This fall, Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development seeks to strengthen and advance its global reach. The Peabody Research Office will expand its mission and strategy to include Peabody Global Initiatives. Peabody Global Initiatives will support faculty to pursue international research and disseminate knowledge as well as develop impactful partnerships and networks through a culturally and contextually responsive, collaborative, and data-driven approach.
“Peabody Global Initiatives reflects our commitment to crossing geographical boundaries through research and partnerships in education and human development,” said Ellen Goldring, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Education and Leadership and vice dean of Peabody College. “As we continue to expand on our recent global engagement successes we will further support faculty to collaborate around the world to develop and research policy and practice that strengthens learning and human development.”
The establishment of the new office dovetails with two Peabody faculty members beginning research collaborations supported by Vanderbilt Global Engagement Research Seed Grants. These grants provide financial support to new and innovative faculty research endeavors that involve global engagement. They are meant to seed projects with larger funding capacities.
Jason Chow, associate professor of special education, is leading efforts to establish the infrastructure for a collaborative focused on synthesizing implementation science research across the globe. Implementation science is the study of the best methods and strategies for ensuring evidence-based approaches are applied by practitioners and policy makers to improve people’s lives. Chow and colleagues at Monash University and the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, both in Australia, and the National University of Singapore plan to identify the collaborative’s resources and needs and to develop its initial infrastructure. Their goal is to improve the sustained use of evidence in global practices and policies. As part of this project, his team plans to develop workflows for producing context-specific research reviews for practitioners and policymakers. They will collaborate with local community partners to ensure the results and recommendations from evidence syntheses are tailored to each nation’s local contexts.
Xiu Cravens, professor of the practice of education policy and leadership, is spearheading a new collaboration to advance teacher development in the Asia-Pacific region through improvement science. Improvement science is a problem-solving approach to develop, adapt, contextualize, and scale innovations that improve educational processes and outcomes. The seed grant will support Cravens’ review of peer practices and help identify research partners with the support from four regional learning hubs: the National Institute of Education in Singapore, the Center for Educational Research and Innovation at National Taiwan Normal University, the National Training Center for Secondary Principals at East China Normal University, and the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change at the Education University of Hong Kong. Working together, they will pursue additional funding for multi-country collaborations and capacity building through research-practice partnerships. The seed grant will also lay the foundation for the Peabody-Asia Consortium for Education, providing a platform for Vanderbilt researchers to engage with academic and professional institutions and individuals in the region.
These awards and the newly established Peabody Global Initiatives reflect Peabody’s commitment to worldwide collaboration that enhances learning and development in diverse contexts and translates discoveries into more effective practice and policy.
