In this interactive session, four organizations will showcase their innovative models of education delivery in times of the pandemic. These success stories, from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, bring together learning from all corners of the region and illustrate how the shared challenge of quality and access can be mitigated through partnership, research, and resilience.
Moderator: Emmerich Davies, Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Speakers: Ayaz Aziz, Manager (Online Education), Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center Nishant Pandey, CEO, American India Foundation Rumee Singh, Founder, Katha4Nepal Haroon Yasin, Co-founder and CEO, Taleemabad
Date: 11 November 2020
Time: 9:30–10:30a EST //8:00–9:00p IST // 7:30–8:30p PKT // 8:15–9:15p NPT // 8:30–9:30p BST
Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. Her work examines the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts, particularly in relation to Muslim populations.
Dr. Khoja-Moolji is the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. She combines historical and cultural analyses with ethnography to examine the meaning of the “educated girl” figure in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. Through her work, she has deepened the scholarship on the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns. Dr. Khoja-Moolji argues that advocacy for women’s and girl’s education is not simply about access, but more concerned with producing ideal Muslim women and girls with specific relationships to patriarchy, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. As such, the discourse on girl’s and women’s education also encompasses issues in class relations, religion, and the nation.
Chair: Ali Asani, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Harvard University
This seminar will focus on recent trends within higher education across the world, and how these trends present opportunities and challenges at Harvard University and similar institutions internationally. Professor Mark C. Elliott, Vice Provost for International Affairs and Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard University, will share examples of Harvard’s global engagement and how it supports the University’s standing as a world-class institution of research and education.
This seminar is delivered in coordination with Harvard Global Research Support Centre India.
Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to mittalinstitutedelhi@fas.harvard.edu.
Emmerich Davies, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will talk about India’s education policy at the American Center in New Delhi. The event is free to attend and open to the public – please register here.
The Crossroads Summer Program is a fully-funded introduction to Harvard and American university culture for students from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Africa, who are the first in their families to attend college and may also be facing challenging financial and social circumstances. Leading Harvard faculty will teach an intensive, multidisciplinary four-day curriculum in Dubai, for up to 60 accomplished, motivated youth.
This is a forum for faculty, administrators, and leadership from universities across South Asia, the Middle East, and neighboring regions (Central Asia and East Asia) to explore ways in which universities may develop a liberal arts education program for undergraduate students, while fostering such objectives as sustainable development; social inclusion and peace; and cooperation across national boundaries among individuals, institutions, and governments. These goals are essential to addressing shared global challenges and to realizing opportunities to advance human well-being. Universities, as institutions that prepare future leadership of societies, have a unique role to play in the achievement of these goals, educating students as global citizens who can understand, value, and contribute to the common good.
Explore design thinking through the lens of an educator: Sanjli Gidwaney, Director, Design For Change, USA. Limited seats only, so be quick to register here: bit.ly/designthinkingconnected
Organizers: This conference is being conducted by HGSE South Asia Education Initiative, a student body at HGSE, aiming to build a bridge between students and faculty in Harvard and beyond with education practitioners and academics in South Asia.
This event is is co-sponsored by South Asia Institute.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is the world’s largest NGO-directed school meal program, feeding 1.4 million children every day. To advance its vision that “No child in India will be deprived of education because of hunger”, the Foundation operates out of 22 locations throughout India, serving almost 11,000 schools. It has been nationally and internationally recognized for decreasing malnutrition, increasing school attendance and academic performance, and instilling post-graduation aspirations in participating students. Venkat is on an Eisenhower Fellowship, where he is exploring new NGO sustainability strategies, and gathering information to advance the development of a School of Social Innovation, which will be the first of its kind in India.
Cosponsored with the International Education Policy Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
This paper provides a detailed account of how the system of teacher transfers operates in large parts of India. It presents evidence to suggest that teacher transfers form the bedrock of a patronage-based low-accountability school system. Politicians need teachers because teachers are politically powerful and can convincingly threaten them with electoral sabotage. This deters politicians from adopting strict teacher accountability policies. Knowing how powerful teachers can be in the collective, politicians attempt to control the behavior of individual teachers through patronage-based transfers. But reality is not as neat and clean, and it is difficult to point fingers at specific politicians, else the task of accountability might have been easier. This happens because of the profusion of middlemen, who promise to connect teachers to politicians. Middlemen sometimes fabricate instances of bribery, preying on informational asymmetries and an institutionalized belief in corruption. They generate a system of beliefs regarding corruption in transfers that becomes self-fulfilling. Grim as the situation may appear, the paper offers hope based upon the recent experience of two states in India.
Pramath Raj Sinha, Founding Dean of the Indian School of Business and a founder of Ashoka University
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
“Everyone knows Indian Higher Education is a mess. Proposals for its transformation abound, but things continue to go from bad to worse. Despite the doom and gloom, there are several recent experiments that attempt to challenge the status quo and set an example. This talk is a first-hand account of building new and transforming existing higher education institutions in India.”
Devesh Kapur, Associate Professor of Political Science, Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India, and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Higher Education in India is going through profound changes, not just in scale but in means and ends. What are the the nature and character of these changes? How can one understand and explain these changes within India’s complex political, institutional and social realities? And what are its consequences for India’s economy, social empowerment and democratic politics?
Karthik Muralidharan, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Cosponsored with the Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics (Brown Watson Institute, Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and MIT Center for International Studies)
