![]()
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION AS AN INFINITE FIELD
Alexander W. Wiseman and C. C. Wolhuter
ABSTRACT
The scope and breadth of the field of comparative and international education (CIE) is immense. There are few, if any, limitations on theme, issue, theory, method, or data that are relevant to CIE. In addition, every context or combination of contexts – social, political, economic, cultural – are available for both CIE scholars and professionals to do research on or work in. The flexibility and scope of the field can be a benefit, but create serious challenges to those who work in and study it. It also poses problems for those attempting to professionalize the field by creating areas of specialization or ownership. At the same time, the development of the field has historically been one of push and pull between international educational agendas and organizations with local or stakeholder-driven needs and situations. This chapter highlights those challenges and introduces the volume’s chapters.
Keywords: Comparative education; international education; secondary analysis; development education; multidisciplinarity; scope of field
Claiming that anything is infinite is a bold statement at best and overreaching at worst. But, to claim the field of comparative and international education (CIE) is infinite is, perhaps surprisingly, appropriate. There have been numerous reflective pieces discussing the diversity, breadth, and borrowed nature of the field (Astiz & Akiba, 2016; Wiseman, 2018; Wolhuter, 2015). Like most sub-fields of educational studies, the scholarship on CIE or from comparative and international perspectives relies upon the methods and theories of other disciplines – most often social or cognitive science disciplines like sociology, political science, international relations, economics, or psychology. The focus of CIE is neither relegated to a specific unit of analysis, like elementary, secondary, or tertiary (e.g., higher) education; nor is it at a specific system level such as campus, district, state, regional, national, or international (Bray & Thomas, 1995). CIE talks about education as an institution as well as an organization (Wiseman, Astiz, & Baker, 2014). It emphasizes the cultural contexts of educational organizations themselves as well as the cultural, social, economic, and political contexts in which they are situated (Harris & Jones, 2018). CIE is historical, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and ethnographic (e.g., McNess, Arthur, & Crossley, 2015; Zapp, 2018). Theoretical perspectives relevant to CIE range from the micro to the macro and engage every aspect of development, culture, society, organizations, psychology, and cognitive science (Paulston, 1999). In fact, if someone were to ask a comparativist of education what is typical of CIE, it would be a nearly impossible question to answer.
For many years the annual speech by the president of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in the United States was an attempt to further define or encompass what CIE had to offer. CIE was called “twins” and the field was debated as a scholarly endeavor versus a development framework (Wilson, 1994). Even after that high-level debate over the definition of the field, there still is no one definition of CIE. Although there are several definitions provided by scholars in the field (Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2014), which are often used as temporary solutions for the problem of a definition for this field of study, there remains no global professional coherence or indisputable ownership over the field of CIE, although some professional trends are evident (Wiseman & Matherly, 2009). After more than 100 years of being a distinct field of study and practice and more than 200 years of development (Epstein, 2016), CIE is broadly inclusive of all methodologies, all theoretical frameworks, all disciplinary foci, all units of analysis, and all topics of focus. In other words, CIE comprises infinite combinations of factors, whether scholarly or professional, and there is no one group, approach, or canon of literature that defines it. And, therein lies the problem.
This book takes stock of the evolution and current state of the scholarly field of CIE after over 200 years of development. This book contains chapters written by comparativists in each of the major world regions (Latin America, North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East-North Africa region, Oceania, South Asia, South-East and East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa) as well as chapters written on several major themes of the development of the field of CIE and its theory and methodology, higher education, teacher education, vocational education, peace education, and the rise of the global testing culture in education. Each chapter takes stock of the history and state of one facet of the field or one region of the world, and contributes to a discourse documenting the development of CIE as well as charting a future course for the field as well.
In 1990, 155 countries and representatives of over 150 organizations pledged “every person – child, youth and adult – shall be able to benefit from educational opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs.” Known as the Jomtien Declaration, this event marked the beginning of Education for All (EFA), a movement dedicated to improving education to lift developing nations out of poverty. However, several decades later, limited progress has been made. While some nations have experienced significant increases in literacy and educational access, EFA has yet to achieve the goal of universal education. There are nearly one billion illiterate people in the early 21st century; nearly all of them are concentrated in the developing and emerging world. In part, this is because educators and policy-makers in these nations lack the capacity to design and implement reform policies that are appropriate for their unique situations.
EFA, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and other international initiatives like these reflect one of the key influences on CIE. The influence of international agendas on education for development is evidence of the impact of globalization, broadly speaking, on the research and professional practice associated with the field. Globalization permeates countless fields in education and affects all manner of people. Be it educators, parents, practitioners, or students, the effect of global education policies can be widespread among a variety of stakeholders. With the continuing nature of education reform efforts, many constituents find themselves left behind, and unaware of the effect a policy may have on their community. Global educational policies often go unimplemented or improperly applied because their designers fail to incorporate the local context into their plans. As a result, critiques of CIE from inside as well as outside of the field abound both related to scholarship and practice.
Whether the critiques be focused on the application of comparative and international perspectives to educational issues and problems worldwide or the policy and practice itself occurring within specific educational communities, three key areas are often highlighted. These are:
1. There is often a lack of participation among local stakeholders in decision-making.
Too often local stakeholders have little say in both the design and implementation of the reform efforts taking place in their communities and schools. Often this is due to the fact that data is available to analyze without the voice of the local or community stakeholders involvement (e.g., Miske & Joglekar, 2018). While this is an argument that can and is often made concerning the pitfalls of development work, it is also relevant to any discussion about the development of CIE in regional, epistemic, or otherwise contextualized communities. For example, Gorostiaga and Espinoza (2019) look at the ways that history, context, and culture intersect to create CIE in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Aguilar and Assis (2019) likewise examine these intersections in Brazil. In both cases, there are international organizations that influence the development or re-development of CIE in these communities. International organizations partly introduce comparative and international perspectives and approaches to education as part of their externalizing influence, but also they bring framework that local comparativists can then adopt and adapt to the unique features and demands of their local contexts. It is within this dynamic intersection between global models and local differences that the infinite possibilities for the development of CIE arise.
