education

The Youth Theater for Peace (YTP) team is very excited to share some more impact news from the program in Tajikistan!

Recently we shared a story about Faroiz, a teenage girl whose work raising awareness about child marriage and education with the local YTP theater group helped inspire 20 girls in her community to continue to 11th grade (the final year of secondary school in Tajikistan.)

I've had the pleasure of chairing research fellowship panels for over a decade. In these years I’ve heard debate surrounding nearly 3,000 applicants, both junior and senior scholars, all trying to secure very limited research funding.  A while back some colleagues in the academic community encouraged me to pull some tips together from my experience in these meetings and also having worked with so many different peer reviewers over the years, from a variety of disciplines. Here it goes:

Thirty years ago, I arrived in China as a young American diplomat after the normalization of relations between the two countries. This summer, I returned to China to witness the vast changes that have taken place.

“Education is the manifestation of the perfection already within a person.” As I listened to the words of Sanjoy Ganguli, founder of the Jana Sanskriti movement and keynote speaker at a recent conference I attended, I couldn’t help but smile. I’ve always felt that development programs are best when motivated by participants rather than for them.

On behalf of IREX, I am pleased to announce that 22 diligent Azerbaijani students and their mentors won netbooks and flipcameras in a recent national contest for the ‘Best Research Essays Using Internet.' One hundred and sixty nine candidates entered from all over the country, notably Sumgait, Guba, Shirvan, Imishli, Ganja, Gazakh, Sheki, Zagatala, Ismayilli and Mingachevir. Plagiarism was penalised, with positive results.

Last week, 74 teachers from 15 countries around the world gathered in Washington DC for the International Leaders in Education Program (ILEP).

Today marks one year since the massive earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, devastating the population and setting back years of development. Over the past year, IREX worked closely with our Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program alumni in Haiti to support their outstanding efforts to rebuild their country. 

I recently participated in a roundtable, "Old and New Media in Russia Today," at the Annual Convention of the Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). The conference brings together political science, history, language, humanities, and other scholars and practitioners in the areas of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from around the world.

While recently visiting sub-grantees of the BOTA Foundation in Almaty, Kazakhstan, I met a group of young adults who are developing their professional talents, despite never having had attended school and rarely having had the opportunities to leave their homes.  It is not that Almaty lacks schools; there are many schools of high quality that are developing a skilled workforce that is supporting their country’s economic growth.  Nor are they excluded from the education system based on their ethnic or linguistic aff

Maybe it was just luck that my bicycle tire blew out right in front of the bike repair stand in the Freedom Compound shanty town. I took that same road every time I travelled between my village and the town of Monze during my Peace Corps service in Zambia. I usually pedaled as quickly as I could through Freedom Compound in order to avoid all the beckoning calls of “Mzungu”, white person or foreigner. This time I had no choice but to stop. As soon as I slowed down I was rushed by people trying to help me. “No, no, it’s fine, I can manage myself” I told them.