Collaborating with the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan

December 15, 2011

Complementing the University of Wisconsin’s status as one of the most internationally connected universities in the world, the School of Education (SOE) plays an important role in preparing students to be global citizens and in helping to shape the University’s broader global agenda.

Among those working with colleagues across the world is faculty member Mark S. Johnson, from the Department of Educational Policy Studies. Johnson’s research interests focus on the history of Soviet and post-Soviet education. He studies the role of universities in regional development, and new forms of external partnerships and engagement, most notably in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan.

University Partnerships

Johnson is collaborating with Moscow’s National Research University Higher School of Economics to create a new MA program in Higher Education Management and Policy Studies.

The aim of the course is to train expert analysts and managers to develop and implement plans and programs in educational institutions and Russia’s system of higher education. Johnson is also working with colleagues at the university to build an infrastructure for service learning study. He and his Russian colleagues want to know more about the effects of pilot programs in service learning—how they work, what they accomplish, and their effects on retention.  If that is successful the university may create a center for service learning.

Johnson has also watched, and worked with other colleagues from Madison as Kazakhstan has built, from scratch, what promises to be a world-class research university: Nazarbayev University (NU) in Astana, Kazakhstan. Its entering class began in fall semester 2011. In a formal partnership with faculty from several departments and schools across UW-Madison, Nazarbayev University is building a School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Johnson is helping the university develop tools for assessing teaching and learning, and to build its higher education research capacity.

NU’s partnership with UW Madison is part of a larger international collaboration with several leading universities globally ranked in the top 30 universities of the world.

Teaching Interests

Johnson manages all this on top of his teaching responsibilities. One graduate course, Introduction to Comparative and International Education, provides an overview of the most important schools of thought, methods and approaches in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). The course is intended for students interested in transnational education research and policy studies; for students interested in possible careers in teaching, study and teaching abroad; as well as for work in international and exchange organizations. Johnson teaches that graduate level course in Spring 2012, along with an undergraduate course, Globalization and Education.  In Fall 2012 he will teach a graduate level course: Global Studies in Higher Education.

Funding for Johnson’s research is provided in by the School of Education’s International Education Committee.