International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

In France, the notion of competence began to be discussed in the early 1990s and was finally enforced in the Education Act of 23 April 2005. Since its emergence, this notion has been strongly opposed by a certain number of teachers, unions and researchers. To understand how competence-based education finally prevailed, I take into account the…

This article aims to show the value of the concept of policy trajectory to compare, from a long-term perspective, the transformations of education policies in the context of globalisation. After discussing the scope and limitations of the analyses of the concept in the literature -- descriptive, sequential, metaphorical and building on the works…

This article explores the idea that effective education policymaking necessitates an improved understanding of how students, as micro-scale actors, position themselves in operational terms in the globalised context. The article introduces the concept of perceived operational space as an analytical and methodological perspective to support this…