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Narratives as a way of conceptualising the field of comparative education
Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education
Abstract
Based on the authors' wide reading in the field, this article suggests the notion of the narrative as a fitting and meaningful way of conceptualising and mapping the field of comparative education. Four prominent narratives can be identified in not only the field of comparative education (and the scholarly discourse on education) but also the public discourse on education. These are the narratives of the capability theory, neoliberal economics, the creed of human rights, and the call for social justice. These narratives are contrasted, and guidelines are offered for further research on reconstructing and reflecting on the current state of comparative education and its future trajectory.
... Por su parte, Wolhuter et al. (2022) identifican cuatro narrativas predominantes en el campo de la ECI y de los discursos públicos en educación. Estas son la narrativa del desarrollo de capacidades, la neoliberal, la de los derechos humanos y la de la justicia social. ...
... Los autores del artículo referido (Wolhuter et al., 2022) admiten que su esquema fue desarrollado a partir de una lectura de la bibliografía y las discusiones en congresos académicos predominantemente provenientes del Norte Global, a pesar de que dos de ellos residen en el Sur Global. Es por eso que oportunamente recomiendan en las conclusiones del artículo explorar la adecuación de estas narrativas al análisis de los discursos sobre educación en el Sur Global. ...
... Durante las últimas tres décadas, las presiones para responder a un amplio rango de demandas globales 11 y nacionales han resultado en significativos esfuerzos de reforma educativa tanto en la Argentina como en Sudáfrica. La formación de los discursos académico y público en torno a estas reformas tiene claros vínculos con las cuatro narrativas globales identificadas por Wolhuter et al. (2022). En ambos países, por ejemplo, actores gubernamentales y no gubernamentales han expresado una narrativa neoliberal basada en visiones gerencialistas o incluso de mercantilización de la educación, mientras que la narrativa de los derechos humanos ha movilizado políticas para el incremento del acceso, y la narrativa de la justicia social ha desempañado principalmente un rol para la crítica y el señalamiento de las limitaciones de estas reformas o de sus efectos desigualitarios. ...
Este artículo compara los procesos de articulación de los discursos sobre reforma educativa en dos naciones ubicadas en el Sur Global, la Argentina y Sudáfrica, en las últimas tres décadas, desde la perspectiva de la Educación Comparada e Internacional. Siguiendo trabajos antecedentes, se toman como referencia las principales narrativas que articulan los discursos sobre reforma educativa en este campo académico y en eldiscurso público, aunque el artículo pretende mostrar que los procesos ocurridos en cada caso nacional presentan selecciones y reformulaciones de estas grandes narrativas según sus propias dinámicas sociohistóricas. Por esta razón, incluimos un breve racconto social e histórico de ambos países —con énfasis en sus realidades educativas— lo que sirve de fondo para una exploración y discusión de los discursos sobre reforma educativa. El procedimiento metodológico seguido en esta indagación consistió, primero, en una revisión bibliográfica, dando cuenta de textos académicos y documentos de política claves en el período seleccionado en ambos países. En segundo lugar, la comparación entre la Argentina y Sudáfrica fue realizada siguiendo el enfoque desarrollado por Schriewer (2019), esto es, buscando convergencias y divergencias entre los casos bajo el supuesto de una causalidad compleja y del reduccionismo de las “grandes teorías” universalizantes.
... In the analysis reported in this paper, the authors opted to use the notion of narratives as a heuristic device, for reasons explained (Wolhuter et al., 2022). A narrative, being defined as a story or account of events (Ibid.), is believed to be a more meaningful depiction of what takes place in the field. ...
... Another major reason for opting for the notion of narratives is that these, being present in both the (comparative and international education) scholarly and the public discourse of education, also serve to bridge the theory -practice gap -a long-standing problem in the field that has been pointed out by many scholars (e.g., Psacharopoulos, 1990, in his Comparative and International Education Presidential Address;Welch, 2000). The following four narratives, identified by Wolhuter et al. (2022), were taken for the analysis reported in this paper: capabilities theory, the neo-liberal economic narrative, the human rights narrative, and the social justice narrative. The frequency of the different narratives in the articles surveyed is presented in Table 3. ...
