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…

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,…

The logic behind international aid to development has typically centered on economics. Notwithstanding the variation in focus--from macroeconomic monetary and trade policies, to economic wealth programs aimed at creating jobs, to supply- and demand-side reforms--the central discourse on international aid has been dominated by a political…

In the introduction to his article, "Aid, Development, and Education," Klees (2010) poses the question, has the "hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid... loaned to [or otherwise targeted to "assist"] developing countries through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms... helped?" He then posits the question to be "too complicated to…

Recent works that assess whether development has been well-served, or served at all, by international aid, are overwhelmingly pessimistic in their assessment and in favor of the market as the antidote to international aid (Klees, 2010). The author finds that Steve Klees' essay focuses on the neoliberal and liberal frameworks that represent the…

In his article, "Aid, Development, and Education," Steve Klees tells two stories about foreign aid. The first is that foreign aid does not "work" to alleviate world poverty, no matter whether one takes a neo-Marxist or liberal approach to understanding it. Aid is more about self-interest and geopolitics than anything else--at best it is a form of…

While there are areas of disagreement in the responses to this author's earlier article [Klees, "Aid, Development, and Education," "Current Issues in Comparative Education," v13(1) 7-28 2010], he finds that the disagreements are much less important than the commonalities. He tries to detail both in this reply, but he focuses on how he and his…

In recent years scholars across the humanities and social sciences have revitalized the ancient concept of cosmopolitanism. Dale Snauwaert illuminates why this is so in his thoughtful article on what it might mean to educate for a shared humanity. Snauwaert shows why many people find so-called "realism" an unsatisfactory political and moral…

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…

Classroom practice in the real world has become increasingly incommensurate with the lived experience of students. Young people, consisting of all age cohorts and class fractions, have never known their world to not include the Internet. They have been utilizing this technology since before they started kindergarten, whether it was in games that…

Development of post-secondary curriculum in emerging interdisciplinary fields presents particular challenges in course design and resource utilization, especially when the field is interdisciplinary by nature of its inherent breadth. A new course at the University of Calgary, designed to introduce undergraduate students to the methods and…

This essay examines the evolution of cosmopolitanism in relation to the individual and the broader scope of society. Cosmopolitanism seeks to affect changes in cultural norms through the cultivation of self-awareness, identity, empowerment, and agency. Coupled with education, these powerful tools contribute to shaping a global society. Examining…

This author feels that how one views NGOs (non-government organizations) depends on one's perspective, and thus his reflections in this article focus more on extending his earlier analysis, rather than revising it. The author does this by considering three relatively recent developments, which in different ways have provoked him to keep wrestling…

Sustainability strategies are closely tied to the logic of the donor in every institution. Philanthropies that are set up with a limited time-span tend to scale up their impact differently. The educational programs of the Open Society Institute, for example, prioritize institutionalization over any other sustainability strategy. This is how it…

"Can NGOs provide alternative development in a market-based system of global economics?" Today, a full ten years after the author first asked this question, individuals still have only partial answers. There is no doubt that NGOs are playing in a more significant role in global ODA (overseas development assistance). While the reasons for supply of…