Most qualitative studies in international education take place in a single site in a single nation. When studies are of more than one country, they most often use more quantitative than qualitative approaches. Beatrice and John Whiting conducted the most systematic of comparative cross-cultural studies of child rearing in their "Six…

Globalization is profoundly altering the education policy landscape. It introduces new problems in education agendas, compresses time and space in policy processes, and revitalizes the role of a range of supra-national players in educational reform. This deterritorialization of the education policy process has important theoretical and…

Tobin's work has been groundbreaking. Famously, he and his team put together a sophisticated comparative study of three ways of doing pre-school--in Japan, China, and the United States (1989). As such, this study has precedents in anthropology. What is unique in Tobin's work is that he got people from one place to comment on what they…

The Teachers College Symposium invited scholars to rethink culture, context, and comparison in educational research. In his response to these questions (this volume), Joe Tobin promoted comparative ethnographies to understand how social, cultural, and political processes play out across multiple locations and time periods. He urged careful…

Because educational research has grown more global in nature over the course of the last few decades, researchers find themselves questioning how best to conceptualize content and establish distinct levels in educational research. Globalization has exacerbated the need to rethink culture and context, to understand how and why similar content are,…

This article problematizes some of the ways that the issue of "context" has been treated in comparative education scholarship. We critique the cube approach recommended by Bray and Thomas (1995) as well as the common recirculations of Sadler's (1900) garden metaphor. Borrowing a set of analytic concepts from Bruno Latour (2004), we…

This paper discusses the role of institutions in the ethical engagement of Canadian youth volunteers abroad. In recent years, researchers and practitioners in the international field have questioned the ethics of volunteering as part of development, with scrutiny on who actually benefits from volunteering initiatives. Since the 1960s, over 65,000…

This article examines the link between the governance of Hong Kong's international school and Direct Subsidy Scheme school categories and changes in the broader Hong Kong society through a neoliberal framework. As Hong Kong's economy has grown since the 1997 handover to the People's Republic of China, an increasing number of people…

School choice policies, as neoliberal reforms, have often been analyzed using the very discourse embedded in neoliberal mentalities. By reviewing the way scholars have conceptualized school choice as a transnational phenomenon, this paper evaluates the extent to which scholarship has attempted to, or succeeded in, overcoming traditional,…

The past decade has witnessed a notable shift in the international education policy environment, characterized by a rapid growth in private educational provision. In the context of a divisive debate on the role of the non-state sector in primary and secondary education, this paper grapples with the theoretical underpinnings of both advocacy and…

There is ample evidence to suggest that American schools perform worse than schools in many other countries. The U.S. ranks toward the bottom of the industrialized nations on international tests of academic achievement in science and mathematics. Not only may American schools perform worse but they may do so at the same time as they use more…

This paper presents a vertical case study of the history of universalizing education in postcolonial Sierra Leone from the early 1950s to 1990 to highlight how there has never been a universal conception of universal education. In order to unite a nation behind a universal ideal of schooling, education needed to be adapted to different…

During the last decade, Chilean society was shaken by sharply critical and powerful student movements: secondary students led the 2006 "Penguin Revolution" and university students led the 2011 "Chilean Winter." This article describes and analyzes these student movements to illustrate how students can be highly relevant…

This article explores the approach to transformative education utilized by Sadaka Reut, a binational civil society organization in Israel that works with Jewish and Palestinian youth. I examine three central tools Sadaka Reut uses to achieve its goal of educating youth for social change: using personal experiences as the basis for discussion;…

Established in 2011, the Online School of Civic Education (the Online School) is intended to give Iranian teachers and educators the opportunity to reflect, experiment, and create classroom experiences aimed at teaching their students how to think, rather than what to think. The Online School was developed to provide teachers and educators inside…