulating around the globe, but often to certain countries? Not every country is a host country. Does that shape the conversations and the traditions in which a scholar might engage, or think they should engage?

Liz Jackson 9:10
What has really inspired me — first realizing how many interesting conversations were going on around the world, with communities not linking up to each other even though we say we’re in a global situation — is also seeing the way that ideas move globally, because they do move globally.

One of the metaphors I used in my upcoming book is the idea of centre and periphery. What we find — and you and I are both very familiar with East Asia — is that not many PhD students are coming to study in Korea and Japan. More students are coming from Korea, Japan, and China to study in Australia, the US, the UK, Europe, and so on. And through that process, there’s this assumption. I think we also need to give more credit to Asia in comparative education. In East Asia, there’s an assumption that you learn from other places — and that’s not a global assumption. So when students show up in the US, there’s this expectation that you have to learn from your colleagues in the US. There’s not the expectation that US colleagues have something to learn from their students. And then eventually, the ideas learned in the US, UK, or Australia get brought back to Japan, Korea, or China, and that sort of becomes the knowledge from the world, or the knowledge from the West. But you don’t see that movement of ideas going the other way as often.

I’ve also noticed this in Hong Kong, where I am. In Korea and Japan, there’s this culture of hospitality — to invite in scholars from around the world, not just Western scholars, but scholars from around the world. Thank you for coming. You’re from Africa. You’re from Ukraine. You’re from Tanzania. You’re from the US. Welcome here. That culture of hospitality is less deeply ingrained in a lot of Western liberal societies. So even a top scholar coming from China or Korea to the US might be met with, “Are you here for something? Do you want something from us?” rather than, “Wow, we have something to learn from you.”

Will Brehm 10:58
A lot of what we’re talking about is around geography and coming from different places, and how these local contexts matter to thought and shape thinking. Since you are a philosopher of education, to what extent can thought be universal or abstracted beyond the local? Is there such a thing as a universal thought that you can work with, rather than a thought that comes specifically from some geography?

Liz Jackson 11:22
This is a really hot topic in philosophy. And this is one reason why people puzzle when I say that philosophy of education needs to become more global. There is this idea of a methodology called conceptual analysis. In conceptual analysis, you’re looking at concepts which could be abstracted from any culture, and it’s seen as a methodology that could be universal — it doesn’t matter where you are.

Two concepts I like to work on recently are gratitude and humility. If you think about gratitude, you can sort of come up with a definition that would make sense to anybody, anywhere. And in fact, people do say this — this is a universal value, a universal concept.

Two interesting things happen here when it comes to universal concepts. The first is: do people around the world think about universal concepts, or is this something particular to Western philosophy? I think there is a misconception that it’s something people do more in Western philosophy communities than globally. And I don’t know why there’s this misconception, because Chinese philosophers also think about concepts. This is not something distinctive to a particular region.

But the other issue is: if you assume that the concept that matters to you is important to everyone around the world, that’s a slightly different issue. Everyone around the world can understand your concept. Everyone in the world has concepts. But if there are three or four different ways to think about gratitude, and you’re saying you have the best view — does that mean it’s the best view for people in China, for people in Tanzania? There’s a really important question there about whether you’re implying that everyone needs to share values that come from one region.

And the people doing this work — which I want to problematize — are not really thinking about it that way, because they don’t understand that their ideas are influenced by their culture. That’s another reason why it would be so valuable for people to be more globally interconnected in philosophy: because people often don’t realize how culture influences their thinking until they meet someone with a different view. A philosopher might say, well, that’s why we argue with people in the same city, because even people in the same city have different views. But if you leave your city, leave your region, and go around the world, you’ll find views that were not at all common in your own country. And then you’ll start to realize — okay, you have a universal concept, but it may matter more to people in the UK than in China.

Will Brehm 13:28
Universal concepts, but particular interpretations — maybe there’s also a temporal dimension here, around when a universal idea gets taken up or not.

I guess this raises the question around philosophy of education more broadly. Is that field in and of itself a Western field? Is there an assumption that the philosophy we’re talking about, when we say “philosophy of education,” is a Western European, North American construct?

Liz Jackson 13:52
Yes, this is a question that I’ve been thinking a lot about, and many of my colleagues have been thinking about too. It was actually one of the first responses I got from some peers when I started saying: your handbook calls itself international, but there’s no one talking about Confucianism in it. What’s going on? And a few colleagues actually said, well, philosophy is Western. It comes from Western philosophy, and that makes philosophy of education Western.

