Professor Stromquist's Report on Greece and Bulgaria
With partial support of the COE’s Office of International Initiatives and EDHI, I participated in June and July in two European meetings. The first (24-26 June) took me to Athens, to an international conference coordinated by the International Association of Intercultural Education (IAIE) and the Hellenic Migration Policy Institution. Organized around the theme “Paideia, Polity, Demoi,” the conference had a migration sub-theme, where I presented a paper on “Immigrants and the Educational Experience in the U.S.” Over 500 persons from various parts of the world, but primarily European, were in attendance at this conference, which confirmed three issues for me: the significant overlap between intercultural education and comparative education—the former being a critical subset of the latter, the growing importance of migration as a social phenomenon with profound implications for educational systems all over the world and at all levels of schooling, and the strengthening of ethnicity as a marker of identity. It was particularly informative to hear presentations on school responses to students coming from other countries and cultures in settings as varied as Spain, Germany, and Greece. Unexpected tensions are emerging in processes of inclusion and exclusion, as programs set up by educational systems navigate situations new to them, all intensified by a dynamic process of global migration. My paper was well received and gave me an opportunity to enter into dialogues with researchers working on various aspects related to policy and instructional strategies. Prof. James Banks (University of Washington) gave the first keynote speech, which focused on human rights, diversity, and citizenship. Prof. Jagdish Gundara (University of London) gave the second keynote speech, which examined the intersection between interculturalism and ancient Athenian democratic knowledge. Conference attendance made it possible for me to obtain substantial insights into the research theories and methodologies being applied by European scholars. My new contacts also served to extend a bridge between UMD and other universities, particularly in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. One of the most frequent, and challenging, questions I was asked by new colleagues was whether the election of President Obama reflected the success of U.S. schools in teaching interculturalism.
The second international conference (30 June-3 July) was organized by the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society, now in its seventh year. This is a smaller conference, in which participants are limited to 100 through careful selection of paper proposals. My presentation, on “Higher Education and the Search for Excellence: U.S. Strategies,” was part of several in the thematic section of Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Social Inclusion. I also served as a leading discussant on the panel that highlighted the key issues arising from the presentations in the thematic session. Prof. Nikolay Popov (Sofia University), the current president of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society, designed the conference so that it comprised not only professional presentations but also cultural tours. We visited the National Museum of Education in Gabrovo, a fascinating setting that showed the evolution of schools and teaching methods in Bulgaria; we visited as well one of the first secular schools in the country (1839), located in Tryavna, at the foot of the Central Balkan Range. In the warm atmosphere that characterized this conference, I made the acquaintance of several colleagues working on similar topics in countries such as Norway, Turkey, Hong Kong, Iran, and the UK. Opportunities for collaboration, including participation in an edited book on higher education, were discussed. I was invited to publish my paper as a chapter in the book on The Reorientation of Higher Education: Compliance and Defiance, being edited by professors of Liverpool Hope University and the University of Sheffield (both in the UK) and the Hong Kong Institute of Education. In my view, participants gained greater awareness of the University of Maryland through my presence at this conference.
Attending professional conferences abroad may sometimes bring unpleasant surprises. These included for me a delay of 15 hours (due to a flight cancellation in New York—luckily on my way back), two hours on London Heathrow’s tarmac (due to a summer storm), and an attempted robbery on the Athens metro. In balance, though, the gains greatly outweighed the annoyances.
