This edited collection was produced to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal Comparative Education, one of the most established and prestigious journals in the field. Each chapter was written by a leading scholar of comparative and international education. The collection marks a creative and critical engagement with some of the most important topics in contemporary comparative education, including ‘big data’, pedagogy, adult education, scholarly mobility, and gender. The theme of ‘silences’ connects the papers: while comparative education covers the breadth and depth of educational concerns, it has its own obsessions, but which themes do not receive the attention they deserve?
This book will be of interest to anyone interested in the theory, method and practice of comparative education today or in its development over the past 50 years. It will be informative to all scholars and graduate students concerned with education in its global contexts. In addition, to those readers who situate themselves within the field of comparative and international education, it offers a unique perspective on this important area of inquiry and the activities, preoccupations, absences and communities within it.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.
Introduction
Michele Schweisfurth
1. Comparative education: stones, silences, and siren songs
Robert Cowen
2. Global league tables, big data and the international transfer of educational research modalities
Michael Crossley
3. Lessons from abroad: whatever happened to pedagogy?
Julian G. Elliott
4. From adult education to lifelong learning and beyond
Peter Jarvis
5. The intellect, mobility and epistemic positioning in doing comparisons and comparative education
Terri Kim
6. ‘Comparatography’, history and policy quotation: some reflections
David Phillips
7. Neither orthodoxy nor randomness: differing logics of conducting comparative and international studies in education
Jürgen Schriewer
8. Among the comparativists: ethnographic observations
Michele Schweisfurth
9. Thinking about gender in comparative education
Elaine Unterhalter
Biography
Michele Schweisfurth is Professor of Comparative and International Education and Co-Director of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is Editor of the journal Comparative Education. Her research interests include tensions between global frameworks (such as children’s rights, and notions of ‘best practice’ in teaching and learning) and local and cultural imperatives. She is the author of Learner-Centred Education in International Perspective: Whose Pedagogy for Whose Development? (2013) and Comparative and International Education: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice (2014, with David Phillips).
