The UNESCO Chair Committee

Please visit the UNESCO chair webpage for full information on Juliet and her role as UNESCO Chair in International Education and Development.

UNESCO Chair role

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As well as his current role as head of the School of Education, Volker is an honorary professor at the Centre for Researching Education and Labour, University of Witwatersrand. He is the convenor of the Nottingham UNESCO UNEVOC Centre.

Prior to joining the University of Nottingham he held positions at  universities in South Africa, where he held various senior positions as head of  school, deputy dean for continuing education, and research Chair in vocational education and pedagogy. He served on numerous national bodies, including three ministerial committees and advisory committees of the Council for Higher Education (CHE) and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA).  He was a panel member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa reporting on the state of agricultural education and training in South Africa.

He has served in various editorial capacities, as editor in chief of the Journal of Education, as associate editor of International Journal of Training and Development and Pedagogy Culture Society, and as a member of the international editorial boards of four international journals. 

His research has been funded by SAQA, Umalusi, DHET, HSRC, UNESCO, ESRC GCRF, and the British Academy amongst others. He has supervised 12 doctoral students to completion. He is the author of numerous research papers, journal articles and book chapters. His current research projects focus on TVET lecturer professional development, skills ecosystems and skills and TVET  policy.

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Subarna is the research lead of the Sustainability and Transformational Education Research Cluster (STERC) and heads the University of Nottingham UNESCO Chair in International Education and Development Malaysia Office.

Subarna also serves on the leadership team of the University of Nottingham Malaysia Sustainable Environments interdisciplinary research cluster. Subarna loves working and researching within an interdisciplinary space. Her areas of expertise include sustainability and higher education, environmental education, climate change education, education for sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation, particularly within the context of indigenous communities.

Subarna is an Acumen Fellow, and the recipient of the WWF Malaysia's National Eco-Lecturer Award for her efforts in advocating for greater awareness amongst youth to champion sustainability. Subarna obtained her PhD in Education from the University of Nottingham.

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Ashley heads the University of Nottingham UNESCO Chair in International Education and Development Ningbo office in China.

Ashley is an Associate Professor of Education at UNNC. Prior to joining UNNC, she worked in at the university's Malaysia campus (UNM), where she was responsible for the administrative, assessment and teaching of all masters programmes delivered in the university. She was also the programme director for the Bangladesh College Educational Development Programme, which was a partnership between the World Bank, the National University of Bangladesh and the University of Nottingham Malaysia, where more than 1,000 principals and future managers were trained. On top of that, she oversaw and taught on the off-shore masters programmes in Sri Lanka, Mumbai and Singapore. In 2019, she joined the newly formed School of Education and English at the University of Nottingham's Ningbo Campus. In UNNC she is involved in the teaching of the MA International Higher Education programme and supervises both EdD and PhD students.

She was sought out and now sits on the Board of Management of Global School Leaders International, a non-profit organisation as the adviser for the development of school leaders and school improvement on an international basis. On many occasions, when she was working in UNM, she was called to the Malaysian Ministry of Education for consultation on their various initiatives. She is also the editorial board member of Asia Pacific Journal of Educators and Education. She has received a number of awards for her contribution to education. One of them is the Ahli Mangku Negara (AMN) conferred by His Majesty the King of Malaysia in 2009.

International bodies (BELMAS), and national grants (FRGS) among others have funded her research. She is the author of numerous research papers, journal articles and book chapters. Her current research is focused on educational leadership, school improvement, and teacher professional development in rural schools in China. She is also the Senior Research Fellow in UNM.

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Jo-Anna's research is focused in two key areas, both of which link to the activities of the UNESCO Chair.  A key area of Jo-Anna’s work focuses on the relationship between the private sector and international development, particularly in the context of UK foreign aid.

Jo-Anna is a co-investigator on an ESRC-funded project examining the role of consultants and contractors in foreign aid, leading the work on consultants and UK aid for education in sub-Saharan Africa. The second area of Jo-Anna’s work focuses on vocational education, where she works closely with partners in Uganda on research focused on community based and community led skills development initiatives. She is also involved in a project with colleagues in South Africa on defining and understanding vocational teacher quality. 

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With a PhD in gender and early childhood studies gained from the University of Glasgow, Yuwei's research critically engages with Sustainable Development Goals 4 (Quality Education) and 5 (Gender Equality). He particularly focuses on disrupting heteronormative gender discourses as manifested in Global South contexts, empowering all genders in full participation at all levels of life.

Yuwei is co- editor-in-chief for Children & Society and Pedagogy, Culture and Society journal, and associate editor for Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. He is also a British Educational Research Association (BERA) council member and membership lead for Gender and Education Association. 

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Tingting has a PhD in Comparative Education (University of Bristol, UK), MA in Comparative Education and BA in Education Management (Beijing Normal University, China). She serves on the editorial boards of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education and International Journal of Educational Research. She is also the editorial review board member of Research Papers in Education and Journal of Global Education and Research. Tingting's broader research interests include globalisation, public goods and education, international aid of education, China-Africa educational cooperation, international higher education policy and other educational issues within the complexities of global political economy.