The longer I think about it, the less sense that makes. We can think about this claim from an empirical view or from a conceptual view — what is philosophy? Some people will say philosophy is based on the activities going on in ancient Greece, with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as the fathers of philosophy. If I look at what those thinkers were doing — they were giving lectures, thinking about big questions about reality, about life, about what’s good or bad, debating, dialoguing, telling jokes, telling stories, imagining hypothetical situations, making sometimes ridiculous arguments — people around the world across thought traditions and history were doing things like that. To make the point that philosophy is Western, you’d need to be able to say there’s some kind of activity those Greeks were doing which people weren’t doing elsewhere. I’ve seen some people gesture at this, but I don’t find any real evidence. I think the same things that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were doing, Confucius and his contemporaries were also doing.

The one other thing people will say is that philosophy of education — and philosophy itself — is Western because the word “philosophy” comes from ancient Greece. I think that’s a rather silly argument. If that’s true, then tofu is Chinese, and if you have tofu outside of China, it’s not tofu. Or you can’t have yoga outside of India. If you want to make that argument, it’s pedantic and unhelpful. But when you’re talking about this topic in the context of the history of Western supremacy, and these ongoing manifestations where global scholars are still treated as inferior to others — why would you make such a pedantic point that isn’t really relevant and has a negative real-world impact? It makes a harmful view. That’s why I really want to challenge it.

Will Brehm 16:02
Maybe this is a good point to turn to some practical philosophy, and perhaps your own practice. As a philosopher working on different concepts, how do you take a supposedly universal idea and recognize that it came from your own thinking and your own experiences in a particular context? And how do you see whether it works elsewhere? How do you actually go about doing that?

Liz Jackson 16:28
One thing I have mentioned in my work — and still need to think more about — is this idea of field testing. This is something philosophers and psychologists I’ve worked with do. When it comes to humility or gratitude, you ask ordinary people in society what they think about it, what their associations are with it.

They’ve done that with gratitude, actually. If you ask people in the US, UK, and Australia, you find quite interesting results. Normal people in those contexts describe the term differently. Gratitude in the US is associated with being very happy — a lot of terms are associated with happiness in the US. In Australia and the UK, people have more mixed emotions; they might feel embarrassed, for example. This makes a difference if you want to create a global curriculum, or if you want to bring a curriculum from one place to another. And in fact, there is research that shows that approach doesn’t often work the way people want it to.

A more accessible way to think about field testing — and this is something I encourage in my role as Associate Dean Research, and with my students — is really just to think about: who is the audience for your work? Will this work be interesting to someone around the world? And you don’t just have to think about it — talk to someone, have them read your article, have them read your literature review. Does this have anything to do with people and schools in their context? Because schools are still quite different in different parts of the world. Is this relevant or not? How could you make it relevant? But it is still a methodological challenge and something to think through more, for sure.

Will Brehm 18:10
What about the challenge of tapping into academic literature written in a language you don’t speak?

Liz Jackson 18:16
This is a really tough challenge. And a lot of the challenges here — if we sat down with an expert in linguistics, there’s a whole linguistic dimension to all of this. Many of my colleagues will say that another reason Western scholars are not aware of excellent work in other fields is that it’s not in English. People are having amazing conversations in other languages.

Some people have suggested that AI might help with this, but I’m not sure it can, because there tends to be a tendency to conflate concepts. Something Chinese philosophers think a lot about is whether a term can be translated at all. A lot of key terms really aren’t that easy to translate. So this really throws off the whole project of conceptual analysis.
When you think about the challenge of translation, I think this is where it becomes really important to actually collaborate with people. And a lot of the recent work I’ve done — there’s no doubt about it — has really benefited from me becoming closer with and collaborating with people who come from different backgrounds than I do.

Will Brehm 19:18
Another practical question I have is around supervision. You brought up students, and you and I both teach students from all over the world. Students travel the globe to places like the University of Hong Kong. If you’re working with a student who comes from a context you don’t really know much about, how do you supervise them? How do you encourage them to explore different knowledge traditions and philosophy from a global perspective?

Liz Jackson 19:44
This is a great question, and one people are facing because higher education has become so global, and we see that when it comes to students. But it’s a different world than the world many of us grew up in, which was not global. And there are still global differences — just because we meet each other doesn’t mean we have the same experience, because there are regional and global distinctions.

For me, it was interesting — when I first got to HKU and started my job there, whenever there was a strong student who came from a country that other colleagues were not familiar with, they would actually send that student my way. They’d think: well, Liz has lived in South Africa, so she can take a student from Tanzania. Liz has done work about Islam, so she can take a student from Bangladesh. And I was happy to take up that challenge to work with talented students.
I think there’s a general challenge in working with students in such a way that you don’t want to dismiss their knowledge and their experience. The way I think about doctoral supervision is that my goal is not to create little mini-me’s, where everyone’s work is derivative of my own. My view is that each student has their own vision, and it’s my goal to try to bring that out. But this is not an easy thing to do, because they might have difficulty expressing it to me. Sometimes I find that if a student cares deeply about a topic, they especially have difficulty sharing and translating it — some things are genuinely difficult to translate. So I see it as a kind of dialogue to bring out that creativity and inspiration from students.
My goal is really to help them bring out their vision and to help them make a bridge between their vision, their experience, their knowledge, their perspective, and the broader field — so that they can connect their insights to a wider community.