This chapter takes stock of developments in, and the state of, the field of comparative and international education at the beginning of the 21st century, using as data base articles published in the journal Comparative Education Review during the second decade of the 21st century and to compare results with a content analysis done on the first 50 years of the existence of the Review and which was published in 2008. The 246 articles that were published in the Comparative Education Review during the decade 2010-2019 were analyzed under the following metrics: levels of analysis of articles; number of units covered by articles; research methods; narrative basis; phase of education articles cover; and mode of education articles deal with. Compared to the first 50 years of the existence of the Review, single-unit national-level studies still dominate the field, though less so. A case can be made out for a deconcen-tration to allow more space for research at geographic levels both larger and smaller than the nation-state. The most prominent narrative in which articles are framed is that of the social justice narrative. The neo-liberal economic narrative stands strong too, while the poor standing of the human rights narrative is disappointing. Turning to modes and phases of education is concerned, the shadow education system has registered on the comparative and international education research agenda, while there seems to be a modest upswing in interest in pre-primary education. Thoughts about the future trajectory of the field are suggested.
... Phenomenology is then in the bedrock of narrative research. Wolhuter et al. (2022) ...
... 'what can?' of education), often lost in the conventional paradigm mapping of the field of comparative education (which limits itself to the 'what is?' question of education). They suggest narratives serve as a fitting and meaningful way of conceptualising and mapping the field of comparative education and are more connected to the public discourse on education (Wolhuter et al., 2022). ...
Comparative education has not given sufficient attention to the multiple trans-national and intercultural dimensions of educated identity. The article argues that 'major-ity' logic is embedded in comparative education, where the world is conceptualised as the 'international society of nation-states' rooted in the dominant Grotian worldview. It presents a typology of three worldviews that can shape different approaches to comparative education, leading to diverse interpretations of educational phenomena and systems, and envisioning different futures. It then delves into the complex interplay between knowledge and identity, and between Homeworld and Alienworld, adopting a phenomenological perspective: moving from normality to normativity, from knowledge to narrative, and from international to intercultural. The article proposes an interface between comparative education and inter-cultural education, embracing mobility, migration, diaspora, and transnational identity as essential components of 'comparative intercultural education'.
... The advantages of differentiating teaching include fostering inclusive education, promoting equality, and creating maximum opportunities for each learner, in line with the principles of Capabilities Theory (see Wolhuter, Espinoza & McGinn, 2024). However, the disadvantages include its higher cost and increased demands compared to a uniform approach to teaching. ...
Over the five and a half millennia of the evolution of institutionalised education, two interrelated salient trends stand out. The first is the shift from elite to mass education. The second change involves the transition from schools being blatantly used to bludgeon a population into submission and uniformity—reinforcing an officially sanctioned hegemony and suppressing any trace of diversity—to a valuing of diversity. Since the 1960s, at least two major global societal tendencies have constituted a force working against schools being instruments for imposing dominant cultures. These two are the growing multicultural or diverse societies across the globe and the rise of the Creed of Human Rights as a moral code for a globalised world. Together, these trends have contributed to a one hundred and eighty degree change, as diversity has come to be valued in education (institutions and systems). Dimensions of diversity acknowledged include cultural diversity, religious diversity, diversity in terms of gender and sexual orientation, and diversity concerning ableism. This chapter focuses on the concomitant differentiation needed in teaching.
... Social justice and equity (or equal education opportunities) have been two major motivations for the worldwide education expansion and reform spurt over the past 75 years (see Wolhuter, Espinoza, and McGinn 2022). For the purposes of this article, Piketty's (2020, 967) definition of a just society as "one that allows all of its members access to the widest range of fundamental goods" is used as a working definition of social justice. ...
