ICSEI 2025 Dialogic
The ICSEI Dialogic is a multi-modal conversation which brings together and amplifies a range of perspectives, contexts, voices, and modes of influence. This is with the aim of documenting, enabling, promoting, pursuing, inspiring, and challenging dialogue, and engagement in sustained collaboration, conversation, and action that could result from this.
The fifth issue of the ICSEI Dialogic is being developed in partnership with the Culture, Race, and Intersectionality Network (CRI). This year, the theme is:
Culture, Race, and Intersectionality:
Assets and Challenges for Leading Educational Effectiveness and Improvement
In 2023, the Culture, Race, and Intersectionality Network was formed with multiple purposes:
- To support the aims of ICSEI’s committee on Generational Renewal, Inclusion and Diversity (GRID)
- To provide a space for scholars, practitioners, and advocates to investigate, understand, and challenge the constructs of culture, race, and intersectionality for educational equity and inclusion and school effectiveness and improvement for students, families, and educators.
Holmes (2021) explains that culture shapes how we learn and problem-solve, as well as how we construct our self-concepts and experience emotions. She explains that many students around the world are placed in formal educational settings whereby they must negotiate the differences between their home cultures and those of their school environments. UNESCO (n.d.) recognizes that shifts in global challenges and opportunities such as migration, conflict and democratic backsliding, and digital transformation call for stronger synergy between culture and education. To this end, UNESCO underscores the need for greater intersectoral collaboration between the resources of education and culture for policy and practice to yield more agile, inclusive, and resilient societies.
Regarding culture, Sowell (1994, p. 1) reminds us that “The role of a particular people’s cultural equipment or human capital is much clearer in an international perspective than in the history of one country. For CRI, nested within ICSEI, this perspective is important as a global community, for the nuances of a people’s culture are most acutely discernible in relation to the “other.” Fisher (1988) advises that a proper definition of culture is dependent upon who uses the word and in what context. For this issue of the Dialogic, the CRI network adapts Fisher’s concept of culture as the design that informs the behaviors and mindsets of a group, which are socially created and shared by individuals of the group. Culture shapes the group’s self-concept, and its behaviors impose rewards and punishments among members for the subsistence of group cooperation and cohesion in relation to the vicissitudes of social, economic, political, environmental, and educational contexts.
Race is defined as a political and social construct that is fluid (National Human Genome Research Institute, 2023). In some contexts, race has historically been a determining factor in access to high-quality education (Darling-Hammond, 1998). The CRI network applies a socio-political concept of race for the advancement of equity and school effectiveness. As such, we consider race as the distinguishable ethnic differences among groups by physical traits, creed, and/or nationality (see also Sowell, 1994). The network also adopts Haslanger’s perspective (2019) who theorizes race by acknowledging the intricate and nuanced history of race, which has been utilized to segregate and empower diverse populations. The author contends that framing race as a social construct is crucial for addressing historical and persistent racial inequities. However, they underscore the importance of a political perspective on race to effectively tackle issues of racial injustice, suggesting that these conceptualizations can evolve.
Intersectionality encompasses the exchange and interplay across cultures and races. More broadly, intersectionality is an analytic framework coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) used to understand the interplay between the identities of groups and individuals against experiences of privilege and discrimination.
In this 5th issue of the ICSEI Dialogic, we invite community members to reflect on, define, and analyze issues of race (e.g., indigeneity, whiteness, color), culture (e.g., represented by ability, linguistic, gender, and LGBTQIA+ diversity), and intersectionality within their local contexts and their influence on the congress’ 2025 theme of Redefining Education: Purpose and Possibility. This issue centers learning, skills, and perspectives of individuals who shape school effectiveness and improvement.
Guiding Questions
Defining and centering culture, race, and/or intersectionality within context, consider the following guiding questions as provocations for your contribution:
- What are the strengths and challenges of social capital for community engagement in educational effectiveness and improvement?
- How has educational equity been achieved and or maintained for marginalized communities?
- What can be learned from the examination of current frameworks for equity and inclusivity to inform educational effectiveness and improvement?
- How might or does the negotiation of dissenting policy positions inform educational effectiveness and improvement?
- How can transnational collaboration contribute to advancing racial equity and social justice in schools across borders in the Global South and North?
In collaboration with the CRI network, the ICSEI Dialogic editorial team invites YOU to contribute a short viewpoint piece in response to the above questions. Our aim is to bring together different perspectives for the 2025 issue of the ICSEI Dialogic.
Contributions from ICSEI members and friends (regardless of network affiliation) are welcome in many different forms: written, video, audio, or visual formats are encouraged. Written submissions should be 500–750 words and audio/video submissions should be limited to a maximum of 5 minutes. Submissions in languages other than English are also accepted.
Please submit your work by October 15, 2024 to [email protected]. The ICSEI Dialogic team will review all submissions and authors will be notified about acceptance by October 31.
As with previous Congresses, we will be holding an ICSEI Dialogic Fireside Chat during this year’s gathering in Melbourne, Australia in February 2025 with a follow-up virtual gathering in June 2025. The session will be hosted by the Culture, Race, and Intersectionality Network (CRI), which prepared this call at the invitation of the ICSEI Dialogic team. Details will follow once the conference program is confirmed.
To read previous issues of the ICSEI Dialogic, please visit: https://www.icsei.net/library/icsei-dialogic/
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the ICSEI Dialogic team at [email protected]. We look forward to your submissions!
With best wishes,
CRI Network:
Jacob Easley II, Pinkie Mthembu, Karen Ramlackhan, Andrew Wambua
ICSEI Dialogic Team (Communications and Knowledge Sharing Standing Committee):
Paul Campbell, Joelle Rodway, Trista Hollweck
ICSEI 2024 Dialogic
We are delighted to share the fourth issue of our ICSEI Dialogic! Click here to download.
This year, the ICSEI Dialogic is being developed in partnership with the ICSEI Crisis Response in Education Network (CREN). The theme is:
The role, value and use of collaborative research to promote educational equity and improvement in the context of crisis.
This might include sub-themes such as:
- education and climate crisis;
- teacher-students’ relationships and wellbeing post-pandemic; and
- the teaching profession, school networks and assessment during and after Covid-19.
Guiding questions include:
- What is the potential of relationships within and beyond schools for the learning and wellbeing of students, teachers, school leaders and families in a post pandemic context?.
- What is the role of teacher professional learning and development in addressing the Climate Crisis? How is it possible to foster community and student-centered solutions for the Climate Crisis? What is the role of educational leadership in addressing the Climate Crisis?
- What are the opportunities and barriers for teacher agency in a post pandemic context?
- How has the governance, the mobilisation of knowledge, and outcomes of educational networks changed during the pandemic and in a post pandemic context?
- How have the broader changes in assessment practices during COVID-19 influenced students, teachers, schools, and school systems in the short and long term?
ICSEI 2023 Dialogic
We are delighted to share the third issue of our ICSEI Dialogic! Click here to download.
ICSEI 2022 Dialogic
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How can we take advantage of the pandemic and amplify the voice of the educator and learner?
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How can education systems incorporate more student voice and choice so learners can access their passions and curiosities as a means of learning new knowledge and skills?
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What actions taken during the pandemic can be sustained to address the inequity gap?
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How might education weave real world problem identification (which is foundational to problem-solving) into the curriculum?
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How can we leverage real world issues and challenges so that students see the relevancy of schooling?
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During the pandemic, school leaders have become more important than ever. So, what implications does this current context have for new leaders as they prepare to lead in uncertain times?
