About the series
This research seminar series is aimed at academic staff, researchers, and PGR and PGT students with an interest in comparative and international education, education policy, and international development.
The 2026 GLACIER seminar series brings together scholars whose work engages with pressing questions of care, equity, participation, and humanisation across diverse educational contexts. Spanning early childhood education in the Global South, refugee education and humanitarian policy discourses, asset-based parent engagement, and Freirean pedagogies in higher education, the series foregrounds how educational relationships are shaped by global inequalities, policy regimes, and lived experiences. Across the four seminars, speakers critically examine how education is enacted within conditions of precarity, displacement, and structural constraint, while also exploring alternative, relational, and strengths-based approaches to learning and teaching. Collectively, the seminars invite participants to reflect on how global discourses intersect with local contexts, how power and voice are negotiated in educational spaces, and how more humane, inclusive, and socially just educational practices might be imagined and sustained across borders.
Each research seminar will last one hour. Sessions will feature an invited speaker delivering a presentation of up to 30 minutes, followed by a PGR respondent who will offer reflections and pose the first question. The session will then open to the audience for discussion and Q&A.
This research seminar series is organised by GLACIER – the Glasgow Comparative and International Education Research Network – with support from the School of Education.
The GLACIER seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 15:30 to 16:30 in Room 227, St Andrew’s Building. All seminars will be held in person and will not be recorded or live-streamed. Details of each seminar and registration links can be found below.
4th February 2026: How can we better support caregiver and educator responsiveness to nurturing early childhood learning and care in the Global South?
Wednesday 4th February
15:30-16:30
Room 227 (St Andrews Building)
Dr Paul Lynch
How can we better support caregiver and educator responsiveness to nurturing early childhood learning and care in the Global South?
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2015-2030 have shifted the global focus from merely ‘saving’ the lives of children to ensuring they can ‘thrive’. To achieve this, there is a huge demand for high quality locally-relevant early childhood interventions, as well as data on the numbers of children experiencing developmental delays, disabilities to ensure them access to early childhood interventions based on rigorous identification. However, this remains a challenge as many educators lack training on how to identify and appropriately support children experiencing adverse situations such as extreme poverty, climate-related challenges and domestic violence. Families, in turn, often feel frustrated, stigmatised, with little support from social welfare, education and health services. While low-cost, early interventions have been shown to improve learning and resilience outcomes, there is still limited evidence on early identification of psycho-social developmental difficulties and effective intervention linkages in low-resource settings.
In this presentation I present the challenges and opportunities facing today’s children, and talk about e the implications for their education and wellbeing as adults. I will argue that children’s future mental health, and intergenerational justice, are issues that (as children tell us) are pressing on us right now and which require creative child-based approaches.
Presenter biography
Dr Paul Lynch is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Inclusive Education and Early Childhood Education and Disability at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Previously, he was a funded Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham conducting commissioned educational studies for Sightsavers over 14 years. Paul has carried out consultancies for the World Bank, the United Nations Commission for Human Rights and OneBillion. Paul has a teaching background supporting children with learning difficulties and autism in Ireland. Paul has conducted research into the educational and development of children with vision impairment. Paul has been involved in inter-disciplinary studies into the identification, assessment of young children with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa as well as South Asia. Paul has a keen interest in the education and well-being of children with albinism in Malawi. He is currently involved in two large projects exploring school readiness, play and well-being in Bangladesh, Nepal and Tanzania.
11th February 2026: Refugee education and the ‘humanitarian turn’ in global education policy discourse
Wednesday 11th February
15:30-16:30
Room 227 (St Andrews Building)
Professor Marta Moskal
Refugee education and the ‘humanitarian turn’ in global education policy discourse
In this seminar, I would like to reflect on the recent ‘humanitarian turn’ in global education policy discourse that refers to the increasing dominance of humanitarian rationalities, priorities, and vocabularies—such as protection, resilience, crisis response, vulnerability and emergency—within international education governance and policy frameworks. This turn marks a conceptual and institutional shift: education is no longer framed primarily as a vehicle for development, peace or human capital formation, but rather as a tool for managing and mitigating crisis. In this way, the humanitarian turn not only signals a change in vocabulary but also marks a deeper transformation in the moral and political economy of global education governance.
Presenter biography
Professor Marta Moskal is a Professor of Migration and Diversity. She joined the School of Education at Glasgow from Durham University (2017-20). She trained at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and at the University of Montpellier in geography, sociology and public policy. She was awarded her PhD by Jagiellonian University in 2004. Following this, she held an Assistant Professorship at Jagiellonian University, a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh (2006-07), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Personal Research Fellowship at the Centre for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh (2008–11) and a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Personal Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow (2012–16). Her research spans a range of migration studies, including key themes such as transnationalism and family migration; migrant youth identities and citizenship; university internationalisation and international student mobilities; and family engagement and refugee education.
