Bridging cultures and co-creating knowledge is not a soft aspiration when set beside a quality assurance system. Rather, it raises a question about authority and about who is entitled to say what a good education looks like here, for these students, at this time. Over several decades, in many parts of the globe, school self-evaluation has extended evaluative responsibility beyond external inspectorates and quality assurance agencies to include schools themselves, and research has rightly concentrated on the capacities that this requires. Drawing on over 30 years of research into inspection, evaluation and quality assurance in Ireland and Europe, and more recently in other contexts, this paper argues that capacity and agency have too often been conflated. It suggests that a school can run a self-evaluation cycle expertly while having almost no influence over the purposes, priorities and criteria embedded within it, and that communities can be consulted extensively while remaining excluded from setting the agenda. Informed by the history of inspection and comparative research on policy enactment and student voice, the paper proposes a framework of evaluative agency built around five questions — who asks, who defines, who knows, who judges and who acts — all oriented by the prior question of purpose.

The paper attempts to speak directly to both the local and the global. Global drivers have produced real convergence in the language of quality assurance in education, yet those drivers are mediated by national histories and recontextualised at school level. This is why the suggested framework cannot travel unchanged across the systems represented at a TERA-WERA conference. Treating evaluation as culturally situated, the paper traces a movement from evaluation of schools towards knowledge from educational communities and proposes culturally responsive co-evaluation. This is defined as a recursive process in which frameworks articulate common aspirations, communities evaluate how these are actually enacted, and local knowledge feeds back into wider dialogue. Artificial intelligence, it is suggested, provides perhaps the sharpest test of this conceptualisation of evaluation in educational settings. Simply put, AI may radically expand evaluative capacity while quietly narrowing whose knowledge counts. The bridge between cultures holds, the paper argues, only if agendas and criteria are genuinely shared, making it possible to ask together what constitutes a good education here, for these learners, and how what is learned locally can contribute to what education understands globally.

Knowledge diplomacy can be understood as an approach to international educational cooperation that promotes knowledge sharing, mutual learning, and cross-cultural understanding through equal partnerships, rather than the unilateral transfer of educational models. This presentation explores how this perspective can help reconsider conventional relationships of educational “borrowing” and “lending,” particularly in an era when countries increasingly look abroad for educational models in response to rapid social and technological change.

Drawing on the experience of Japan, the presentation examines the strengths and challenges of Japanese education and their implications for international cooperation. Particular attention is given to holistic approaches such as Tokkatsu (special activities) and Lesson Study, as well as Japan’s EDU-Port initiative promoting Japanese-style education overseas. These experiences demonstrate both the potential of sharing educational practices internationally and the difficulties of reconciling transferred models with local cultures, values, and needs.

The presentation argues that knowledge diplomacy should not seek to export supposedly successful models as fixed solutions. Instead, educational models can serve as starting points for dialogue and mutual reflection, enabling both those sharing and those receiving them to reconsider their own educational practices. Such reciprocal learning can contribute to a transnational learning community based on equal partnership, respect for multiple ways of knowing, and a shared commitment to nurturing autonomous citizens in sustainable and democratic societies.

In 2009, the World Educational Research Association began as an “international umbrella organization connecting national, regional, and specialty education research associations to advance global scholarly work.” In April 2026, I released my theme as president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for 2026-2027, entitled “Transcending Borders and Boundaries in Education Research: Toward a Beloved Global Community.” My theme draws on the moral vision of the Beloved Community articulated by Howard Thurman (1971) and embraced by Martin Luther King Jr. As the writer Toni Morrison (1987) notes, a Beloved Community is not free of conflict or tension; it grapples with the difficult work of remembering and repairing. As a society and as research communities, we face forces that question the usefulness of our work, limit creative scholarly expression, and attempt to curtail community.

In this 2026 WERA keynote presentation, I build on my AERA Presidential theme and draw on WERA’s legacy as a trailblazer, as well as its 2026 and 2027 themes, both of which emphasize the importance of a global approach to conceptualizing and investigating education. I assert that research, even in its emphasis on empiricism, must also center collective human flourishing. These moments of coming together across many of our research associations over the past two decades can be viewed as the building of a Beloved Global Community in Education Research. To further advance my arguments about the centrality of community, I draw on various fields, including biology, anthropology, history, neuroscience, and genetics, to illuminate the scientific basis of human similarities and interconnections, and the benefits of community. I then describe how social and historical forces have constrained collective human potential and flourishing.

Moreover, drawing on my research on urban and predominantly Black schools and communities in the U.S. South and Midwest, I discuss the importance of conceptual and epistemological models that are empirically based, human-centered, and emancipatory. I specifically note how my Communally Bonded Education Model (CBEM) (Morris, in press), which focuses on the educational ecosystem for Black people in the United States, serves as a research model that centers relationality, reciprocity, mutuality, care, solidarity, and interdependence among researchers, educators, communities, and learners. I conclude with implications for translating key concepts and ideas into collective and action-oriented steps for researchers, community members, educators, and policymakers who are deeply committed to understanding phenomena, creating educational opportunities, and ensuring human flourishing for historically marginalized groups in schools and societies.

References

Morris, J. E. (In press). Conceptualizing the Communally Bonded Education Model: An Ecological Approach for Black Education in the United States. Educational Researcher.

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.

Thurman, H. (1971). The search for common ground: An inquiry into the basis of man’s experience of community. Harper & Row.