Will Brehm

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Canberra

This article argues that since World War II, comparative education has worked in the service of two historic blocs: one focused on creating institutions and ideologies in support of internationalism and a second focused on containing the threat of communism. Both versions have supported and justified foreign intervention into domestic education sys...

• New media formats such as podcasts are revolutionizing the production and dissemination of knowledge in and outside of higher education. One danger is the rise of EdTech companies that have used the pandemic as an opportunity to increase profits as more individuals and systems of higher education rely on digital platforms and products. • This rep...

An edited collection of articles on the effects of COVID 19 on education

This chapter connects the concept of identity to mid-space actors involved in hybrid peacebuilding. The power of identity draws attention to the process of framing and othering as important factors contributing to successful bridge-building across diverse actors during hybrid peacebuilding. Buddhist monks in post-conflict Cambodia are exemplar. How...

This chapter provides an overview of the concept of everyday privatization, connecting it to education generally and anthropological literature on village life in Cambodia specifically, as well as provides a methodological overview of the research. Educational privatization is often examined as part of government policy reforms. This “top-down” app...

Purpose This paper sought to understand at one time point what was known and not known about the status and use of indicators of internationalization of higher education in Asia–Pacific. More specifically, we identified and mapped publicly available indicators of international of higher education in the region. We examined the ways by which interna...

Philanthropy has been used as a tax avoidance strategy since its inception. This article details the history of such strategies, which have evolved as tax law changed, primarily in the USA. The contemporary era of philanthropy is dominated by strategies that further the privatization and financialization of public goods, such as education.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to compare two UNESCO reports on educational development in Cambodia, one from 1955 and the other from 2010, in order to understand how the global education development agenda has impacted shadow education. Design/methodology/approach The study is conducted through a textual comparison of two UNESCO reports wri...

This chapter uses the concepts of “global summitry” and “clientelism” to theorize higher education governance in Cambodia. After reviewing the history of higher education since the 1960s, the chapter analyzes the country’s experiences amid regional attempts to harmonize standards, degree structures, quality assurance systems, and credit systems in...

Some of the biggest debtors in the twenty-first century are not small business owners or first-time homeowners, but rather university students who take out massive debt in the belief that it is an investment in their future. Like housing loans before the Global Financial Crisis, student loan debt is today being packaged and re-packaged into exotic...

This chapter explores curricular challenges to multiculturalism in the Mekong subregion of Southeast Asia by looking at human rights and history textbooks in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. Although these countries are part of an elite effort aimed at constructing a multicultural regional identity through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, w...

This article focuses on the limitations of terms and definitions regarding shadow education research in Cambodia. Although shadow education in Cambodia is typically defined as private tutoring taught by mainstream schoolteachers to their own students, other manifestations of it have been missed by most studies on the subject, including my own. By t...

Educational privatisation has received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. In much of this work, educational privatisation is viewed as the outcomes of certain government policies or as the result of the influences of education businesses in school systems. This article presents a portrait of an educational entrepreneur in Cambodia to...

This paper examines the Civil Society Education Fund’s (CSEF) impact on the non-governmental organisation education partnership (NEP) in Cambodia. With financial backing from the World Bank and the Fast Track Initiative, the CSEF is an initiative that is managed internationally by the Global Campaign for Education. Its goal is to help national netw...

This chapter analyzes school textbooks in Cambodia during the 1980s when the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was in power. Our paper focuses on the portrayal inside textbooks of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), which was the regime that preceded the PRK and is commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. Education during this period attempted to unify survivo...

This chapter analyzes school textbooks in Cambodia during the 1980s when the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was in power. Our paper focuses on the portrayal inside textbooks of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), which was the regime that preceded the PRK and is commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. Education during this period attempted to unify survivo...

This chapter focuses on the emergence of civil society as a central pillar in Cambodian educational governance. By re-tracing how the NGO Education Partnership (NEP), a federation of education NGOs, became a recognized actor in national education policy making, this chapter documents the re-scaling of educational governance through the internal pol...

A central feature of the contemporary education system in Cambodia is the perceived necessity of extra classes in order for students to pass monthly, semester, and national examinations. Although this perception is not always correct because sometimes more students pass exams than take extra lessons, it does nevertheless highlight the issue of educ...

This chapter focuses on the emergence of civil society as a central pillar in Cambodian educational governance. By retracing how the NGO Education Partnership (NEP), a federation of education nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), became a recognized actor in national education policymaking, this chapter documents the rescaling of educational govern...

Educational privatization has received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. In much of this work, educational privatization is viewed as the outcomes of certain government policies or as the result of the influences of education businesses in school systems. My study of one community in Cambodia builds on this work by focusing on the w...

This paper uses Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach to analyze the emergence of civil society within global educational governance. The purpose is to understand the intersection of historical structures with global actors and spaces that have accompanied the globalization of education. Based on findings from a study on the impact in Cambodia o...

This is a review of Micah Uetricht's book "Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity."

This article traces the emergence of the world culture theory in comparative education using critical discourse analysis. By chronicling the emergence and expansion of world culture theory over the past four decades, we highlight the (unintended) limitations and exclusive regimes of thought that have resulted. We argue that the theory’s telos of a...

The international construction of a new political economic order in Cambodia has had contradictory e􏰀ects on education. The rhetoric of democracy thrives along- side corruption and human rights abuses, the Education for All initiative exists alongside privatization of public education, and many international education de- velopment e􏰀orts perpetuat...

This article argues a post-2015 Education For All agenda must include multiple spaces of education that cannot be reduced to just public or private education. The absence of these hybrid spaces has consequences for where and how education officials at the country level direct their attention.

School curricula are contested spaces of nationalism that socialize students into society and teach a certain set of morals, ethics, and history. But what version of the nation is articulated in school? More importantly, whose version is it? These questions are at the heart of the relationship between the project of mass schooling and the formation...

Silova, I. & Brehm, W. C. (2013). The shifting boundaries of teacher professionalism: Education privatization(s) in the post-socialist education space. In T. Seddon, J. Ozga, and J. Levin (Eds.), Educators, professionalism and politics: Global transitions, national spaces, and professional projects (pp. 55-74). New York: Routledge.

The changing dynamics of education in most countries over the last thirty years obscures an understanding of how the requirements of human rights and economic and social justice are to be met under the new and increasingly pervasive conditions of private, public and private-public provision in education. The Privatisation in Education Research Init...

Brehm, W. C. & Silova, I. (2011). The ignorant donor: A radical reimagination of international aid, development, and education. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 13(1), 29-36.

The construction of the European education space has typically been attributed to European education policy makers, institutions, and networks. Rarely do scholars consider the role of outside, non-European actors in shaping the terrain of European education thought and practice. This article considers the construction of the European education spac...

This article discusses William W. Brickman's contributions to the field of comparative and international education. Through archival research of Brickman's collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, interviews with his former colleagues, students, and family members, and a content analysis of his publications and the two journals...

This article chronicles the history of the journal European Education since its establishment in 1969 by placing it within the larger context of geopolitical changes of the twentieth century and the historical debates on theory and method in the field of comparative education. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 40 journal v...