In the past 30 years, since c. 1990, a higher education revolution has taken place in all parts of the world. This has been a costly exercise, and while the global higher education revolution can boast an enrolment explosion and has opened the doors of higher education to many, it has taken place within the parameters of the neoliberal economics, meaning that the imperatives of social justice and equity have not been adequately responded to. The pivot between this contextual force of neoliberal economics and the contextual imperative for social justice in higher education is funding. South Africa is part of this global revolution, although the specific contextual ecology of the country too has had an impact on the form this revolution has been taking on. In this article, the issue of higher education funding in South Africa is investigated from the theoretical framework and with the methodological apparatus of comparative and international education. This framework and methodological apparatus are explained. Then the main tenets and context of the worldwide higher education revolution vis-à-vis the imperatives of social justice and equity are reconstructed, and the South African case is interpreted and assessed against this global canvas in order to suggest a forward trajectory for South African higher education.
A comparative analysis of two approaches to education in two academic literatures in two languages is the basis for discussion of how education systems should respond to contemporary transitions in the world in an Anthropocene age. The first approach is based in francophone literature and argues for an 'individual pedagogical education' in contrast to the 'social normative education' which dominates mainstream education in France. The second anglophone approach focuses on how education can – and in experimentation has already – prepare learners for social action as denizens of their community even before they are formally citizens, with voting and similar rights. The combination of the two approaches suggests that current global transitions demand responses which involve substantial transformations in learners and that education systems must accept this responsibility.
We live in a moment of epochal precarity, amidst irreversible environmental catastrophe that is impacting all life on Earth. Signaling the end of human exceptionalism, this era calls for an urgent redefinition of what it is to be human and a reconfiguration of the relationship between human and Earth. How should education respond to a world of shifting planetary boundaries and collapsing ecosystems? What education policies, practices, and pedagogies can help re-situate the human within the relational flow of life where everyone and everything – both human and non-human – are deeply interconnected? How can we learn to responsibly encounter and fully engage with a more than human world? In this article (based on the CIES 2021 Presidential address), Iveta Silova invites us to encounter and engage with the ‘other’ in an embedded, recuperative, and relational ethics of reconfiguring worlds together.
Pedagogy significantly affects children’s learning and growth, but appropriate pedagogy in the Global South is still under-theorised and lacks empirical evidence. With the aim of proposing pedagogical approaches alternative to the dominant framework – the ‘learner-centred pedagogy’ currently implemented by international donors in a top-down manner – this research has explored locally-relevant pedagogy through a bottom-up process. By applying the capability approach, it has examined achievements and pedagogy valued by primary teachers in Tanzania. The analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews applied the critical realist concept of the ‘four-planar social being’. This revealed the hegemonic power dynamics between the international, national and local players as well as those between the researcher and researched, plausibly shaping the teachers’ valued pedagogies. The effort undertaken to appreciate people’s values could intensify the ideological colonisation through pedagogy that learner-centred pedagogy has inherently imposed on the Global South.
This paper identifies OECD's shifting agendas and approaches to education since inception and distinguishes three time periods. Each of these periods reflects shifting geopolitical and economic realities that shaped OECD's priorities and modes of operation. They also demonstrate the adaptive capacity and expansionist nature of OECD's education work as it successfully innovates, finds market niches and adds new dimensions to its datasets. These have culminated in its recent strategic initiatives, namely: PISA for Development and the Learning Framework 2030. The former aims to adapt PISA to fit into low- and middle-income countries and serve as the global learning metric; and the latter aims to incorporate non-cognitive competencies into its main tests. Together they are designed to expand and consolidate the Organisation's influence in the context of the SDGs. By adopting a historical perspective, we provide a critical understanding of OECD's shifting role in global education governance and its ‘humanitarian turn.
In this paper, I reflect upon my journey of learning to do comparative education research over the last decade and half. It involves transnational moves from Japan, Canada, US, Australia and back to Japan where I encountered numerous ‘others’. I use my story of a series of relocations as an entry point for theorising what I mean by ‘negative’ comparative education. Drawing on Andrea English and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, I use the term ‘negativity’ in the philosophical sense. That is, it refers to affective experiences of discomfort, perplexity and confusion as an important catalysis for generative learning and unlearning. It is a story of learning to let go of the familiar language and frame of seeing the world and embracing disruption as a critical moment for new learning. In conclusion, I argue that negative comparative education offers a methodological stance that enables us to undertake comparative research in a manner that challenges the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge and hence to contribute to the pluriverse world.
