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The chapter will address comparative teacher preparation programs for teachers who wish to teach in inclusive settings, including those in the United States and People’s Republic of China. Consideration will be given to developing course objectives and outcomes for teacher preparation programs through the alignment of teacher standards and content standards. Further, discussion will review assessing pre-service teacher candidates for inclusive settings. It will conclude with recommendations for inclusive teacher preparation programs.

Many researchers and practitioners in the field of comparative and international education (CIE) also work as educators, teaching CIE courses to cadres of students across various levels. In teaching these courses, CIE educators play a significant role in shaping the field’s future: the perspectives they privilege and the pedagogies they utilize arguably leave lasting impressions on students, who themselves go on to become teachers, researchers, policymakers, international development practitioners, and more. However, scant attention has been paid to the teaching of CIE. This chapter explores the possibilities and potential benefits of linking the teaching of CIE more deeply with both the emerging scholarship on it and the current debates and dilemmas with which the Comparative and International Education Society and CIE journals have engaged in the past few years such as decolonizing development and education. The chapter raises questions about the future of teaching CIE and concludes with a renewed call for additional research on the scholarship of teaching CIE.

In recent years, the field of comparative and international education (CIE) has experienced an outburst of self-reflective papers wherein comparativists study the nature of the field and map its content. This study contributes to this trend by drawing attention to a previously unstudied aspect of CIE: its purpose. Using Arnove’s dimensions as a starting point to create five new purpose categories, four prominent CIE journals are surveyed to test whether the pragmatic history of CIE is evident in its current body of research. In this process, a complete and clear genetic mapping of the journals is created, which explores their similarities and differences, as well as the changes in their content over time. Findings indicate that the pragmatic purpose of CIE dominates, though it is primarily emancipatory and transformative in its prescription. Furthermore, articles rooted in specific situational contexts were more prominent than expected considering the comparative and international nature of the field.

In this chapter, I will first describe the field of comparative education in Italy, especially in terms of teaching. I will then describe the topics of interest for comparative education research in 2015. In Italy, not all comparative education studies are singled out as such (Palomba, 2011): some of them formally belong to other areas of educational research. Because of this, it is difficult to draw a topography of what is being done in comparative education. I will rather point at transversal and relevant topics concerning education and Italian society and policy, which are potential subjects for comparative research, today and in the near future. I will close the chapter by describing the activities of the Italian Comparative Education Society (SICESE) and the initiatives they have undertaken to gather in a more cohesive, homogeneous academic space, the researchers who, under heterogeneous labels, de facto, are doing comparative education research in Italy.

This chapter examines the usefulness of the field of comparative and international education (CIE) in reference to supporting and informing the development of education in the Pacific Islands (Oceania) region. Accordingly, it reconsiders the conceptualization and practice of the field by unpacking understandings of CIE with specific reference to the Pacific Islands. I argue that advancing the field in Oceania entails critical examination of context, of persisting colonial legacies in education and the broader social, economic, and political landscape. Considerations of these discourses identify some of the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences that eventuate as “education for national development” is reconciled with indigenous knowledges and the intellectual traditions that sustain Pacific island communities. Adopting a postcolonial perspective, this chapter explores recent educational initiatives in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Solomon Islands. These initiatives reveal the complexities and multifaceted dynamics that underpin the context of Pacific Islands systems of education. They also reflect how Pacific educational leaders negotiate global imperatives for education while observing indigenous knowledge systems and cultural values. The lessons drawn from these case studies suggest that comparative education scholars need to rethink partnerships with colleagues and neighbors in consideration of Pacific and indigenous (including Australia and New Zealand) cultural protocols of engagement by honoring respect and reciprocity, mutual benefit, and empowerment. Such conceptual and practical reconsiderations may facilitate an assessment of the impact of western intellectual contributions on systems of education in Oceania.

In this chapter, the authors provide a historical overview of the development of comparative and international education societies throughout the earth. In most cases, these societies have gradually grown and continue to thrive; in other cases, some comparative education societies have become dormant and a few no longer exist. A historical analysis that outlines the rise and fall of comparative education societies is provided. An overview of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies is also discussed, including its lead organizational role in serving as a historical hub to help comparative education societies preserve and disseminate their respective histories. The chapter concludes with suggestions on how anyone can get involved to help contribute to the history preservation of comparative education at the individual, national, regional, and global levels.

This discussion essay explores trends and issues in the teaching of comparative education. We argue that the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) must give more attention to the aspect of teaching, as comparative education courses are increasingly being affected by diminishing devotion to social foundations of education programming in many institutions of higher education and schools. Ironically, despite growing pluralism, the rise of economic utilitarianism has led to technicist-driven curriculum and less inquiry about philosophical, historical, and cultural assumptions underlying educational policy and practice. Another challenge in the teaching of comparative education is that students are often ill-prepared to understand and utilize the most basic social science concepts. Recognizing that teaching and research in CIE are inevitably linked, it is argued that a transformational model that advances CIE across disciplines, schools, and departments may reinforce its importance and ensure that the benefits that comparative inquiry affords – namely critical reflexivity, insight about school–society relationships, and possibilities for educational improvement – are addressed and safeguarded in tertiary and teacher education. An understanding of cultural and national contexts is important to educational reform and enables educators to view globalization in terms of how it benefits or undermines humanistic aims, namely the importance of individuals and the uniqueness of cultures.

This chapter aims to reconstruct the trajectory of comparative education in Brazil using the timeline concept to identify structural elements in the emergence and reconfiguration of this field of study. The timeline historical perspective allows us to use two additional features: (a) the reconstruction of the scenario in which emerge the intellectual productions; and simultaneously (b) identify how themes, issues, and research objects appears, whether in a homogeneous association or not. These elements allow us to associate comparative and historical methods to recognize the supranational and supraregional influence, determining the configuration of what is meant by comparative education in Brazil. The text distinguishes seven different moments for the Brazilian comparative educational area, which are: (1) the study of the structure and functioning of European and North American systems education; (2) the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) pioneering influence on the production of annuals; (3) the prioritization of educational practices; (4) the influence of supranational relations; (5) the focus on educational public policies; (6) new cycle of supranational influence; and (7) (re)definition of the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological anchorage of comparative education. In the last quarter century, it can be said that there is a resurgence of Comparative Education in Brazil and the region, which may be associated with strong historical influences, here reconstructed by periodization.