Ruth E. S. Hayhoe
PhD (University of London)
Professor and President Emerita, the Hong Kong Institute of Education
Email: ruth.hayhoe@utoronto.ca
Tel: 416-978-1213(Office) 416-413-1758(Home)
Professional Background:
Degrees:
Professor Hayhoe received a BA in Classics from the University of Toronto (1967), and MA and PhD degrees in Comparative Education from the University of London Institute of Education (1978 and 1984). She also has a Certificate in Education from the University of Hong Kong (1975) and a Diploma of Theology from the University of London (1978).
Ruth's professional career began as a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong (1967-1978), followed by undergraduate teaching at Fudan University in Shanghai (1980-82), lecturing at the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education in London (1983), postdoctoral work at OISE (1984-1986), and an academic career at OISE since 1986. Two extended leaves of absence enabled her to take up the post of First Secretary for Culture and Education at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (1989-1991) and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education directly after Hong Kong's return to China (1997-2002). She also served as Chair of the Higher Education Group at OISE, 1993-1995, and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, 1996-1997. In 1996 she was visiting professor at Nagoya University in Japan for six months under a Japan Foundation Fellowship. Since 2002 she has been on a half-time appointment at OISE/UT.
Ruth's exposure to East Asia, and especially Hong Kong and China, has given her a lifelong fascination with Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions, and a desire to bridge the contrasting educational and philosophical worlds of East Asia and North America. She has had a particular interest in the "Dialogue among Civilizations" and has organized a number of large-scale conferences relating to this, including "Knowledge Across Cultures" at OISE/UT in 1992, "Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Interchange: Challenges to the Idea of the University" in the Yuelu Academy in Hunan, China and "Education and Civilizational Interaction: Facing the Global Century" in 1999 at OISE/UT. Ruth also initiated and led two major CIDA-funded projects in joint doctoral training and educational research involving OISE/UT, UBC and seven universities in different regions of China, from 1989 to 2001. She served as a Trustee for the historic New York-based United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia from 2000 to 2010, and Secretary from 2003 to 2010. In this role, she was actively involved in an Asianization process that resulted in all of the Board's Programs and the President's office being moved from New York to Hong Kong under the leadership of the first Asian Chairman of the Board. Most recently Ruth has been appointed to serve on the international advisory board of the University of Macao.
In 1998 Ruth was made an Honorary Fellow of the University of London Institute of Education, and in 2002, was given three major awards: The Silver Bauhinia Star by the Hong Kong SAR Government, Commandeur dans l'ordre des Palmes académiques by the Government of France, and Honorary Doctorate of Education by the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She was also appointed Zhijiang Honorary Chair Professor in Education at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, and additionally holds an advisory professor title at more than ten other universities in different regions of China. In 2009 she was given a Lifetime Contribution Award by the Higher Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society of the USA (CIES), and in May of 2011 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the CIES, at the Society's Annual Meeting in Montreal.
Teaching:
Ruth teaches the following four graduate courses, normally two in every autumn term:
1825 Comparative Education Theory and Methodology
1826 Comparative Higher Education
1832 East Asian Higher Education
3810 International Academic Relations
She also developed a related studies course and textbook in Comparative and International Education for the B Ed. Program, together with Karen Mundy, Kathy Bickmore, Meggan Madden and Kathy Madjidi. She taught the course with Karen Mundy in 2006 and 2007, and since then it has been taught every year by a senior doctoral student affiliated with the Comparative International Development Education Centre. (CIDEC)
Between 2005 and 2007 Ruth taught one of her graduate courses to doctoral students at the East China Normal University in Shanghai every June, using the same course outline and materials but communicating entirely in Chinese.
Research Interests:
Ruth's research has mainly related to Chinese higher education and educational relations between East Asia and the West. She has been interested in the ways in which cultural values and epistemologies from Eastern civilizations may provide a resource for new thinking in global higher education development. She is also interested in the intersection between Asian ways of knowing and women's ways of knowing, and questions of gender in cross-cultural leadership, topics stimulated by her personal experience of institutional leadership in an Asian context.
