The Vanderbilt University Peabody College of education and human development is planning to expand its global research efforts this fall, a recent university announcement said.¶
According to Ellen Goldring, a professor of education and vice dean of Peabody College, the Vanderbilt Peabody Research Office’s new Peabody Global Initiatives program will aim to support international partnerships geared toward collaborative research to study best education and human development practices.¶
“Peabody Global Initiatives reflects our commitment to crossing geographical boundaries through research and partnerships in education and human development,” she said in an announcement. “As we continue to expand on our recent global engagement successes, we will further support faculty to collaborate around the world to develop and research policy and practice that strengthens learning and human development.”¶
Goldring told Tennessee Firefly that one of the main focuses of the office lately is addressing “complex challenges facing education and human development globally.”¶
“That mission is important because we want to understand what works and build that bridge of evidence to policy and practice, not just in the United States but in other countries,” she said. “There are many school systems around the world that are very high-achieving, for example. What can we learn from them about how they train teachers or how they provide professional development or early childhood education? There are other countries that have universal early childhood education or more supports for family engagement in their schools … It’s about sharing what we’ve learned, but also learning from other systems.”¶
Goldring noted that the establishment of the new initiative coincides with the beginning of two Peabody faculty members’ research collaborations, which are supported by Vanderbilt Global Engagement Research Seed Grants. The grants provide financial support to new and innovative faculty research endeavors that involve global engagement and are meant to seed projects with larger funding capacities.¶
Among those faculty members is Jason Chow, an associate professor of special education, who is leading efforts to establish infrastructure needed for collaborative research that focuses on synthesizing global implementation science to study “best methods and strategies for ensuring evidence-based approaches are applied by practitioners and policy makers to improve people’s lives.”¶
Chow will work with colleagues at Monash University and the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, both in Australia, and the National University of Singapore to identify the collaborative’s resources and needs and to develop its initial infrastructure. His team plans to develop workflows for producing context-specific research reviews for practitioners and policymakers.¶
In addition, Xiu Cravens, a professor of the practice of education policy and leadership, is spearheading a new collaboration to advance teacher development in the Asia-Pacific region through improvement science, which is described as “a problem-solving approach to develop, adapt, contextualize and scale innovations that improve educational processes and outcomes.”¶
The announcement said the seed grant funding will support Cravens’ review of peer practices and identify research partners through four regional learning hubs: the National Institute of Education in Singapore, the Center for Educational Research and Innovation at National Taiwan Normal University, the National Training Center for Secondary Principals at East China Normal University, and the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change at the Education University of Hong Kong.¶
That grant will also lay the foundation for the Peabody-Asia Consortium for Education, which will allow Vanderbilt researchers to engage with academic and professional institutions throughout the region, according to a university news release.¶
“These awards and the newly established Peabody Global Initiatives reflect Peabody’s commitment to worldwide collaboration that enhances learning and development in diverse contexts and translates discoveries into more effective practice and policy,” the announcement said.¶
