Award for Global Engagement

The career of John J. Cogan, professor emeritus in Educational Policy and Administration, is a case study in global engagement. Through his scholarship, academic program development, educational leadership, teaching and advising, and technical assistance in the U.S. and abroad, his work has had a profound impact on all levels of education, on his own students, and on the thousands of scholars and students who have read his works and attended his conference and workshop presentations.

Together with two other professors, he began the University’s Comparative and International Development Education program (CIDE) three decades ago. CIDE is recognized as one of the top programs of its kind in the U.S. It combines both comparative education and international development education, together with a strong foundation of intercultural understanding.

Professor Cogan has worked with dozens of universities and given lectures, workshops, and invited presentations on international development education, citizen education, and global education reform in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Thailand, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Canada. In conducting his research, he has worked collaboratively with researchers across the world to address education policy issues.

Throughout his career he has used his experience in comparative and international development to advance educational institutions across the globe. He has a particularly strong record of institution building in the Asia-Pacific region and two decades of technical assistance and program development with schools, universities, and ministries of education in Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand. In addition, he created several consortia in Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Professor Cogan's publications are central to the field of international education and to the academic study of citizenship education in the international sphere. During his career he has published five books, 17 book chapters, 85 journal articles, and 25 technical reports that addressed education in a global context. His key themes of scholarship have been civic education and citizenship in a global context, global education in pre K-12 social studies settings, the internationalization of higher education, social studies education, education in developing nations, and comparative studies of education.

During his career as a faculty member at the University, he has served as adviser to approximately 120 graduate students and the adviser of record on 20 Ph.D. dissertations, most dealing with international education. He has served on numerous University committees in the international arena, including 20 years on the College of Education and Human Development’s Committee on International Education. He received the Beck Award for Distinguished Teaching, one of the highest honors in the college.