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After a decade of comparative and international education research, evaluation, reflection, and introspection, there still may not be a clear answer to the question: What difference does an Annual Review of Comparative and International Education make? Bereday’s questions regarding the field from the 1960s largely remain unanswered, and what answers there are remain relatively unchanged from the initial review of the field in 2013. In this reflective piece, the editor of the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education provides a retrospective look at what the Annual Review of the field has produced as well as what has not been accomplished over the first 10 years of the Annual Review’s publication. Key points are that (1) comparative and international education continues to be an affiliation-oriented rather than independent, well defined field of study and practice; (2) annual reflection on the field is meaningful even when the field seems resistant to change; and (3) comparative and international education scholars and professionals alike tend to under emphasize reflective scholarship and practice and over emphasize critique or critical commentary; (4) there is promise for the field related to unity, debate, clarification, understanding, and encouragement; (5) the field is persistently under-professionalized; (6) the state of the field is largely unchanged since the 1960s; and (7) the organization and content of the Annual Review itself – much like the field itself – is subject to reflection and change.

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.

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.

After a decade of comparative and international education research, evaluation, reflection, and introspection, there still may not be a clear answer to the question: What difference does an annual review of comparative and international education make? Bereday’s questions regarding the field from the 1960s largely remain unanswered and what answers there are remain relatively unchanged from the initial review of the field in 2013. In this reflective piece, the editor of the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education provides a retrospective look at what the Annual Review of the field has produced as well as what has not been accomplished over the first 10 years of the Annual Review’s publication. Key points are that (1) comparative and international education continues to be an affiliation-oriented rather than independent, well defined field of study and practice; (2) annual reflection on the field is meaningful even when the field seems resistant to change; (3) comparative and international education scholars and professionals alike tend to under emphasize reflective scholarship and practice and over emphasize critique or critical commentary; (4) there is promise for the field related to unity, debate, clarification, understanding, and encouragement; (5) the field is persistently under-professionalized; (6) the state of the field is largely unchanged since the 1960s; and (7) the organization and content of the Annual Review itself – much like the field itself – is subject to reflection and change.

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.

This chapter introduces readers to the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education and approaches to reviewing the field broadly, by examining the ways that scholars and professionals in the field reflect on comparative and international education (CIE). It begins with a synthesis of the reviews and reflective pieces published since the mid-20th century, and then critiques the field for being neither consistently nor systematically reflective. The chapter then summarizes several of the benefits of consistent and systematic reflection through a process of annual review. The chapter concludes with an overview and synthesis of each of the sections, which provide the structure of the Annual Review, and poses questions that drive systematic reflection through each section of the volume and the field as a whole.

Neo-institutional theory has provided a productive perspective on comparative and international education phenomena since the 1970s. Yet, recent critical discourse about educational phenomena investigated through a neo-institutional lens has been somewhat one-sided. The authors reexamine neo-institutional theory and its application to comparative and international education by demonstrating the ways that the theory frames both macro- and micro-level educational phenomena. The ability to shift the discourse about neo-institutional theory from a largely macro-level framework to one capable of investigating educational changes occurring at the micro level is vital to understanding the comprehensiveness of national educational systems and the ways that both world culture and individual agency contribute to these systems. Specifically, using the empirical application of neo-institutional theory to the intersection of information and communication technology (ICT) and internationally comparative educational data, the macro and micro levels of educational phenomena can be productively examined. In so doing, this chapter shifts the discourse on how and why neo-institutional theory reflects cross-national educational trends and micro-contextual effects on education worldwide.

This chapter synthesizes the key themes and issues from across the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2013, and reflects on how the input from the regional society presidents and representatives was developed in each section of the review. Ways to think about making the Annual Review a reflective process for the field as a whole, and to engender input from all corners of the global comparative and international education community are suggested as well.

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.