National education policies in Nigeria aim at addressing female disprivilege by improving girl-child enrolment in schools in line with Millennium Development Goal targets. In addition, the National Gender Policy and its Strategic Implementation Framework stress the importance of mainstreaming gender perspectives within the education sector by…

This article critically examines the concept of gender mainstreaming and raises questions about a series of category slippages in debates and discussions. Some key concerns are the way in which women are constructed as a unified analytical category, and how gender equality is frequently reduced to issues of representation. It also critically…

The global dominance of neoliberal policy prescriptions in recent decades has been well documented, with particular implications for educational systems. These include reduced public expenditure and provision, the promotion of individual (parental) choice, competition, increased user-pays and the privatisation of education. Against this…

Since the mid-1990s, the concept of professional learning communities has arisen in the education field in the West, aiming to improve teachers' professional competency by using collaborative approaches. Western studies indicate that these strategies help teachers achieve professional growth. Schools in China have had a long history of enhancing…

Violent conflict and humanitarian disasters such as floods, famines, or tsunamis, have existed since the start of human history. However, it is only recently that education in these emergency situations has emerged as a visible organizational field. We aim to use a unique theoretical application of sociological neo-institutionalism to explain the…

"Improving quality" has become a key phrase in policy and academic discourses on education in low-income countries, reflecting concerns that the success in increasing enrolment and widening access to schooling is being undermined by low-quality teaching and learning, and subsequent low levels of skills and knowledge among school leavers. We wish…

The study reported here focused on comparing teachers' actual and desired participation in different decision-making situations and examined how participation in decision making differs in Indian higher educational institutions. The paper provides a comparison of findings with similar studies conducted in Western settings regarding the…

This paper suggests the need for a critical analysis of the nationalization of mourning and its educational implications, especially in conflict-ridden areas. Our thoughts are grounded in a comparative study on mourning that has been conducted as part of our long-standing ethnographic research in schools in Cyprus and Israel during the last 10…

The study investigated the psychometric properties of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) Short Scale administered to two groups of Brunei trainee teachers of both genders taking psychology courses in English (117 students) and Malay (106 students). The extraversion scale had the most problematic items. Both administrations…

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish in English, in Anglophone centre journals. At the same time, research on professional academic writing indicates that scholars from outside Anglophone centre contexts face considerable obstacles in getting their academic work published in such journals, relating to material and…

This paper focuses on investigating the dialectic between global and local educational agendas in shaping curriculum transformations in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Curriculum transformations are seen as a way to respond to the challenges of promoting Education for All (EFA), but also reflect SSA traditions, social and economic changes. In this…

Relation between education and development has been recognized in Nepal since the beginning of planned development efforts and the modern schooling at mass level. Both were initiated during 1950s. Beginning of Development Studies in MPhil and PhD in Education in School of Education, Kathmandu University focused exploring such relationships in a…

The fields of comparative and international education have overlapping identities and are commonly paired. The overlap and pairing has been evident in the history of "Compare" as well as elsewhere. However, the indistinct nature of the boundaries can cause conceptual difficulties. Taking a historical perspective not only on "Compare" and its…

Development studies and comparative education have unusually wide terrains. Content analysis of selected journals reveals much that separates them, but areas of overlap are increasing. Unlike development studies, comparative education research remains mainly qualitative and is not mainly focussed upon low income countries. However,…

In the wake of the recent ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA) launch in 2010, this paper argues for the greater scholarly contribution of international development studies in the discourse of comparative education in East Asia. The argument is based on three premises. The first acknowledges the growing relations of East Asian countries to…