2015 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society

Megan Mercado's CIES presentation focused on strategies for developing literacy materials in local languages.

(April 2015) The 59th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) was recently held in Washington, DC. This year’s event brought together around 3,000 participants—policy makers, graduate students and education specialists who work in a variety of settings around the world. Several of SIL’s literacy and education specialists contributed to the planning of the conference, chaired sessions and presented research.

The theme of the 2015 CIES conference invited participants to examine issues of inequality in education. The challenge: “Generally, education systems continue to contribute to the reproduction of existing structures of socio-economic inequalities…As a result, curricula, classrooms and community rarely intersect, especially in the developing world.” There is a growing awareness that language is a vital consideration for making education accessible and effective for all children. Dr. Barbara Trudell and Dr. Kimmo Kosonen serve as volunteer officers for Special Interest Groups on Global Literacy and Language Issues, respectively. At this year’s conference several SIL presentations addressed language-related issues:

  • Kimmo Kosonen: “Twenty years of non-dominant language use in Cambodian education: A critical analysis”
  • Megan Mercado: “Who holds the pen? A comparison of empowerment strategies in developing local language literacy materials”
  • Kristine Trammell: “The Kom multilingual education project in Cameroon: Curriculum development and teacher training”
     

SIL serves language communities worldwide, building their capacity for sustainable language development, by means of research, translation, training and materials development. SIL has been an official NGO partner with UNESCO since 1993 and has had special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) since 1997 and is a founding member of Maaya, the World Network for Linguistic Diversity.

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