Sarfaroz Niyozov Receives Gail P Kelly Award

Dr Niyozov’s thesis, entitled “Understanding Teaching in Post-Soviet, Rural, Mountainous Tajikistan: Case Studies of Teachers’ Life and Work” examined the continuities and changes in teachers’ practices across the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in the Autonomous Province of Badakhshan, Tajikistan. Through qualitative life-history case studies, Dr Niyozov explores how five Tajik teachers in three different regions understand and improve their practices in a politically unstable, ideologically complex and isolated area and how their practices interact with their changing world. More generally, the study gives prominence to the dynamic and critical aspects of context in teachers’ professional and personal lives.

The Comparative and International Education Society was founded in 1956 to foster cross-cultural understanding and scholarship and societal development through the international study of educational ideas, systems and practices. The Society’s members include more than 1200 academics, practitioners and students from around the world as well as about 1300 institutional members. Over the last four decades, the activities of the Society’s members have strengthened the theoretical basis of comparative studies and increasingly applied those understandings to policy and implementation issues in developing countries and cross-cultural settings. The CIES publishes a quarterly journal, Comparative Education Review, as well as organises an annual conference in March where the recipient of the Gail P Kelly Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in comparative and international education is honoured.