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…

The last three decades has witnessed a burgeoning comparative education as a field of study in Asia. In China comparative education has taken a phenomenal course from a small and relatively low-key field in search of an identity in the late 1970s to a vibrant one today with a sizable group of scholars across the country, seeking to integrate…

Over the past decade, international development agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than simply quantity) of education in developing countries. This new focus has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality. As this interest in…

This study focuses on girl college students in a rural area of South West Bangladesh exploring the meaning and value they give to higher secondary education. By listening to their voices, the ethnography shows that unlike their younger counterparts, who stop studying in order to get married, girls who enrol at college develop more complex and…

Schooling is not a benign process, rather the choice of schooling is often an opportunity for marginalised groups to creatively express particular sets of values in an attempt to gain distinction. Educational attainments carry the potential to open up a range of employment opportunities, but even if these options fail due to structural…

This article critically reflects upon the "divides" among actors within two currently popular education policies in low-income countries: decentralisation and Universal Primary Education (UPE). Current literatures suggest that the existing decentralisation framework tends to overlook the "divides" among actors that often impede the implementation…

This paper views seeking the optimal balance between state strengths and the scope of state functions for "good governance" as the formation of a homogenization-heterogenization matrix of policy initiatives in different social settings. Homogenization refers to a global tendency for institutional changes and governance framework to change state…

This article presents findings from an Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) study on the roles of education in the trajectories of health care professionals who migrated to England and became carers. The study looks at the downward mobility and deskilling of these women, and their struggles to reverse their bungled career paths. The author maps…

This paper discusses the background and key findings of a two-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded mixed-method research project (2006-2008) which was designed, within the context of university internationalisation, to provide an investigation of the experiences of first-year international students during their undergraduate…

As a result of chronic poverty many people in South Asia experience poor quality schooling, interrupted schooling, or no schooling at all. People affected by poverty face multiple constraints on wellbeing, which typically include informal employment, low wages and poor health. In such contexts the benefits and, more specifically, the "returns" to…

This paper considers how academic supervision and support by educational authorities help improve the teaching-learning process and the professional development of teachers in government and private-aided senior secondary schools. To date the research into this field in India has tended to focus on the mechanics of supervision. A comparative study…

With the rise of network society, consumerism, individualization, globalization and contemporary change forces, students are pressured to both perform well in standardized academic assessments while at the same time constructing a non-standard, unique project of the self. I argue that this generates a particular set of place-based tensions for…