Six Decades of the Comparative and International Education Society: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

The 2016 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) was held in Vancouver, Canada from 7 to10 March. This year marked the 60th anniversary of the creation of CIES. Over the last decades, the Society has brought together stakeholders from the education as well as other fields and disciplines with the goal of promoting cross-cultural and cross-national understanding. It also provides a platform to share ideas from all world regions to improve research, policy and implementation in education.

This year’s participation of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) focused on new developments in lifelong learning and, in particular, the lifelong learning themes and programmes that the Institute is working on. Four UIL representatives attended the conference, including its Director, Arne Carlsen, who chaired a panel titled ‘A critical look at global goals: past, present and future’ and served as discussant on a panel discussing UNESCO and the future of global monitoring processes.

Stephen Roche, the Executive Editor of UIL’s International Review of Education – Journal of Lifelong Learning (IRE), served on a panel to discuss the Journal. He also participated in the launch of a special issue of IRE titled ‘Rediscovering the Ubuntu paradigm in education’, which emerged from the 2015 CIES conference in Washington, D.C.

UIL programme specialists Cassandra Scarpino and Ulrike Hanemann presented a paper on ‘Family literacy and learning’, which drew on findings from several literacy programmes in regions of the Global South. Their presentation showed how intergenerational approaches to learning can effectively respond to challenges related to literacy in the Global North. All programmes analyzed in the presentation are featured on the UNESCO Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database (LitBase).