Ruth completed a study of the lives and ideas of eleven influential Chinese educators in 2005, developing a set of Portraits which illustrate the continuing value of the Confucian educational heritage. In 2006 she obtained a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) for a project on China's Move to Mass Higher education, looking at the implications for democratization of a growth in higher education student numbers from 5 million to 25 million over about 12 years, and exploring the kinds of cultural leadership Chinese universities will bring to the global community. This project was completed in 2010 and details about its results can be found on its website, http://home.ied.edu.hk/~junli/China
In 2011 she was obtained a new grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, entitled “Canada-China University Linkages in a New Era of Global Geo-Politics.” The project was awarded $111,000 and runs until 2014, with Professor Qiang Zha of York University as Co-investigator and Dr. Julia Pan as Research Associate. It will be looking at the long term impact of a large number of linkages between Canadian and Chinese universities in the 1980s and 1990s, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency and covering the areas of education, health, agriculture, engineering and management. It will seek to discover new synergies for present and future collaboration in the changed conditions of a very different time period.
Selected Recent Publications:
R. Hayhoe, J. Li, J. Lin and Q. Zha, Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong and Springer, 2010)
R. Hayhoe and F. Yan (eds.), “China’s universities in the move to mass higher education: The Search for Equality, Quality and Diversity,” Special Issue of Frontiers of Education in China, Vol. 5, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 465-577.
Ruth Hayhoe and Yongling Lu, “Christianity and Cultural Transmission,” in R.G. Tiedemann (Ed.) Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume Two: 1800 to the Present (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 681-691.
Ruth Hayhoe and Jian Liu, “China’s Universities, Cross-Border Education and the Dialogue among Civilizations,” in David Chapman, William Cummings and Gerard Postiglione (eds.) Crossing Borders in East Asian Higher Education (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Centre, University of Hong Kong and Springer Press, 2010), pp. 76-100.
R. Hayhoe & Jun Li, “The Idea of a Normal University in the 21st Century,” Frontiers of Education in China, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010, pp. 74-103
K. Mundy, K. Bickmore, R. Hayhoe, M. Madden and K. Madjidi (eds), Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press Incorporated, and New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), 394pp.
Ruth Hayhoe, Portraits of Influential Chinese Educators (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, and Dordecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 398 pages.
R. Hayhoe, "The Use of Ideal Types in Comparative Education: A Personal Reflection," in Comparative Education, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2007, pp. 189-205.
Ruth Hayhoe & Qiang Zha, "Higher Education in China" in J.F. Forest and P.G. Altbach (Eds.) International Handbook of Higher Education. (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006), pp. 667-691.
Ruth Hayhoe, "China's Universities in the Global Community: History and Perspectives," in Eckhardt Fuchs (ed.), Bildung international: Zu Rezeptions- und Transferprozessen in historischer Perspektive (Wuerzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2006, pp. 279-303.
R. Hayhoe, "Ten lives in Mine: Creating Portraits of Influential Chinese Educators," International Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 41, Nos. 4-5, 2005. 324-338.
R. Hayhoe, "Peking University and the Spirit of Chinese Scholarship," Comparative Education Review, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, pp. 575-583.
Ruth Hayhoe, and Qiang Zha, "The Role of Public Universities in the Move to Mass Higher Education; Some Reflections on the Experience of Taiwan, Hong Kong and China," in Frank Iacobucci and Carolyn Tuohy (eds.) Taking Public Universities Seriously (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 5-25.
R. Hayhoe, "Women, Universities and the Dialogue among Civilizations," in Glen Jones, Patricia McCartney and Michael Skolnik (eds.) Creating Knowledge, Strengthening Nations: The Changing Role of Higher Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 67-80.
R. Hayhoe, "Sino-American Educational Interaction from the Microcosm of Fudan's Early Years," in Cheng Li (Ed.) Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: U.S.-China Educational Exchanges 1978-2003 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 25-47.
Yongling Lu and R. Hayhoe, "Chinese Higher Learning: The Transition Process from Classical Knowledge Patterns to Modern Disciplines 1860-1910," in Christophe Charle, Juergen Schriewer, Peter Wagner (eds), Transnational Intellectual networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 2004), pp. 269-306.
For more information about Prof. Hayhoe, visit her website at http://individual.utoronto.ca/hayhoe