Department of Education

Pierre de Galbert

Visiting Assistant Professor
Arnold Lab, 91 Waterman Street, Room 416
Spring 2025 Office Hours Tuesdays 2:30 - 3:30 and by appointment

Biography

Pierre de Galbert is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University in the education department. His research focuses on language of instruction policies in low- and middle-income countries, and the association between language policies and learning in the early years of formal school. He is particularly interested in the multi-dimensional set of factors that influence both the language policy decisions and their implementation. In the US context, his research focuses on supporting multilingual learners in linguistically diverse school systems. In addition, he partners with governments and non-governmental organizations to work on policy and program evaluations using causal methods. 
 

Recent News

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

Online training and financial incentives for teachers: Evidence from Bangladesh

Teacher training is costly and sometimes ineffective, especially if teachers are not fully engaged. In this paper, Professor Pierre de Galbert and his co-authors present findings from a randomized evaluation of an incentivized online teacher training program implemented in Bangladesh during COVID-related school closures. One treatment group received training and the other also received a moderate financial incentive.
Read Article
JULACE: Journal of the University of Namibia Language Centre

Namibia in its thirties: Reviewing the choice of English as sole official language

Namibia is a linguistically diverse country that attained independence in 1990. One of the most significant policy decisions at the time was to remove Afrikaans as one of the official languages, recognizing English only. In this paper, Kristof Iipinge (University of Namibia) and Pierre de Galbert (Brown University) critically review the criteria used to justify this decision and argue that the choice of these criteria, and the “value” attributed to European languages, compared with that of Namibian languages, were biased in a way to support the monolingual English policy.
Read Article