4th March 2026: Asset-based parent engagement in education: Reimagining partnerships between parents and educators
Wednesday 4th March
15:30-16:30
Room 227 (St Andrews Building)
Dr Max Antony-Newman
Asset-based parent engagement in education: Reimagining partnerships between parents and educators
Parent engagement has been the centre of attention of policymakers, educational researchers, parents, and teachers for several decades (Goodall & Montgomery, 2014; Lareau, 2011). Parent engagement increases academic achievement and improves well-being among learners (Boonk et al., 2018; Jeynes, 2005; Martinez-Yarza et al., 2024). In the neoliberal context with its emphasis on individual responsibility, school choice, and accountability in education, parents are expected to be engaged in their children’s education more than ever before (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2013), while schools are tasked with engaging parents as part of their school improvement agenda (Jeynes, 2010). Subsequently, in our increasingly unequal times, many parents are often viewed through the deficit lens (Goodall, 2019). Working-class, racialised, and immigrant parents are particularly constructed as lacking capitals, skills, or dispositions to follow the normative parent engagement and are labelled as “hard to reach” or “uninvolved” (Crozier & Davies, 2007). Such discourse ignores cultural capital of families from non-dominant groups (Lareau & Weininger, 2003), downplays real material constraints faced by many parents (Butler et al., 2022), and misrecognises home-based parent engagement that is not visible to educators (Poza et al., 2014). To counteract the deficit discourse, in this presentation I will highlight asset-based approach to parent engagement (Leo et al., 2019) and provide examples of successful asset-based parent engagement practices employing such concepts as funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), parents’ knowledge (Pushor, 2015), and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) among others to help move the field of parent engagement from the focus on barriers (Hornby & Blackwell, 2018) to the emphasis on affordances for socially just and democratic parent engagement (Baquedano-Lopez et al, 2013).
Presenter biography
Dr Max Antony-Newman is an educational researcher, working from a critical sociological perspective to uncover the hidden curriculum in education and show how the identities of culturally and linguistically diverse students, teachers and parents together with social institutions shape the process of education. His main focus is on school-family partnerships, education policy, and teacher education with the overarching goal of moving from parental engagement as a source of social inequality to an opportunity for social justice. His work also centers immigrant and refugee students and linguistic minorities in diverse classrooms. His current research focuses on immigrants and refugees with post-Soviet backgrounds in the North American context, the role of teacher educators in preparing teachers for parental engagement in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia as well as critical analysis of policy requirements for teacher readiness for parental engagement. His work has been published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Canadian Journal of Education, Comparative and International Education, Curriculum Journal, Educational Review, International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Teacher Education, School Community Journal. His teaching expertise is in the sociology of education with special emphasis on social justice, immigration, and social inequality. He worked with undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Toronto in 2017-2021 and Sheffield Hallam University in 2022-2023. Prior to joining academia, He taught ESL to linguistically and culturally diverse students in Canada and Europe for more than a decade and worked in language assessment and writing support in Toronto, Canada.
11th March 2026: Humanising pedagogy through Freirean culture circles in higher education teaching
Wednesday 11th March
16:00-17:00
Room 227 (St Andrews Building)
Dr Gaston Bacquet
Humanising pedagogy through Freirean culture circles in higher education teaching: Connecting content and lived experiences through autobiography
This ongoing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project examines the implementation of Paulo Freire’s culture circles as a humanising pedagogical approach within postgraduate education at the University of Glasgow. Grounded in Freire’s (1968) dialogical approach to pedagogy and Pinar’s (2023) currere framework, the study explores how structured spaces for autobiographical reflection and collective dialogue may support students in connecting course content with lived experience and engaging critically with their educational and social contexts. The project is being carried out with a cohort of MSc Education Studies students in the Modern Educational Thought module, where I have embedded culture circles as part of the regular pedagogy.
Using an action-research design, data collection consists of participant observations, students’ currere reflections, visual representations of their work, and a researcher journal documenting pedagogical and ethical considerations. As the project is currently in progress, no analysis has yet been undertaken; instead, this presentation will outline the project rationale, methodological design, and early reflections on implementing a humanising pedagogy within this student cohort. By sharing emerging questions and methodological challenges, the session seeks to foster dialogue about how SoTL research can take effective steps in decolonizing educational spaces by foregrounding agency, relationality, and critical reflection.
Presenter biography
Dr Gaston Bacquet is a Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he teaches courses on research methods, Inclusive Education, and Asian Religions. Before taking up this post, he spent nearly two decades working as a language teacher in Chile, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Myanmar, as well as teaching yoga. His scholarship is shaped by Buddhist philosophy, international wisdom traditions, and decolonial studies, with a particular focus on nonviolence as a catalyst for educational change and whole-person formation. He emphasizes nonviolent philosophical and theoretical approaches in both teacher preparation and classroom relations. His current work explores how we might conceptualize an ethical, humanizing pedagogy capable of disrupting the instrumentalization and competitiveness that characterize neoliberal education.