2. There is a lack of communication between individuals and organizations studying education comparatively or internationally.
This is due both to epistemic siloing as well as a lack of opportunity to connect and share ideas (e.g., Kubow, 2018). Turner (2019) identifies several reasons why there is not only a lack of communication about CIE, but also why specific debates about its method and theory have been either one-sided or irrelevant. He suggests that without the possibility of CIE attaining disciplinary status, the trend of de facto comparative education, and scholars settling for social justice-oriented theorizing without asserting the role of the global then the field of CIE has run up against an obstacle to further development. Turner is not suggesting that communication is lacking as much as that the content of the communication is less substantive than it could be, and that it is important to more actively and passionately engage each other as scholars in order to develop the field. In short, the assertion is that in the face of an infinite array of possibilities the dilemma for CIE is that it and those who comprise it have taken the path of least resistance rather than continue to develop CIE as its own disciplinary science.
3. There is a lack of practice-oriented research in the CIE sector.
Theoretical research is powerful, but it must be relevant to a specific context to have value and meaning in local communities and schools worldwide (e.g., Ashton, 2018). As this is true for development studies of education’s impact on local communities, so this is also true for the development of the field of CIE. Jacob et al.’s (2019) work on the rise and fall of comparative education societies shows that a connection to the globally conceptualized field of CIE is often, but not always, enough to sustain a regional CIES. The World Council of Comparative Education Societies may be a hub for CIE-related societies to preserve and disseminate their histories, but it may not be able to facilitate practice-oriented research in those societies. While the diversity in context, language, culture, and region across CIE societies worldwide provides ample (perhaps infinite) opportunities to create practice-oriented applications in local communities and schools, the role of societies in doing so is questionable and unproven.
Solutions are sometimes suggested to the aforementioned problems, which involve collaboration on two, equally important levels:
1. Individuals and organizations from across epistemic communities must collaborate to produce meaningful research or practical solutions from comparative and international perspectives.
Scholars from CIE, educational policy, sociology, anthropology, political science, international relations, human geography, history, economics, and others must share their field’s or discipline’s insights if the specific context is to be fully understood. Most of the chapters in this volume summarize the ways that education experts and scholars from across disciplines and backgrounds intersect in order to develop a new or renewed interest in comparative education.
2. CIE scholars and development professionals must listen to the people on the ground.
Experts must also be fully partnered with context-specific education stakeholders and other practitioners to adequately understand how to adapt policy. They must work with local policy makers to understand the institutions and political realities in the area being studied. Global educational policies often go unimplemented or improperly applied because their designers are unable to incorporate the targeted context into their plans. No policy designed for all nations can be designed with one specific context in mind. Unable to take a given nation’s culture, history, institutional background, or economic situation into account, policies such as EFA, the SDGs, or others can never be enacted without substantial adaptation at the local level. In other words, international organizations and multilateral agencies must be driven by the local context – rather than just taking context into account – when making policy recommendations. This is understandable, as each locality has its own unique context, making it virtually impossible for the United Nations or the World Bank to adapt their efforts to each community. Indeed, within countries many national-level reform policies suffer from similar problems of scale when they are applied to disparate regions.
In areas with high levels of adaptive capacity and structurally solid institutions, adapting policies to the local context does not provide a significant challenge. However, in the developing and emerging world – where education is needed the most – the ability to adapt policies is too often lacking. It is the very lack of quality education that produces the conditions that prevent EFA, the SDGs, and similar measures from having their intended effect. Simply put, local policy-makers, educators, and students need help.
Equally troublesome is the lack of opportunity for local educators, parents, or students to contribute in the development of these policies. The design of educational delivery systems requires input from these important stakeholders. Without local participation there will be little buy-in, diminishing the prospects for even the best developed adaptations. These issues cannot be addressed by CIE alone, nor can local contextualization and stakeholder partnering be the only approach to CIE scholarship and research. For better or for worse, large-scale, international education data are increasingly available in the twenty-first century, and the availability and accessibility of this data only expands over time; it does not contract. This contributes further to the infinite nature of CIE as a field because it allows for the remote analysis of educational phenomenon around the world.
THE IMPACT OF SECONDARY DATA ANALYSIS ON COMPARATIVE EDUCATION
On a final note, it should be highlighted that although the information in this volume is not large-scale data, it does provide a repository of information on CIE, which can be used by future researchers to better understand the development of the field. Likewise, there is an abundance of large-scale, international education data available for secondary analysis, but there is surprisingly little research on the impact that these secondary analyzes have on educational policy and practice. This lack of research is largely the result of an obsession among researchers and policy-makers on estimating the impact of teacher and school factors on student achievement rather than investigating the global phenomenon across systems. The question then arises whether and to what extent secondary analyzes of data about education systems or about comparative education impacts policy and practice worldwide. If there is data available for every country or region, and that data is available to an unlimited number of potential analysts, then the research output is also potentially infinite.
Previous research suggests that one of the main impacts of secondary analysis availabil...
