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…

This article enters into contemporary debates regarding methodology and training in comparative and international education by addressing epistemological questions about "what" can be known of the world and how it can be known through comparative research. We contend that debates over qualitative versus quantitative methods or area studies versus…