I’m very pleased to take up the position as an Associate Professor at the Center for International Education at UMass. As my name suggests, I’m originally from Norway, but my high school and most of my university studies were done in France. Bjorn NordtveitIn particular, I received my MPhil in history of education, specializing on the Lao PDR, at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne. Subsequently, I started as a volunteer at UNESCO in Paris, after which I became a UN associate expert in Vientiane in 1994, and then a technical adviser monitoring non-formal education projects for UNESCO and UNDP in the Lao PDR.
In 1999, I took up duty as an Education Observer for the UN Security Council’s Oil for Food Program in Iraq. Between 2000 and 2006, I worked in Washington DC as a consultant on non-formal and adult literacy education for the Word Bank, and this work sent me to Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal and The Gambia. In 2005, I also worked in Rome for the World Food Program’s Hunger and Development Report and for UNESCO’s EFA Monitoring Report.
Since 2006, I have been based in Hong Kong, working as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. During this period, I have been associated with the U.S. Department of Labor, for which I have conducted fieldwork on the topic of child labor and education. This work has enabled me to access new data in the field of teacher training and protection of vulnerable children in Benin, Cambodia, DR Congo, Guinea, Namibia and Swaziland. Also, a competitive grant from Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council enabled me to expand my research and publication in the field of project effectiveness through the study of China’s educational cooperation with Africa, using Egypt and Cameroon as case studies.
I believe my research work, teaching, and occasional fieldwork for international development organizations form a continuity in data gathering, teaching and learning, stimulating discussions with students and colleagues, as well as research and writing. I take a student-centered, constructivist approach to instruction, a methodology informed by both my formal teacher training at the University of Hong Kong and my academic research training. I see myself as a student at the same time as a teacher: I have had the opportunity to take teacher training classes at the University of Hong Kong, as well as specialized courses in topics relevant to my research, such as critical discourse analysis.