The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the ‘science’ to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning – and being – to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children’s literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies – nature and culture, time and space, self and other – by bringing the ‘pagan’ worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon.
In Saudi Arabia, the national education policy emphasises developing well-rounded human beings. This broader role of education echoes the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which urge greater efforts to empower students to create a better world. This paper aims to investigate to what extent the rhetoric of Saudi education policy has been translated into practice, with a focus on the degree to which policymakers consider this wider approach and the impact that the current policy designs have on students. The study utilises the capability approach to identify students’ real opportunities to expand their learning and life capabilities. Findings from this study suggest that Saudi education tends to focus on economic benefits and give little consideration to the intrinsic value of education for whole-person development and lifelong learning. Therefore, a wider perspective is needed in education policymaking that acknowledges both the instrumental and intrinsic roles of education.
The year 2015 was significant for the arena of international development, as UNESCO’s Education for All agenda was replaced by Education 2030, which would identify minimum standards of education quality. The OECD had been working on extending its existing PISA assessment into low- and middle-income countries through PISA for Development (PISA-D) and positioned the new assessment as a means of tracking progress on the post-2015 goals. The organisation maintains that PISA-D was introduced primarily in response to the demands of the international community, especially low- and middle-income countries, and that the assessment was developed in partnership with them. This paper investigates those claims through an analysis of the arrival of PISA-D in Cambodia, situating the analysis within UNESCO’s shifting agenda and the strategic visions of the OECD and World Bank that first emerged in the 1990s. The result is a very different picture to the portrayals of local agency, demand, consensus and partnership that adorn the official websites and pamphlets of global agencies and much academic research, raising serious doubts about education governance post-2015.
This article critically assesses the works of Paul Monroe, Isaac L. Kandel, and the International Institute at the Teachers College, Columbia University, in the early twentieth century. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading, it presents a different account of their legacies that foregrounds the colonial and imperial realities of the time as constitutively significant to the early formation of the field and the comparative education knowledge generated during this period. In doing so, the article unsettles the comforting ways in which the founding histories of the field have been narrated by the historians. By illuminating their deep colonial/imperial entanglements during the early formative period, this article invites readers to reflect on how the particular historical and geopolitical context within which we operate sets limits on what knowledge we produce, and today, when the relationship between our scholarship and international development agencies are closer than ever.
This article examines the development of education policy in Myanmar/Burma at a period of “critical juncture.” There are two major strands to this article, regarding policy process and stakeholder voices that we bring together. We argue that powerful actors such as the government and international agencies frame policy in ways that often exclude the concerns and aspirations of education users and that there are often significant gaps between their positions and the realities of “ordinary” citizens. Such issues are of particular concern, given the importance of education and language as key elements of ethnic stakeholders’ identities and interests, in relation to the ongoing and still deeply contested peace process. As a result, opportunities opened by the critical juncture in the reform process are being missed. The article is based on data collected in interviews and focus groups with over 500 respondents between 2011 and 2016 in Myanmar.
This article questions some of our assumptions about the history of comparative education. It explores new scholarship on key actors and ways of knowing in the field. Building on the theory of the social constructedness of the field of comparative education, the paper elucidates how power shapes our scholarly histories and identities.
With a focus on lifelong learning, this book examines the shifts that UNESCO's educational concepts have undergone in reaction to historical pressures and dilemmas since the founding of the organization in 1945. The tensions between UNESCO's humanistic worldview and the pressures placed on the organization have forced UNESCO to depart from its utopian vision of lifelong learning, while still claiming continuity. Elfert interprets the history of lifelong learning in UNESCO as part of a much bigger story of a struggle of ideologies between a humanistic-emancipatory and an economistic-technocratic worldview. With a close study of UNESCO's two education flagship reports, the Faure and Delors Reports, Elfert sheds light on the global impact of UNESCO's professed humanistic goals and its shifting influence on lifelong learning around the world.