Tingting is currently leading a project on Teaching and Learning Comparative and International Education during the Global Emergencies and Uncertainties. She is also organising an international symposium on Education for International Understanding and Global Justice, held at the Jubilee Campus in June 2023, funded by the university's International Research Collaboration Fund. This is to accelerate the School of Education and Chair's collaboration with the Institute of International and Comparative Education at Beijing Normal University. 

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Gary is the Co-convenor of the Centre for International Education Research and is President of the History Teacher Education Network. Until recently he was Chair of the Academic Advisory Board for the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. For many years, he led the Secondary PGCE History course, and developed an exchange programme for postgraduate history education students with the University of Connecticut. He teaches across a number of MA courses, supervises PhD and EdD students, and is the module leader for the History of Education module on the BA Education course.

Gary's research interests are centred on the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides. He has held research awards from The British Council to work with history teachers in Rwanda, and was recently a theme leader and Co-Investigator on two AHRC-funded projects exploring the use of Holocaust and Nazi photography in classroom settings. With US colleagues he also holds a Spencer Foundation award researching the use of virtual interactive Holocaust survivor testimony in museums and classrooms. Recently, with colleagues from the Maximillian University Munich, he has help develop a new network of international scholars - Technology Meets Testimony [TMT] - investigating the future of Holocaust survivor testimonies. He recently co-curated an exhibition funded in part by the Arts Council – the Eye as Witness - that raised the question of through whose eyes are we seeing the past and took a fresh look at this problem, contrasting Holocaust photos taken by perpetrators with the perspectives of victims. His work on teaching difficult histories has recently taken him to new areas looking at how we teach historic climate change. This work builds on how students visualise change over long periods of time and also aims to examine how historic climate change is taught in different international settings.

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Joanna has been teaching and researching in higher education contexts since 1995, supporting students at research, postgraduate, undergraduate, presessional, and foundation levels at various UK universities and overseas. Joanna holds an MA in English Language Teaching from the University of Nottingham, and an EdD (Doctor of Education) from the University of Bath, UK. 

Joanna’s main research interest is in the area of Internationalisation of Higher Education. She launched and has chaired an Internationalisation of Higher Education Institutions webinar since 2007. The webinar has been supported by the British Educational Research Association’s (BERA), the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) (Morgan State University, US) as well as the University of Bath and the University of Nottingham’s international offices.

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Tony is Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Nottingham and president of his professional association, British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS).   

He is also editor-in-chief of the World of Science Q2 journal, Educational Management, Administration and Leadership (EMAL), and a best-selling author in the field of educational leadership and management. 

He has directed UNESCO projects on inclusion in Asia, and on school leadership in West Africa. He has extensive experience of research, consultancy and knowledge exchange in the global south, including projects in Botswana, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.   

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Christopher is Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of Nottingham, Professor of Educational Leadership and Management in the University of Sydney, Australia, and Chair Professor at Beijing Normal University, China. Prior to this he worked as a teacher, lecturer, and schools’ adviser.

His interests, research and publications focus upon teacher professionalism, teachers' work, lives and effectiveness; successful school leadership in high needs communities; school-university partnerships; and system change.

His current research projects focus on:

1. Successful school leadership
2. System leadership: policy making and management in disruptive times
3. Chair-principal relationships in new public governance.

Recent book publications include:

• School-University Partnerships in Action: the promise of Change (2021) Routledge
• Successful School Leadership (2020) Education Development Trust
• Teachers' Worlds and Work: understanding complexity, building quality (2017) Routledge. 

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Gabriela holds a PhD in Spanish (Linguistics track) from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research foci are literacies-based second and community language education, computer supported collaborative learning, multimodal social semiotics, multimodal literacy, and teacher education.

Throughout her career, she has published articles in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, as well as three books on multiliteracies-based second/heritage language education and four textbooks for the teaching of Spanish as a second language. She has also been involved in the development and implementation of inclusive, research-guided methodologies and open educational resources for language teaching.

Gabriela has been part of several interdisciplinary past and ongoing collaborative projects that have had the objective of serving Hispanic/Latinx and Black/African American students and communities in Southern United States and the Salinas Valley in California. At present, she is working on the edited book Towards Education Justice: Literacy, Multiliteracies, and the Design of Social Futures with Dr Bill Cope and Dr Mary Kalantzis. This volume will be published by Routledge in summer 2023.

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Bob Adamson is Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and Honorary Professor at the Education University of Hong Kong, where he formerly held the UNESCO Chair. Bob publishes in the fields of language policy, teacher education, curriculum studies and comparative education. He was a member of the team awarded the “European Label for Innovative Initiatives in the Field of Language Learning” by the European Union in 2006. In 2013, he was recognized by the Qinghai Provincial Government with the title of "Kunlun Expert" for his 30 years' work in Chinese education.

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