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This opening chapter sets a frame for the chapters of this volume, dealing with how the dynamic dialectic interplay between forceful global societal forces and context shape humanity’s education response in various parts of the world. “Context” as a perennial threshold concept in Comparative and International Education is explicated. It will then be explained how, during its long historical evolution, scholars in the field each time had to contend new contexts, or reconceived the notion of “context” in a new way. Subsequently the problems of an overly fixation on the historical and the present, to the detriment of the future, and inertia are extant in the field, will be explained. The unprecedented, seismic changes currently impacting on the societal context worldwide, will then be enumerated. These changes can be subsumed under the collective name of globalization. The concept globalization is then clarified, and the take of the scholarly community on the impact of globalization on education is then mapped and interrogated. The authors’ stance on this is stated, namely that a dynamic interplay between global focus and contextual realities shape education in various parts of the world. It is in this theoretical frame that the remainder of the chapters of the volume is presented, combing out the main features of education development in each part of the world, as a dialectic between global forces and contextual imperatives.

From well before the mid-19th up to the mid-20th century those scholars who read and commented on The Essential Principles of the Wealth of Nations, including Marx and Seligman, seem to have been unaware of the very name of its author. Since then it has become accepted knowledge (again) that the work was written by one John Gray. Beyond the name, however, biographical details about Gray have remained extremely sparse until the present day. If one were to use a measure of obscurity, something which perhaps is appropriate in a work devoted to ‘neglected economists’, then one may use the fact that neither the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (old or new editions), nor the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (any edition), nor any other biographical dictionaries devote an entry to Gray. The modern authors who discuss his economic writings contend themselves with the statement that ‘little biographical information is available about Gray’ (Delmas & Demals, 1995, p. 119, n. 5).¹ This is unfortunate because at least some knowledge about the personal background and career of an author is often useful in arriving at a better understanding of his or her ideas. This, as will become clear shortly, is the case too for John Gray.

This paper argues that the revolution in intellectual property rights is not forward-looking, but backward looking, and that it is not consonant with the purposes of the patent and copyright clause. It is animated by the theory of common law copyright, which deliberately reconceptualizes social relations in order to recast them as property, and which has been with us for centuries. This paper investigates the “mythology of common law copyright,” showing how this reconceptualization has worked both historically and in the present day to push the law in a direction that is ostensibly author-centered, but is actually focused on the rights of intermediaries.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

In this chapter, the author builds from foundational scholarship which suggests that service-learning yields positive outcomes for students, faculty, and community partners. The author first suggests that service-learning can be a vehicle for humanizing community partners as well as students, faculty, and course content, then describes a program evaluation context wherein community partners would benefit from a humanizing service-learning experience. The author then introduces the field of program evaluation and the foundational documents espoused by the American Evaluation Association, and looks at the organizational structure of the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, which houses the Evaluation Studies specialization. Next, the author presents a foundational program evaluation course, discussing its emphasis on service-learning and on humanizing the students, community partners, and course content, and introducing the textbooks, readings, and activities used to bring the experience to life. The author concludes by looking at opportunities and challenges to integrating program evaluation into a departmental core at other universities.

Educators strive to develop and implement high impact educational experiences, which are critical to ensuring university courses and curricula serve as memorable and transferable learning experiences for students. It is not clear, however, which experiences are exceptional from a student perspective, or what kinds of illustrative examples exist in applied disciplines. In this chapter, we ground our discussion of high impact educational experiences in the field of program evaluation, contextualize it as organized at the University of Minnesota, describe three experiences that have been repeatedly described as impactful by students, and engage in a collective dialogue as teachers and learners.