The nature of any particular comparative study of education depends on the purposes for which it was undertaken and on the identity of the person(s) conducting the enquiry. This first chapter begins by noting different categories of people who undertake comparative studies of education. It then focuses on three of these groups: policy makers, international agencies, and academics. Although this book is chiefly concerned with the last of these groups, it is instructive to note similarities and differences between the purposes and approaches of academics and other groups. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. All rights are reserved.
Este artículo argumenta que un enfoque perspectivista provee
una forma de comparación (el análisis de semejanzas, diferencias e interrelaciones
entre distintas perspectivas) que aporta una herramienta valiosa
para el estudio de problemas de la educación. En particular, se discuten las
características metodológicas de la cartografía social y cómo se inscribe en
los debates del campo de la educación comparada. Además, se ilustra su
aplicación a problemas de política educativa desde una perspectiva comparada
y en el contexto latinoamericano, haciendo foco en una investigación
que analizó el debate intertextual sobre la relación entre globalización y
reforma educativa en la región en el período 1996-2008.
This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on “Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education,” brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field’s founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These logics gained legitimacy through the Cold War geopolitical contexts in which the field was established and have shaped subsequent approaches including the much-debated world-culture approach to globalization in education. The article then reviews decolonial, postcolonial, and southern theory scholarship as an intellectual resource upon which CIE scholars and practitioners can draw to tackle these active colonial legacies. We situate the contribution of this special issue within this larger intellectual movement and call for a major collective rethinking of the way CIE knowledge is produced and circulated on a global scale.
Human capital theory and rate of return methodology have long been a dominant framework in comparative and international education and other fields. While there have been criticisms since its inception, it has been ubiquitous and widely accepted as an important mechanism for educational planning, evaluation, and policy making. In this article, I raise fundamental questions about the internal logic of this framework. In particular, I examine the problems with its two strands of empirical work, dealing with the impact of education on income and economic growth, as well as with its conceptual base. In conclusion, I briefly examine some alternatives to using a human capital framework for educational planning, evaluation, and policy making.
The debate concerning the professional status of comparative and international education has a relatively short yet tumultuous history, beginning roughly in the mid-twentieth century. Two professional organizations, in particular, have been at the center of this debate, and are now among the oldest comparative and international education (CIE) associations. The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) was established in 1956, and NAFSA (The Association of International Educators) was established in 1948.1 Yet, comparative researchers and international educators are still struggling to distinguish themselves as belonging to a unique profession. In fact, the debate as to the status of comparative and international education as a profession began about the time these associations were founded (Heath 1958), and has ebbed and flowed ever since.
This chapter introduces readers to the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education and approaches to reviewing the field broadly, by examining the ways that scholars and professionals in the field reflect on comparative and international education (CIE). It begins with a synthesis of the reviews and reflective pieces published since the mid- 20th century, and then critiques the field for being neither consistently nor systematically reflective. The chapter then summarizes several of the benefits of consistent and systematic reflection through a process of annual review. The chapter concludes with an overview and synthesis of each of the sections, which provide the structure of the Annual Review, and poses questions that drive systematic reflection through each section of the volume and the field as a whole.
This article contributes to contemporary theorising in comparative education by exploring how narratives of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in postcolonial settings are understood in terms of affective justice. Affective justice is introduced as a framework for understanding justice as an affective practice. Through the analysis of two examples of girls’ education in the Global South – Malala’s shooting in Pakistan and the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in Nigeria – the paper shows how these stories are circulated through sentimental narratives that fail to recognise long-standing colonial conceptualisations of education and schoolchildren. It is suggested that the notion of affective justice helps reorient understandings of education in postcolonial settings by turning educators’ attention to three domains – pedagogical practices, embodied affects, and emotional regimes. It is argued that a nuanced conceptualisation of affective justice offers insights into how educators and students can move beyond sentimental narratives to acknowledge coloniality and structural injustice.
