Education involves socialization so that individuals become productive members of society. At present, in the United States, educational transitions are primarily viewed in terms of their location in an outcomes-oriented process and framed as helping people achieve the American Dream, but in terms of the status quo national economic interest. But…

The aim of the Inter-Life Project was to investigate the use of virtual worlds and creative practices to support the acquisition of transition skills for young people to enhance their management of important life events. In particular, the authors have been investigating the role of the Inter-Life virtual worlds in supporting the development of…

Global teaching and learning for sustainable development reaches from the classroom to the world outside, and is therefore a particularly interesting setting for practising transition skills. The article suggests a number of features perceived as crucial in developing young people's capability to act in a changing world and under circumstances…

This article explores secondary school transitions from a comparative perspective. It focuses on a stage at which a major institutional transition takes place in two different educational systems. Over the years a number of international studies have explored different learning environments and their impact on student educational outcomes. Much of…

For many years there has been research on study abroad, student mobility and international student exchange; however in the last two decades the volume and scope of this work has increased significantly. There are now specific academic journals, a host of new books each year, expansive reports by international research organizations, and an…

There is no question that internationalization, and particularly international student mobility, has transformed the higher education landscape in the last decade. It has brought diverse benefits to students, institutions, communities and countries. But there are unanticipated outcomes and risks as well. The purpose of this article is look at the…

The Bologna Process is the newest of a chain of activities stimulated by supra-national actors since the 1950s to challenge national borders in higher education in Europe. Now, the ministers in charge of higher education of the individual European countries have agreed to promote a similar cycle-structure of study programmes and programmes based…

In the US academy, there is significant disciplinary variation in the extent to which graduate students are encouraged to or discouraged from studying abroad and doing fieldwork overseas. This article examines this issue, focusing on US graduate training in the social sciences and the extent to which students are discouraged from developing…

Drawing on the author's experience as a founder and editor of the first academic journal devoted to education abroad ("Frontiers: the interdisciplinary journal of education abroad"), and his work leading the first membership association devoted exclusively to education abroad (the Forum on Education Abroad), this article provides suggestions for…

While Southeast Asia as a region is generally poorly represented in scholarship on higher education, this is even more the case when considering Islamic higher education in the region. While patterns of mobility within the Islamic world are ancient, with mediaeval scholarly centres such as Baghdad, Cairo and Alexandria attracting scholars and…

Students who spend a period of time studying outside of their own national systems have a number of advantages in terms of developing a comparative perspective on education. The experience of living and studying abroad provides them with the opportunity to act as participant observers of at least two different systems, and the natural…

As a result of China's growing participation and importance in the process of internationalization and globalization a continuously rising number of Chinese students has gone abroad for further study. By the end of the last decade the number of Chinese students abroad made up the largest group of international students in the USA (surpassing those…

Demonstrating how international education programs can be used to study theoretical issues relevant to comparative education, this article reports on a scholarly analysis of 83 handover letters written by US participants in a volunteer program in Ecuador to their incoming counterparts between 2006 and 2010. It applies Swidler's notion of…

International migration between Japan and Brazil dates back to 1908, when the first group of Japanese migrated to Brazil. However, in the 1980s, a reverse flow occurred, as thousands of Brazilians of Japanese descent traveled to Japan to work in manufacturing and construction factories ("dekasegi" workers). Japanese Brazilians up until the third…

This article elaborates one approach to conceptualizing and investigating international processes of education policy formation (IPEPF), which are dynamic, multi-level and processual in nature. This contribution is important because, although research is increasingly conducted on phenomena with such characteristics, extended discussions of how…