Congratulations to Asel and Jade for receiving the Martindale Scholarship. Read below to find out more about their projects and their research.
Asel Dorombaeva is a second-year doctoral fellow (Ph.D.) from the Kyrgyz Republic. Her research interests have focused on the stakeholder perspectives of country ownership in developing countries as well as policy development and education governance at the regional and national levels. Before pursuing doctoral studies, Asel oversaw education programs at Aga Khan Foundation, American Councils, DAI, and the U.S. Peace Corps, collaborating closely with the Ministry of Education and Science of the Kyrgyz Republic, World Bank, USAID, and EU projects. She is a Fulbright Foreign Student Program graduate. She holds an M.A. in International and Comparative Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a B.A. from the Kyrgyz State Pedagogical University.
Asel’s dissertation research aims to investigate regional integration in education policy development among the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The CIS is comprised of nine post-Soviet countries that aim to increase their political, economic, and social interaction within which they also situate their educational reforms. Therefore, the research seeks to examine the formation of language and teacher professional development policies within the CIS regime. At the same time, CIS members are recipients of and dependent on development aid from the Global North. For this reason, they have to align their education policies and practices with the Western neoliberal agenda. However, these countries are not passive puppets but strategic actors maneuvering policy terrain. Hence, the research aims to contribute to understanding the cooperation of the CIS members at the regional level and how these countries leverage their individual interests at the nexus of national, regional, and global (Western) power dynamics. For these purposes, the research employs regional theories and policy borrowing and lending framework.
Jade Sheinwald is a native New Yorker who returned to New York in 2021 after many years of working in bilingual French and English pre and primary education. She holds a Hons. BA in Humanities from the New College of Florida and serves as the current Co-President of Teacher’s College Peace Education Network. Jade’s research interests include the impact of official language policies on education systems in multilingual, postcolonial contexts, and how such language-in-education policy decisions affect student learning, curricular development, and the training of educators.
Jade’s integrated project collaborates with six experimental bilingual schools funded by the École et Langues Nationales en Afrique (ÉLAN) initiative, in Kindia, Guinea, to assess what social, economic, or political factors bolster or detract from each bilingual school’s operational sustainability. Her integrated project also seeks to identify if educational professionals working in bilingual education consider their professional roles as a form of social advocacy for bilingual education and officialized language-in-education policy reform. To answer these questions, Jade joined forces with employees from the nongovernmental organization, School-to-School Guinée in Conakry, Guinea, who traveled to school sites to conduct structured interviews and questionnaires where there is little to no internet accessibility.