Educators finally gather again at CIES 2022
About the author: Stefano Hollis an M.A. student in International & Comparative Education at Stanford University and a recipient of an FSI Conference Grant.
This year marks the first annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) to be held in person in three years. Although it was my first time attending any CIES conference, the distance of the past years was noted by many other attendees, and it felt special to be a part of the annual meeting’s face-to-face resumption. This year’s conference was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The conference’s theme, “Illuminating the Power of Idea/lism”, spoke to the opportunities for change provided by both the ongoing pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent social unrest in the US and across the world.
One of the many benefits of attending CIES, for both myself and my cohort-mates in the International Comparative Education master’s program, was in receiving valuable feedback on our in-progress MA thesis projects. We were able to present our work so far at refereed roundtable sessions; our background, research problem, methodologies and data used, and some of our preliminary and expected findings. The format of the roundtable was particularly useful in allowing for an intimate discussion with other academics in the field, and to receive feedback we can incorporate as we continue and eventually finish our projects in the summer.
Aside from these benefits to our own research, CIES offered a jam-packed schedule of discussions, presentations, and even film screenings on a huge variety of topics across education. Some of my favorite presented research projects from the week ranged from evaluating the effectiveness of pre-service trainee teachers watching back videos of their own teaching, to exploring the experiences of Chinese doctoral students in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic, to investigating the motivations and the life histories behind Black American teachers’ decisions to migrate to — and remain in — the UAE to teach. Not only were we able to expand our areas of interest within the field and our understanding of diverse topics, we were also able to ask questions of those presenting them, and to network and connect with them following their presentations. CIES was the first academic conference I have ever attended, and I was struck by the great opportunity an event like this represents. I left the conference with a renewed passion for and interest in (new areas of) education, and with new contacts with whom I can discuss these. I would like to extend my thanks to the FSI Conference Grant for helping to facilitate this experience.
