About Joel Samoff
An experienced educator, researcher, and evaluator, Joel Samoff combines the scholar’s critical approach and extensive experience in international development. From Kilimanjaro coffee farmers in Tanzania to militant bus drivers in Michigan to education activists in Namibia and South Africa, his work’s orienting concern has been understanding how people organize themselves to transform their communities. He studies the links among research, public policy, and foreign aid. At Stanford University since 1980, he has been a faculty member at the Universities of California (Los Angeles; Santa Barbara), Michigan, and Zambia and has taught in Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Currently he is Research Associate, SARChI Chair : Teaching and Learning, University of Johannesburg. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Pretoria and the University of the Free State in South Africa. He is a Comparative and International Education Society Honorary Fellow, the Society’s highest distinction. He is an Advisory Editor of the International Journal of Educational Development and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Educational Research in Africa and the Southern African Review of Education.
About the presentation
Over more than three decades, analyses have reported that education in Africa is in crisis. How to explain the dramatic continuities in research on education in Africa? Especially intriguing is that continuities and omissions characterize many different types of research, suggesting powerful influences that often remain unrecognized and unaddressed. Developing a reflective and critical review of those studies requires focusing on the research process. What questions are posed? What are the priority problems? What approaches and methodologies are deemed appropriate, legitimate, and productive? Who is involved in specifying research priorities and process? Several common themes and threads stand out: the conjunction of research and foreign aid; inattention to the organization of schooling; the focus on inputs and outputs, with limited exploration of education as process; the common insistence that the appropriate research model is the quasi-experiment. Explanations for the continuities and omissions begin with the framing and the funding. Notwithstanding intellectual border crossers, methodological orthodoxy is blinding. Social engineering remains far more important than social justice. Education can be liberating and transformative. Researchers play a role in setting, or submerging, that agenda.
