Vilma Seeberg

I have been a member of the Kent State University community since 1989 as professor for international-multicultural education. I completed my PhD in Comparative International Education at the University Hamburg, Germany, in 1990, which was preceded there by my MA in Education with a minor in Sinology in 1983. In 1970, I received my B.S. in Foreign Language Instruction, German and Russian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1970 to 1978, I served as co-founder, principal and executive director of a "street academy" (private non-profit secondary school) serving middle and high school drop-outs, and infant day care center, in Madison, WI. In 1979 I returned full-time to academic studies, and immediately, after normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and P.R. China, was invited to teach as a foreign expert at China University for Science and Technology. During my year there and subsequently in Hong Kong, I conducted my dissertation research on mass literacy in China under Mao. Upon my return to the US, I worked at the World Bank and a think-tank in Washington, D.C., taught in International Studies at the University of South Florida, and foundations of education courses at Cleveland State, while writing my dissertation. I also substitute taught in three districts in the greater Cleveland area.

My interests in education have always been in exploring and finding ways to address the inequalities in access to knowledge, whether that be in advanced industrial areas with pockets of poverty, or poor regions and nations with pockets of wealth. Ancillary to that work, I founded and continue to lead the Guanlan Scholarship Foundation which sponsors village girls through K-12 education in a remote region of China.

My primary line of inquiry and publishing has been in education in China using socio-political and anthropological perspectives in order to frame egalitarian policy in China. Recently I have been focusing on girls/women’s education in marginal regions cross-culturally and adapting the human development capability approach as an explanatory framework.. I am active in the Comparative International Education Society, and the Human Development and Capabilities Association.