Curtis Ziniel

Curtis Ziniel is a lecturer in Education with expertise in sociology and research methods.  Originally from North Dakota in the United States, he started his postgraduate study at North Dakota State University in the field of Communication.  Ziniel earned his MA in 2001 and, after a couple of years teaching, moved to California to start his PhD study.  While working on his PhD, he acquired a 15 month Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University.  While at Harvard, Ziniel joined the Connecting to Congress project, a multi-university research project that investigated how members of the United States Congress use ICT to communicate with constituents.  After the Harvard fellowship, he returned to California and earned his PhD from the University of California, Riverside in 2009.  After a year of teaching politics and research methods at the University of Oregon, Ziniel moved to Liverpool and began teaching for the Education faculty at Hope in 2010.  Ziniel's varied teaching experience includes classes in research methods, communication, politics and education.  His teaching at Hope has focused on research methods, global citizenship, international education and more general Sociology of Education courses.  Ziniel's research interests are also varied.  His current research focuses on the representation of discourses in education policy debates.  He claims that political debates on education policy in the UK have seen a reduction of equality and social control arguments and an increase in equal opportunity and market control rhetoric.  This change in the discursive representation of arguments may impact policy outcomes.  Ziniel is  also interested in current global citizenship pedagogy and the connection between education and patriotism/nationalism. He is currently published in the International Public Management Journal .