Vivien Stewart

vice president, education, Asia Society

Vivien Stewart is vice president for education at Asia Society. She is responsible for Asia Society's programs to promote the study of Asia and other world regions, cultures, languages, and global issues in America's schools, and for building connections between U.S. and Asian education leaders. In the United States, Stewart's initiatives include working with a network of state and national education leaders and creating a national initiative to expand the teaching of Chinese. Stewart has developed a series of international exchanges to share expertise between American and Asian education leaders on improving education to meet the demands of globalization. This includes bringing delegations of educators to each others' schools; producing publications such as *Math and Science Education in a Global Age*; and hosting expert meetings such as the Asia-Pacific Education Forum held in Beijing in 2006. Stewart has had a long involvement with education and youth affairs. Over the course of a distinguished career at Carnegie Corporation of New York, she was a leader in shaping reform agendas in early childhood education, urban school reform, science education, teaching as a profession, and healthy adolescent development. In addition to grantmaking, she was responsible for the management of a number of Carnegie task forces, which produced influential reports such as "Turning Points", "A Matter of Time", and "Starting Points". She was also instrumental in the creation of the National Center for Children in Poverty and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Stewart serves as a board member of the National Center on Education and the Economy and the Longview Foundation for Education in International Understanding and World Affairs. She is senior education advisor to the Refugee Education Trust in Geneva and on the advisory board of the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. She has also been senior policy advisor to the UN special representative of the secretary-general for children and armed conflict and a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. She received her B.A. and M. Phil. degrees from Oxford University.