The article offers an interpretation of comparative education as an episteme that is entangled with international relations. It does so by seeking to extract past and present forms and patterns of comparative educational thought and action from the three main traditions of international relations, namely: realism, rationalism and revolutionism. It…

Mixed methods research (MMR) has been increasingly used in comparative and international education (CIE), but there is less scholarship that discusses the philosophical and methodological bases for such research. This article argues that much research in CIE assumes an ontologically complex and contingent reality and an interdisciplinary and…

Soviet higher education had a distinctive institutional landscape. It combined two institutional types in a uniform model that embedded higher education in the national economy. This paper focuses on the post-Soviet system-level changes in the institutional landscape in all 15 countries of the former USSR. It shows that over last three decades the…

In response to global competition in higher education, university rankings have been developed. These have been interpreted as indicating the regions and countries with the most prestigious and competitive higher education institutions. The rankings are viewed as important in many countries, but their role is ambiguous and contested in the Nordic…

The status of women in academia, including comparative education, has grown rapidly. We build on the extensive literature on women's work in the academy by investigating the macrohistorical cultural processes that promote expanded emphasis on feminist, gender, sex, and sexuality (FGSS) topics in comparative education. We use computational methods…

Conventional approaches to ethics in comparative and international educational research often entail researchers seeking institutional ethics approval; attempting to manage fieldwork's practical ethical dilemmas using institutional and disciplinary protocols; and 'writing up' methodology, primarily an account of the institutional ethics approval…

This article explores the concept of Student Affairs and Services (SAS) as a global profession, how it is positioned and positions itself in the context of what it means to be a profession and reflects on the ways in which SAS has and can professionalize. The literature related to professionalization is presented along with a discussion of the…

This article argues that contemporary education policies promoted by UNESCO and the OECD are embracing two distinct post-humanist visions, which I call the 'sustainable futures' and the 'techno-solutionist' strand. I will relate these strands to two conflicting agendas of education after World War II: the humanistic-emancipatory perspective…

The Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) system in New York State (NYS) has been called into question by educators since its adoption nearly 10 years ago, yet it remains the mandated evaluation system in NYS schools today. Much of the concern has been over changes such as assigning teachers final evaluation scores, as well as for the…

Outside of a specialist literature, the study of violence occupies a marginal position within comparative and international education scholarship. A key contributing factor is the absence of a holistic conceptual framework that can capture the nature, extent and causes of violence in education. The article proposes such a framework, by updating…

This article provides an overview of the politics of education as they affect regions and communities on the periphery of the People's Republic of China. Drawing on the articles in this special issue of Comparative Education, it analyses tensions related to the attempted imposition of Bejing's homogenising and totalising vision of Chineseness…

Colleges are important providers of vocational education and training and in some countries they are the major provider. Although the international literature on colleges has grown considerably in the past two decades, it still consists primarily of qualitative descriptions of college sectors in different countries. Quantitative studies of…

In comparative education, words like 'culture' and 'foreign' are used often early on to determine issues, but they soon become subjected to individual national contexts. The world is then professionally sliced into bits of 'area expertise'. Wonderment at the multiple cultures of the world diminishes. In the post-war reconstruction period…

Teaching the properties of geometric shapes in traditional ways does not help children to understand them, nor does it enable them to visualize them. It may need methods that correspond to the characteristics and tendencies of children and more interesting methods based on fun learning. Designing 3D geometric shapes with children through pop-up…

For activists, scholars, and thinkers, the current state of our hyperpolitical global landscape can be daunting, especially as we consider engaging and responding to the growing political vitriol and hyperbole of our times. Over the past few years, I have wondered a great deal about how to sustain idealism during troubled times in a field such as…