Will Brehm 21:32
One of the things I feel like I experience pretty much every semester I teach is students who speak other languages asking me for permission to use articles and books written in languages they speak that are not English. They always ask: are we allowed to do this? And I’m always like, this is a great resource that you can use. Do you get the same sort of question from students?

Liz Jackson 21:54
I do. And I agree with you that it’s a surprising question from my perspective, because of course, if they’re interested in a certain region or culture, that will naturally come up.

I have a related issue that has been becoming more and more prevalent in my work with students: I now ask them and encourage them to think about — if they come from mainland China and they love European philosophy, what does European philosophy have to do with the situation in China? I get pretty interesting responses to that, and it brings up a whole other conversation.

On the one hand, they shouldn’t be geographically limited. They shouldn’t be forced to study Confucius or Buddhism just because they came from China. If they love Levinas or John Dewey, it’s not right for me to say, based on my philosophy of supervision, don’t look at John Dewey — you’re Chinese, so you’re not allowed to do that.
But I do want to push them. Because of this history of global inequality, I really do want to push them, because what I find is that a lot of students don’t know much about their own local tradition. Some students have been taught over time, in informal ways, that the best scholarship is Western, that the best ideas come from Europe and North America. Indirectly, that message is: there’s nothing good from where you’re from.

The same with my students who come from Africa — mostly from East Africa. I say, okay, what’s important that comes from this region? Not just to use theories and perspectives and philosophies coming from Europe, because those might be completely unrelated. Students often say they want to use Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework to look at relationships in China. To me, there are so many things a Confucian perspective illuminates about relationships in China that Bronfenbrenner’s framework almost hides or obscures. But in any case, why would Bronfenbrenner have more to say about education in China than Confucianism?

So I feel compelled to push students. And I have had some students say: I didn’t realize I had a local tradition, and that I could benefit from thinking about it. It’s a tough balance, actually.

Will Brehm 24:02
By way of conclusion, I want to broaden the conversation beyond students and the supervision you do. What about the academy more generally? How do we move the academy — with all its various activities and institutions — beyond the idea that the West knows best, or that the global equals the West? How do we do it?

Liz Jackson 24:22
This is a great question, and one I’ve been thinking about because what tends to happen — in my experience, having been pushing this message for a while — is that people in some Western societies assume that there is already enough diversity. They assume there is a diversity of ideas and values. They see certain gender, racial, and ethnic diversity, and they think, okay, these boxes are ticked. But at the same time, every institution has its culture. That goes for Hong Kong U the same as it goes for Stanford, for Harvard, for Melbourne, anywhere. There is a dominant culture. And I guess the next question then becomes: is pluralism or diversity a core value of that culture?

This is where we get into more thorny questions. What does pluralism or diversity actually mean? But I think for a lot of people, there needs to be a stepping back to look at the situation — to look at who is and who is not included, and in what ways.

Something I notice in conferences, for example, is that every conference has its norms around how you eat. When I go to Australia and New Zealand, people love to eat finger food. For personal reasons, I don’t love finger food. Some countries love it, some don’t. That’s a really simple example. But all of these things can add up in such a way that it becomes very uncomfortable for someone who comes from a country and context with a lot of cultural traditions and distinctions. I’ve heard of colleagues from China going to conferences in the UK and being told, “get with the program, you have to do it this way” — as if the person from China is being rude. People need to step back and see that they do have a culture. What they call global is also a culture.

In our Faculty of Education at Hong Kong U, we think about things like: do we want to have tea before meetings or after meetings? How can sharing food bring people together in a different way? But also — what are those rituals? There is the trope as well that women get the tea, or women get the snacks, or students get the tea or snacks. So really looking at all of those things. And to look at all of those things, you need to actually ask everyone what they think. It includes having diverse voices in decision making and consultation, and giving people the chance to ask questions and disagree.
That really means changing, and not taking things for granted. I think what has happened in a lot of places is: ten years ago, we went through the Me Too movement, or some other significant cultural shift, and we did a big reform at that time and thought we had it figured out. But everything changes, and we need to keep looking at the situation again. Even for me now, I think about what’s going on with younger scholars and younger students. There are separations across generations and across cultures. So being really thoughtful about who is involved in decision making, and actually looking at the environment — not taking it for granted. Because what tends to happen is that whatever the dean, associate deans, and full professors like is considered good. And that is really far from the full picture.

Will Brehm 27:18
Liz Jackson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on the forthcoming book, and thank you very much for joining again.

Liz Jackson 27:26
Thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure.

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