Portia Williams: We have an international history, beginning with John Dewey, and the work that he did abroad. Over the last century, our faculty members have been engaged in Japan, China, Afghanistan, Tanzania, India, and other places around the world. While educational reforms have been going on worldwide for some time, in the last ten years, there has been a huge shift from issues of access to quality. Countries are not only looking at how to get children into school, or how to curb the dropout rate, but also looking at what to do once the students are in classes. That shift has resulted in a number of countries really looking very carefully at their teaching population—at their pre-service and their in-service training for their educators—and at their educational leadership and policy.

So this is not about why we are doing more international work, but rather, why countries are coming to Teachers College to ask us to work with them on addressing some of these concerns. And while it’s not unique that this is happening with Teachers College, it does help to explain why there’s such a demand right now for this kind of work—and why Teachers College has begun to respond to some of these requests more fully. At present, we have a limited capacity here at the College, so we’re not interested in building new campuses abroad or in creating models to export to other places. Instead, we’ve decided to respond through collaborative partnerships. We want to work together with other institutions that concern themselves with advancing educational reform, educational delivery and quality in education—particularly graduate schools of education. We want to be a part of those discussions. We want to be a part of innovative and groundbreaking research that addresses these issues. We want to share what we know and learn from what others know. So what we’re doing is trying to more strategically work together with those entities interested in the same things that we’re interested in. And under President Fuhrman, through this vision, we hope to do that. But we had to first establish an office that would look more carefully at these requests, and at what we’re doing—what individual faculty members are doing, and what we’re doing as an institution.

 

Portia Williams: Much of what currently happens will continue to happen. We encourage our faculty members to move forward in their scholarship with those institutions where they have relationships around the world. Establishing an Office of International Affairs signals not a change in those relationships, but rather, in the relationships that we take on as an institution and that we want to bring in line with our vision as an institution. As an institution, we will broaden our focus on relationships that are of high quality. That are mutually beneficial. That provide sustainable outcomes for the people that we work with. That provide long-term opportunities for our faculty members and students. So when I talk about institutional-level collaboration, I’m talking about collaborations that provide benefit across both institutions.

 

Portia Williams: Well, we have been working in Jordan for a more than a year now with the Queen Rania Teacher Academy to help train public school teachers in line with widespread educational reforms. That initiative involves faculty members from several departments, including TESOL; Curriculum and Teaching;, Math, Science and Technology; and the Consortium for Policy Education and Research [an organization founded by TC President Susan Fuhrman during the 1980s], through which the project is actually run.

 

In India, we are working through the Khemka Foundation with a large network of private and public schools, helping them develop and implement a leadership curriculum for junior high and high school students. This curriculum is based on values that have been identified in India, and it targets students who intend to go into the public sector. The idea is to create a foundation for students who will then go on to study at university, earn degrees, and come back to India—if they study abroad—and work in the public sector in ways that reflect the values identified in that curriculum.

 

Portia Williams: As we begin to expand the work that we do overseas, we will target our partnerships to like institutions—to graduate schools of education like Teachers College. We’re interested in effective policy reform, advancing new and innovative ways of addressing curricula, teacher education, and the education of students. Our expertise is in “education” broadly defined. Our faculty members focus on education, health and psychology through as many as dozens of programs across nine departments. Our partnerships involve many academic areas, including special education, intellectual disabilities and more. So it’s not just the typical math, science, and English—although math, science, and English are critical areas for basic education that various countries want to reform, and often with the help of Teachers College.

 

Portia Williams: That is both a difficult and a sensitive question, and it’s one that we constantly ask ourselves. First, we work with countries of different income levels, but these also are countries that have a strong desire to work with us. For example, Bhutan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and very recently, it underwent democratic reforms. The Director of the Royal Council for Education there is a former Columbia student who worked with a TC professor, Francisco Rivera-Batiz. Once he returned to Bhutan, he—like many international students who come to TC—took on a very high-level position in government. And once the country underwent democratic reforms and turned its attention to education, this former student came to Teachers College, because he understood the work that we did, he already had established relationships here, and he wanted Teachers College to be a part of a larger advisory council that would engage in helping to make those reforms happen in country.