Compare is a leading journal in the comparative and international education research field, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2020. To commemorate this milestone, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 428 papers published in Compare between 2010 and 2019 to assess this journal’s productivity and influence. The findings show that in the past decade, Compare experienced significant growth in the number of publications and citations. This growth primarily stemmed from England, which yielded over half of the top 20 most productive authors and institutions. Among the numerous research topics discussed in Compare, the disciplinary development of comparative and international education, the internationalisation of education, gender studies in education, and citizenship education were the most frequently addressed. A detailed analysis of these four topics reveals that despite having published many papers falling within the scope of international education, Compare is encouraged to publish more papers about this subfield in the post-COVID-19 era.
The article is an attempt to explore through the lens of my identification as a foreigner, a number of different themes around work in comparative education, particularly aspects of the question of method, and some reflections on the relationship with education and international development. The discussion begins with some reflection on internal or external foreignness, and the ways in which these identifications within my autobiography are heterodox, not singular and co-constructed with many relationships, changing over time. Some different formulations of pluralism and engagements with the capability approach are discussed drawing out some of the resources they provide for exploring approaches in comparative education. In the final section, some features of the idea of reflexive comparison as a methodological resource are sketched.
Claims regarding Western neo-colonial domination over scholarship in Comparative and International Education (CIE) have recently commanded much attention – for example in a 2017 special issue of the journal Comparative Education Review (CER) on the theme of ‘contesting coloniality.’ Stressing their marginal ‘positionality,’ the contributors to that special issue relate their critique to a narrative of ‘epistemic violence’ seen as underpinning ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ hegemony in the CIE field and beyond. Adopting a historical perspective, I argue here that positing a dichotomy between a colonialist ‘Western modernity’ and a uniformly victimised ‘non-West’ is empirically unsustainable, and involves its advocates in propagating just the kind of essentialism and Eurocentrism that they condemn. I also argue that the centrality of ‘positionality’ and ‘opacity’ in postcolonialist or decolonial arguments, as expounded in the CER special issue, impedes meaningful and constructive scholarly dialogue. Scholarship in this vein threatens to divide the CIE field, undermine its wider credibility and distract from analysis of the pressing problems that confront us today. Comparativists need to balance critical scholarship concerning the implications of ‘colonialism’ with greater attention to the comparative study of its history.
The purpose of this study is to measure the impact of international scholarship programs for social justice – a case study of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP), the first model of scholarships for social justice. The human capability approach advanced by Amartya Sen is selected to conceptualize the measurement of the impacts. This study attempts to propose an alternative approach, which allows scholarship sponsors to see scholarship impact on the matter of people’s capabilities, rather than economic growth. By using the data from the 2012 IFP Alumni surveys (n = 1,794, 49.4% female, 50.6% male) and the fellows data (n = 422, 47.6% female, 52.4% male) collected in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 by the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, this study examined the relationships of the very foundational rationale behind the creation of IFP as well as the proposed structural equation model built upon the human capability approach with fellows’ impacts on social justice in their home country. Structural equation modelling was employed as the statistical technique. The results of the analyses revealed that: (a) fellows’ success of choices were positively related to fellows’ impacts on social justice; and (b) fellows’ capabilities and achieved functionings positively predicted fellows’ impacts on social justice. The proposed structural equation model was proved to be theoretically sound and explain the data well.
The Middle East and North Africa region has the world’s lowest returns to education. This paper examines what the value of a degree is using nationally representative labour market surveys from Egypt (2012), Jordan (2010) and Tunisia (2014). Specifically, the authors estimate Mincer models for levels and years of schooling. They find that returns are highest in Tunisia and lowest in Egypt, although all three countries fall short of the global average. Higher education is where returns are greatest. They also analyse the returns by sub-groups: sex; age group; and sector. The returns are higher for women than men in Egypt. The younger generation has lower returns than the older generation in Egypt. The private sector in Egypt and Tunisia has lower returns than the public sector. One reason for the low returns is that many individuals are overeducated relative to position requirements.
