Profile
Hope Pius Nudzor is a Professor of Critical Education Policy and Implementation Analysis at the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (IEPA), a UNESCO Category II Centre of Excellence, at the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana. He is currently the Director of the Directorate of Research, Innovation and Outreach (DRIO) at IEPA. Professor Nudzor holds B.A. degree (with First Class Honours) in Linguistics and Swahili from the University of Ghana in 2001, and graduate degrees in MSc. in Management and Leadership in Education and PhD in Educational and Professional Studies (both from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland) in 2004 and 2007 respectively.
Before Professor Nudzor’s promotion to the ranks of Associate Professor and Professor in 2019 and 2021 respectively, he had worked as Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at IEPA. During this period, Professor Nudzor had taught on IEPA’s graduate programmes and undertaken critical education policy research and disseminated the findings through research dissemination, information and user-engagement activities, especially via conference presentations, journal article publications, seminars, workshops and policy dialogue and review engagements with stakeholders through both physical and virtual engagements. He was also involved actively in community service activities, where he extended his knowledge, competencies and expertise through outreach programmes and engagements to benefit a wide community of actors and beneficiaries of education.
As Director of DRIO, Professor Nudzor is responsible, among other things, for: coordinating IEPA’s research agenda; ensuring quality research by writing research proposals that can sell and be executed to register IEPA’s presence in Ghana and other West African States; coordinating and supporting publication of journals articles, book chapters and books in IEPA; advising management on procedures that promote research-based teaching; and coordinating IEPA’s outreach activities. His Directorate also oversees the offices of Grants, Fundraising and Consultancy as well as Research and Policy within the IEPA’s organisational set-up. Professor Nudzor is also the Convener of IEPA’s Research Seminar Series. He teaches the following courses currently on the IEPA’s graduate programme: Educational Research Methods, Educational Policy Analysis, Economics of Education and Educational Finance, Curriculum Development in Higher Education Institutions, and Higher Education Institutions and their Environments.
Prior to his appointment as Research Fellow at IEPA in 2011, Professor Nudzor had worked variously as Research Fellow (with the University of Strathclyde); as UK’s Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (with the University of Strathclyde); as Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow (with Liverpool Hope University); as Teaching/Research Associate with the University of Strathclyde and as a Primary School Teacher in Ghana.
Professor Nudzor’s research interests and expertise relate to critical education policy analysis; policy success and failure; evaluation of education for all (EFA) policy initiatives in low-income countries; qualitative research methods (particularly critical discourse analysis); management and leadership issues in education; educational decentralization; qualitative interviewing; higher education institutions and their governance systems; transnational higher education (TNHE) partnerships; change management in educational institutions; activity-based learning (ABL) practices in Ghanaian schools; and the group of young people referred to in policy terms as not in education, employment or training (NEET). Professor Nudzor’s contribution to these critical areas of scholarship include a book (on education policy); chapters in edited books; peer reviewed conference papers; and articles published in high impact national and international peer reviewed journals. Some of the journals in which his articles feature includethe British Educational Research Journal, Journal of Educational Change, International Journal of Research and Methods in Education, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Sage Open, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Issues in Education Research, and Educationalfutures. Others comprise Journal of Educational Management; Management in Education; Educational Research; Journal for Educational Development and Practice; International Journal of Innovative Research and Development; Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies; The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives; Ghana Journal of Higher Education; Journal of Education and Work; and Tertiary Education Series.
From 2009 to 2011, when he relocated from Scotland back to Ghana, his home country, Professor Nudzor was a member of the UK’s ESRC Peer Review College. He has served (and continues to serve) as reviewer for a number of high impact international peer review journals, including: Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS), Journal of Educational Change, International Review of Education, and the European Journal of Teacher Education.
Professor Nudzor was the winner of UCC’s Maiden Research Awards Competition in the category of the Best Evolving Researcher in 2016. He was also the winner of the UCC’s Best College Level Researcher Award (BCLRA) for 2020. Professor Nudzor was the Principal Investigator for the group of IEPA researchers who won UCC’s Policy and Practice Oriented Research Support Grant Award for 2017, and had successfully undertaken a nation-wide tracer study on the topic “Placement and Utilisation of ‘IEPA’ Graduates in Sectors of the Ghanaian Economy”. Professor Nudzor is currently an External Examiner for the Department of Educational and Administration Management of the University of Education, Winneba. (UEW).