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Precise and rigorous international comparative research requires methodological reflections and determinations at each step of the empirical research process. This chapter analyzes the precision and rigor of international comparative higher education research by diagnosing their comparative methodology, particularly their country selection and case sampling. It evaluates 202 studies that have been published in journals of both higher education and comparative education, because international comparative higher education intellectually and institutionally intersects both interdisciplinary fields. The major empirical findings show a relative lack of explicit and elaborate justification strategies, as well as a lack of comparative methodology. But they also show that the intellectual and institutional context, represented here in the form of the journals, influences the implementation of comparative methodology. The use of comparative methodologies is more thorough in the context of comparative education, where a continuous debate about the theoretical and methodological aspects of comparative studies takes place. One of the implications of the study is that the debate regarding comparative methodologies within higher education research should be intensified.

This chapter discusses the nature of International and Comparative Education in East and South East Asia through the different organizations, networks, and programs formed to cater to the field. It gives an overview of the existing networks in international and comparative education, related activities, and studies instituted to strengthen the field in the region. Given the more developed network in East Asia, this chapter also highlights the increasing importance of international and comparative education in South East Asia, through the broader base of objectives also defined in the Association of South East Asian Nation (ASEAN) Economic Community (AEC) of 2015. Opportunities and policy reorientations (in education) set to present and utilize the field in both regions are also examined.

The Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (ARCIE) represents a forum and an opportunity for scholars worldwide to discuss and examine trends and directions in comparative/international education, highlighting relevant developments in these fields, related to educational contexts, climates, and reforms in these contexts. Changes and reforms within these contexts and areas can have significant impacts on various education stakeholders, agents, and societies. Given the need to identify and prepare for these changes, the objective of this chapter is to discuss recent trends and directions in the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE). The method employed to identify these trends was a meta-analysis of the 23 chapters published in the 2020 edition of ARCIE. The 23 chapters composed the corpus of texts analyzed in this study, with the support of an online platform for corpora processing. Results of the analysis were contrasted with relevant literature in the field and suggest that (among the three main missions of universities) teaching and research received more attention than outreach/services, considering the corpus analyzed. In addition, teachers and students received more attention than administrative staff. Therefore, we conclude that more attention is necessary toward these aspects (outreach and administrative staff) in the pursuit of social justice and UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Finally, the prevalence of topics related to language and sustainability suggests a need for more representativeness, in terms of regions and languages studied in the field of CIE.

Osmosis is the movement of particles across a boundary until the saturation of particles has been equalized on both sides of the boundary. Although this term is most often used in biology, it is a relevant metaphor for comparative and international education (CIE), as the boundaries which define the field are permeable, with few limitations on what is and is not considered CIE. Previous introductory chapters to the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education have examined the professionalization of the field through the characteristics of articles published in prominent CIE journals. While drawing on a similar framework, this chapter, rather than examining CIE from the inside, examines the development of the field from the outside by considering what, where, and why CIE-related articles appear in journals outside of the field. In addition to data on articles from CIE journals for 2017, education-related articles from domestic and international journals with the highest impact factor from the fields of sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, and education are also included. These components will provide multiple points of comparison and discussion to examine how non-CIE journals include CIE related topics to identify which themes permeate the CIE boundary.

In this chapter, we reflect on how we frame our research on international scholarship programs within the field of comparative and international education and identify perspectives that influence our research. We also briefly describe the theories that shape our research: human capital theory and sociological perspectives that emphasize the centrality of context. We discuss emerging research on international scholarship programs and identify fruitful future directions for comparative and international research on higher education.

This chapter aims to define comparative and international higher education (CIHE), describe its orientation and application, and reflect on research trends of the past five years. Research trends were identified through the review of panel sessions of the Higher Education Special Interest Group at the Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society between 2014 and 2018. These trends include a greater focus on equity, access, and affordability; competition, rankings, and status; partnerships (e.g., international and public–private); regional integration and mobility; and a continued interest in quality and accountability as well as understanding the internationalization at the institutional and system levels. This chapter suggests explanations for these trends, which relate closely to impacts of growing competition for funding in higher education and growing inequities in the world system of higher education. Lastly, it offers recommendations for how CIHE researchers can engage with practitioners to further address these inequities.

This chapter presents the development of Comparative Education in the most representative countries for this discipline in Western Europe, taking into account the diachronic evolution (since the first texts of Jullien de Paris in 1718 or the written work of Sadler in 1900) and the synchronicity of the discipline from which our patterns of committed intellectual activism have been perceived and have consequently allowed the regulation of its current mapping.

Special reference will be given to some of the classic and renewed dilemmas that have prevailed over the decades as cross-cutting themes of interest for specialists in Comparative Education with issues related to denomination, its purposes of ideographic or nomothetic nature, its sometimes problematic entailment with International Education, the significance of the lending and transferring policies in the current scenarios or the present increasing globalization phenomenon in our educational reality, among others.

The chapter also aims at recognizing the possibilities and, at the same time, the limitations currently faced by “Comparative Educations” in Cowen´s words, through working effectively with the most idiosyncratic signs of identity in the discourse and its most immediate future projection in the coming years.

We focus our article on the reasons that support the importance of the discipline: the global evolution of the current supranational scenarios from a social, economic or cultural perspective; the state of education since the contribution of educational policies or the situation of higher education in the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that, among other aspects, mark the good stage through which the analyzed discipline is experiencing.

Finally, the ratification of this statement is complemented by the firm consolidation of Comparative Education in the European context, giving reference not only to the articulation of its own associations or societies created but also to the journals emerged from them, with a notable impact on the rest of the world and their special contribution to the dissemination of the purposes of the discipline related to the generation and diffusion of policies and practices from a comparative view.

In this chapter, the authors analyze the academic field of comparative education in Spanish speaking Latin America as a contested construction both in epistemological and political dimensions. First, the authors provide a brief historical account of the origin and development of comparative education in the region since the nineteenth century. Next, they focus on the current state of the field by addressing three aspects: (1) the institutional basis, specially the development of comparative education societies; (2) an account of the contributions of international organizations, both in terms of studies that have been recently conducted and of the development of data bases; and (3) an analysis of prevailing topics as well as theoretical and methodological approaches in a sample of articles published during the 2010-2017 period. The authors conclude by summarizing the main aspects of the current situation, and pointing to future epistemological and political challenges for the field in the region.

Over the past 65 years, Sub-Saharan Africa has been the terrain of the biggest education expansion drive in human history (Wolhuter & Van Niekerk, 2009). On top of this expansion, Africa has been the site of imaginative experiments and innovations in education (Samoff & Carrol, 2013, p. 403). These all seem to offer attractive and fertile ground for Comparative and International Education scholarship to flourish. This chapter surveys the historical development and current presence of various facets of the scholarly field of Comparative and International Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ultimate aim is to chart a future course for the field in the context of the meteoric rise (economically, demographically, and politically) of the continent. To commence with, an overview of this context is first given. Subsequently the history of formal education and then of higher education in the region are sketched. The evolution and current state of Comparative and International Education within this context is then surveyed, concluding with a reflection on its future prospects and course.