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…

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,…

Drawing upon recent work for the Commonwealth Secretariat and our ongoing comparative research, this article focuses upon the nature, impact and implications of contemporary development challenges for education in small states. It is argued that the post-Jomtien era has been dominated by international goals and targets that have focussed…

This article analyses the institutional power of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the process of education policy formation in El Salvador during 2003-2005. The results show how bi- and multi-lateral institutions are able to leverage financial and intellectual capital to guide the policymaking process and sway…

As a springboard into her response inspired by Noah Sobe's article, this author offers two possibilities for what cosmopolitanisms can tell about comparative and international education research. First, from her perspective, rooted in justice and peace studies, she is intrigued by several authors' assessments of cosmopolitanism as a cognitive or…

This article proposes that for scholars in comparative and international education the study of "cosmpolitanisms" offers a productive avenue for thinking outside of the traditional paradigms of area studies and for understanding the new world-generating optics and multi-layered geographies that appear to be emerging with globalization. The piece…

Cosmopolitan and global discourses are more and more often used for conceptualization and interpretation of citizenship. However, in the United States, the majority of schools are still resistant to incorporating cosmopolitan and global perspectives into citizenship education curriculum. This paper addresses challenges of cosmopolitan and global…

This paper begins by connecting cosmopolitanism to notions of universal and particular knowledge in contemporary conditions. Drawing on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, we then outline a world-systems approach to knowledge. This approach focuses on the capacity of epistemological structures to either reinforce existing inequalities or produce…