The Global Education Colloquium (GEC) was a monthly speaker series organized by the Global and International Education program, led collectively by Jennifer Adams, Rebecca Clothey, and Kristy Kelly, from 2013-2021. The GEC was founded on the premise that providing a forum for rich dialogue about global issues impacting teachers and students, we could find solutions to those challenges. The GEC was composed of faculty, students, staff and community members who make global education their central focus for research and teaching, and those who incorporate global and education analysis into their areas of their primary pursuit. Our mission was to connect theory with practice in ways that would lead to more engaged research and best practice initiatives in education.

The GEC was interdisciplinary, with research spanning from micro to macro levels of analysis, quantitative and qualitative research methods, and theoretical to applied orientations. It shared a commitment to producing rigorous scholarship aimed at understanding education institutions, education process and the social and cultural factors that affect them. We framed education – whether studied locally, globally, or internationally – as shaped by and with the potential to shape social change taking place on a global scale.

Leading global education scholars, and professionals were invited to share their work with the GEC members. Most of the talks were live-streamed and interactive from the start. We have made all talks publicly available on this website at Drexel University’s School of Education. Education faculty around the world have incorporated these talks into their undergraduate and graduate courses, especially those preparing the next generation of K-12 teachers interested in incorporating global issues into their classrooms. To that end, we invited the many contributors to the GEC to share updates on their research and practitioner work with us. The product of this work will be soon available as two edited volumes published by Emerald Publishing.