Dr Sheldon Shaeffer joined ARNEC as a Member of the Board of Directors in January 2014. Dr Shaeffer was Director of UNESCO’s Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education in Bangkok for over seven years, retiring at the end of 2008. A citizen of Canada, he was educated in history (B.A.), anthropology (M.A.), and comparative international education (Ph.D.) at Stanford University. He has taught, done research, and worked in development programmes in Southeast Asia for over 25 years – as a high school teacher in Malaysia, as an anthropologist and an education programme officer for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, and as the regional education advisor for UNICEF in Bangkok.

He was also for 10 years the Director of Education and Population Programmes for the International Development Research Centre in Canada and later was a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Educational Planning (UNESCO) in Paris. Before moving back to Bangkok with UNESCO, he was head of UNICEF’s global education programme in New York for three years. His current interests, reflected in numerous consultancies for a range of development agencies, include early childhood development, language policy in education and the use of mother tongue, teacher management and development, inclusive education (both in regard to disabilities and more broadly defined), child-friendly education, school-based management, and HIV and AIDS and education.