Stanford's International and Comparative Education Program awarded US Department of Education Grant
The International and Comparative Education Program at the Stanford School of Education was awarded a Department of Education grant in September 2008 to collaborate with the State University Higher School of Economics (SUHSE) on joint projects in Moscow and California.
The Stanford team will be lead by Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jackson Professor of Education. They will develop a joint United States-Russian Federation educational program in global economics. Faculty from CREEES, the Stanford University School of Education's economics of education program, and the Stanford Center for International Development (SCID) (Department of Economics) will work together to provide broad expertise in and exposure to this collaboration.
The two-year collaboration will review and strengthen curricula and teaching methods for the training of economists in global economics, with special focus on developing a Master's degree in global economics at SUHSE, including courses based on problem-based learning and competence-oriented approaches to the economics of development policy, international financial policy integrated with trade policy, financial systems and risk management, human capital economics/economics of education, and environmental economics.
SUHSE will send faculty members to collaborate with Stanford faculty on adapting curricula and evaluation systems for courses in these crucial areas of global economic policy. The Russian faculty members will also observe the teaching of economic courses at Stanford and other California universities. SUHSE faculty will have the opportunity to study how public and private universities' economics departments in the United States recruit, train, and help economic students find positions in the labor market.
Stanford will send faculty to SUHSE to teach a series of seminars using elements of the new curricula and to refine with SUHSE faculty the courseware and evaluation instruments using feedback from SUHSE students and faculty.
CREEES will take the lead in sponsoring a series of seminars with visiting SUHSE faculty for Stanford undergraduates studying economics and international relations. The seminars will focus on economic issues in Russia. Their objective will be to promote interest among Stanford undergraduate students in studying Russian language and Russian economic policies and will be tied in with Stanford's Russian language program and its overseas studies program in Russia. Seminars to be held at SUHSE with Stanford faculty as part of their visits will introduce SUHSE students to US economic policy issues.
A third important product of this collaboration between Stanford and SUHSE will be the development of open Internet access courseware in international economic policy subjects to make available to other RF universities through a website developed by SUHSE and Stanford based on U.S. university experiences in open access courseware/distance learning. To better understand how to introduce this courseware widely in the RF, Stanford and SUHSE will collaborate on a joint research project to study the organization and teaching of economics and openness to innovative methods in a sample of RF economics and business departments.
The joint research project will also further an important SUHSE objective of expanding and improving its capacity in economic policy research.
Kate Kuhns, doctoral candidate in the School of Education, authored this report.