José Cossa
Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University, United States
Visiting the IBE archives has enhanced my interest in exploring its holdings because there is so much material that is pertinent to my research on power dynamics in international negotiations on educational policy ,as well as other aspects such as (a) the IBE’s role in shaping the intellectual landscape of the field of Comparative and International Education and Lifelong Learning through its key leadership such as Piaget, Rosselló and others; (b) educational systems transfer through its textbook collection, national reports and the like, (c) theory/theorizing about education in the Global South, and (d) enactments of global citizenship. As a comparativist, tracing the role of Rosselló by exploring the Rosselló Archives comprising of seven boxes covering the years of 1925-1969, is of particular importance; therefore, I will stay attentive to Rosselló’s correspondence and other primary source documents connecting Rosselló to the field of Comparative and International Education (e.g., File 5: Correspondence and miscellaneous documents, 282_Rossello-9). Moreover, as a scholar of African origin, I am interested in how relationships with Africa (e.g., governments, institutions, researchers, practitioners, etc.) are established and manifest. These two pathways might shed light into the IBE’s contribution toward shaping the intellectual landscape of the field of Comparative and International Education and on the IBE’s role in Africa’s educational landscape; thus, add more nuance to our understanding the manifestations of power dynamics in international negotiations on educational theory, policy, and practice. While the holdings that I am currently exploring, for the most part, pertain to the early decades of the IBE’s existence, my hope is that these files will offer a contextual historical understanding of how the IBE and/through its leadership interacted with a wide array of actors (e.g., governments, organizations, educational institutions, individual researchers, etc.) and how such knowledge will enhance IBE’s work on equitable global conversations about education, in general, and educational policy, in particular. It is often argued that learning from the past informs the present and the future. However, in African cosmology/ies, past-present-future are interlinked, juxtaposed, and non-mutually exclusive; therefore, what was is and will be, what is was and will be, what will be was and is.