Susan Wiksten: Ph.D. Student’s Research Recognized by the Comparative and International Education Society

Susan Wiksten, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Division of Social Sciences and Comparative Education (SSCE) was recognized at the annual conference of the
Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) with the Graduate Student Travel Award for her paper titled, “A Comparative Study of Educational Theories for Collaborative Learning: Reading Dewey, Freire, Vygotsky, and Grundtvig Using Self-Determination Theory as a Lens.”

Wiksten was recognized with the award by CIES’ Teacher Education and Teaching Profession Special Interest Group, who described her entry as “a fascinating and innovative consideration of different theoretical frameworks to speak about collaborative learning. The implications discuss important components of learner-centered instruction, an area of research about the teaching profession that continues to increase and gain importance.”

In keeping with CIE’s conference theme of “Six Decades of Comparative and International Education: Taking Stock and Looking Forward,” Wiksten applied a contemporary theory of motivation to highlight similiarities and differences in four historically influential theories of situated cognition representing different regional traditions including Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, and Scandinavia.

“Each of the theoretical approaches I reviewed have contributed to advancing understandings of learning communities,” says Wiksten. “Reviewing scholarship in education that spans more than six decades and represents various regional traditions shows that the narrower set of factors by which motivated collaboration in classrooms is explained in recent theories is comparatively weak in engaging ethical and macro-social theories. Among the more recent theories I reviewed a difference can be noted in Freire’s theoretical approach in relation to self-determination theory, as Freire connected to Christian moral theory and broad societal inequities in his reasoning.“