In this essay, I comment on the objective of cultivating creativity in general and in schools in particular. I start by tracing the historical origin of this objective, then discuss a select set of relevant issues, including what can be considered the best practices for achieving this. I conclude by contemplating the potential for globalisation of this objective, and the portability of general pedagogies and specific approaches to cultivating creativity between different educational systems. © 2018
Theories of change (ToCs) are underutilized in programming and evaluation and seldom analyzed with regard to the challenges and opportunities they present, especially in conflict-affected contexts. We reflect on the use of ToCs in UNICEF’s Peacebuilding, Education, and Advocacy program, using four studies we carried out in Ethiopia and Dadaab refugee camp. We found, by asking program planners and beneficiaries about ToCs and seeking to map outcomes we would expect to see if ToCs were materializing, that ToCs provide important insights for programming and evaluation, even in fluid contexts. We argue that routinizing use of ToCs, particularly what we might call “living ToCs” that can inform responsive programming, presents challenges but also offers an important step toward understanding how education can mitigate conflict and conduce peace. © 2018, by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
In postgenocide Rwanda, education is viewed by the national government as crucial for shaping a new, unified civic identity but also as a tool to address the past genocide. Drawing on Rwanda as a case study, this article analyzes national curriculum documents, school textbooks, and interviews with teachers and students in order to understand the following questions: To what extent does the Rwandan state integrate global rights discourses within the civics curricula and textbooks? How do teachers and student engage with these global discourses in the classroom? I find that while the national civics curriculum intends to inculcate a traditional notion of citizenship, emphasizing patriotism and loyalty to the state, the curriculum also includes global norms oriented toward human rights and global citizenship. However, divergent discourses are evident in the classroom among students and teachers where only some aspects of the global models are embraced. This points to an inherent tension in citizenship education that seeks to address a contentious past by drawing on global models around citizenship and human rights while also promoting national civic values. © 2018, by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
This article discusses the problem of comparison within comparative and international education research. It pushes back against the algorithmic and computational creep in education, arguing that if Big Data analytics replace theory, reflexivity, and critique, we are left with sterilized and atrophied comparative education research. Following a review of several business-as-usual modalities of comparison and a consideration of the colonial and power-knowledge effects that educational comparisons have had both historically and at present, the article proposes a “criss-crossing” comparative education. The term “criss-crossing” references the traveling back and forth along intersecting lines. This approach puts relationality at the center, sees research as an active process of criss-crossing, and aims to surface the entangled complexity of sometime disparate educational actors, devices, discourses, and practices. Criss-crossing comparison recognizes that we construct knowledge from and through relationships, and it additionally recognizes that the production of comparison is itself a way of relating to other people. © 2018, by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
1. Anti-management paradigms in organization theory 2. Structural contingency theory of organizational adaptation 3. A critique of population-ecology theory 4. A critique of institutional theory 5. A critique of resource dependence theory 6. A critique of organizational economics 7. Towards a unified theory of organizational structure 8. A way forward for organizational structural theory.
The aim of this lead article of this special issue of Compare is to assess the value of Jullien’s vision for the field of comparative and international education today. The life, writings and ideas of Jullien are sketched, followed by a survey of the path of development of the field since the time of Jullien. In view of the exigencies of the early-twenty-first century, the article argues that Jullien’s philanthropic vision holds up a beacon for a future trajectory of the field. This article also introduces the other contributions to this volume by using them to illustrate, to refine and to qualify this thesis.
Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World Bank and OECD. To date there have been several critiques but these have been too limited to challenge the validity of the claims. The consequence is continued utilisation and citation of these strong claims, resulting in a growing aura of scientific truth and concrete policy reforms. In this piece we report findings from two original studies that invalidate these statistical claims. Our intent is to contribute to a more rigorous global discussion on education policy, as well as call attention to the fact that the new global policy regime is founded on flawed statistics.
Despite the vast differences between the Right and the Left over the role of education in the production of inequality one common element both sides share is a sense that education can and should do something about society, to either restore what is being lost or radically alter what is there now. The question was perhaps put most succinctly by the radical educator George Counts in 1932 when he asked "Dare the School Build a New Social Order?", challenging entire generations of educators to participate in, actually to lead, the reconstruction of society. Over 70 years later, celebrated educator, author and activist Michael Apple revisits Counts’ now iconic works, compares them to the equally powerful voices of minoritized people, and again asks the seemingly simply question of whether education truly has the power to change society.