Salzburg Global Fellows share their views during Education Futures: Shaping A New Education Story
A select number of Fellows at Education Futures: Shaping A New Education Story were asked, "Whose voices would you like to hear from more in education and why?" We have published their answers below.
“It may be useful to listen more to, and systematically collect, the voices of direct stakeholders, like the students. The children, the youth, who are the main beneficiaries of many of the interventions that we are working on. In my experience in designing projects or trying to advise policymakers, I feel like we could do a lot more about collecting the information from students about their experiences, their constraints, the underlying challenges that prevent them from learning well, and their general well-being.”
Koji Miyamoto, Senior Economist, World Bank, France
“I definitely want to hear more of the teacher’s voices in education. I think a lot of the time we either go top-down with the policymakers, or we come from the parents and the students, but the teachers are the ones who are responsible for implementing the change.
And so a lot of the time we hear things and think, ‘that’s not going to work’, but we’re forced to implement it and we don’t have the teacher buy-in so that’s not successful, and then the blame falls on the teachers. But if they would listen to our voices more, then perhaps we could have better options.”
Janine Jackson, Doctoral Student - Psychometrics, Morgan State University, USA
"I’d really like to start hearing more teacher voices. I think we’ve had periods of time where we’ve been really concerned with student voices, and parents and carers, and policymakers we listen to all the time, and I think we are at a point in the cycle now to listen to teachers. It was interesting listening to Andreas [] saying that unless we get buy-in from the people who want to affect the change, and unless they feel ownership and that they are part of the planning process, it is always going to flounder and never going to happen."
Lisa Hanna, Deputy Director, Scotland’s National Centre for Languages, United Kingdom
“I’d like to hear more from the national leaders. Leaders of governments – heads of state, presidents, prime ministers – should talk about education as much as they talk about other things, because I think they realize – or we should help them realize – that for many of the problems that they are facing, education is the solution. So while education may not land us being the top story on the front page of newspapers, or the first thing they speak about, perhaps it should be, and transformation in education in education is really key to social change and to economic progress around the world.”
Michael Nettles, Senior Vice-President and Edmund W. Gordon Chair of Policy Evaluation and Research, ETS, USA
