View the 2017 Program and Presenter Biographies of the 3rd edition of the Colloquium, held in Soria, July 5-7, 2017.
Plenary Speakers
Erwin H. Epstein
Professor Emeritus, Loyola University Chicago
"Education in Shaping National Identity and Consciousness: A Filter-Effect Theory of Schooling"
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Erwin H. Epstein is Professor Emeritus of Cultural and Educational Policy Studies and former Director of the Center for Comparative Education at Loyola University Chicago.
Prior to his tenure at Loyola, Dr. Epstein was Director of the University Center for International Studies and Professor of Humanistic Foundations of Education and of Rural Sociology at The Ohio State University. He has been the head of academic units at four universities and has been a visiting professor at universities in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and South Africa. He has been a visiting lecturer at 12 North American universities as well as at universities in Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and Taiwan. He has been a Fulbright Professor in Mexico and an Academic Specialist for the United States Information Agency in Nicaragua.
Dr. Epstein has served as a consultant to, among other organizations, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Academy for Educational Development, and the Chilean Minister of Education. He has been an external evaluator for 24 universities and is a member of the Honorary Academic Council of the Graduate Program in Educational Policy and Administration at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina), and an associate member of the Comparative Education Research Centre of the University of Hong Kong.
Professor Epstein has devoted his professional life to advancing the field of comparative education. He is a former president of both the Comparative and International Education Society and the World Council of Comparative Education Societies. He was the editor for 10 years of the Comparative Education Review. His most recent edited book is Creating a Global Field: Six Decades of the Comparative and international Education Society (Springer), and his most recent articles are "Is Marc-Antoine Jullien the 'Father' of Comparative Education" (Compare) and "The Nazi Seizure of the International Education Review: A Dark Episode in the Early Professional Development of Comparative Education" (Comparative Education).
Alan Crawford
Professor Emeritus, California State University, Los Angeles
"Bilingual/Trilingual Education in Central Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America: Major Concepts and Issues"
Friday, July 7, 2017
Dr. Crawford is Past President of the California Reading Association, the state affiliate of the International Literacy Association (ILA). He served as the ILA's representative to UNESCO for many years, and was also a Senior Literacy Specialist at UNESCO in Paris during International Literacy Year in 1989-90. In addition, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Ecuador and Morocco, on the topics of bilingual education/second language acquisition, and critical thinking, respectively. As a Professional-in-Residence, he conducted research at the American Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Dr. Crawford has done extensive teaching, consulting, and writing on reading instruction in the elementary school, especially for second language learners. He frequently presents workshops and seminars on second language acquisition, reading and writing instruction, and critical thinking in Latin America, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Europe, and Africa, as well as the United States. He has written curriculum for teaching reading in English and in Spanish for many countries, including Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Georgia, Ghana, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia. In Kazakhstan, he consults on the implementation of a trilingual programme in Kazakh, Russian, and English.
Professor Crawford is lead author of Teaching and Learning Strategies for the Thinking Classroom, published by IDEA in Amsterdam, and co-author of several books, including All Children Read, Understanding Reading Problems, and The Developmental Literacy Inventory, published by Pearson. He has also co-authored several major English and Spanish reading programmes for the Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company in the United States, and has published widely in most ILA's journals, serving as a reviewer for two of them.