Professor Marianne Larsen
Comparative and International Education
Dr. Larsen's areas of teaching and research include comparative and international education; teachers and teaching, self-study and action research, sociology of education, education policy, and social studies education, especially global citizenship education.
She has researched and taught on the related topics of global education and global citizenship education. In particular, she developed a curriculum resource book for elementary school teachers, in partnership with the Thames Valley District School Board and the NGO Free the Children, entitled "ACT! Active Citizens Today: Global Citizenship for Local Schools." You can download the teaching kit at http://www.tvdsb.on.ca/act.She has also published research on the teaching of global citizenship education.
Dr. Larsen has an interest in theory and methodology in the field of Comparative and International Education. She has researched and written about the state of comparative education in Canadian universities, historically and in the contemporary moment. She has also written about historical research in comparative education, and proposed, through her work, new approaches, methodologies and theories for the field. Her recent book, New Thinking in Comparative Education, is one such example.
Dr. Larsen is also broadly interested in critically interrogating the concept of 'quality teaching' by drawing on self-study inquiry and theoretical policy sociology approach. Specifically, she has examined the effects of the establishment of professional and ethical standards, teaching testing, performance appraisals, and mandatory professional development schemes on teachers and their work. Her research echoes other scholarly findings about the increased stress, anxiety and tensions that teachers have been experiencing as a result of neo-liberal reforms in education. Finally, her research on the notion of the 'quality' teacher has also been historical. She has published about nineteenth century conceptions of teacher knowledge and has a new book, based on her doctoral dissertation, entitled: The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher: A Comparative, New Cultural History.
