Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021: Volume 42A

This chapter provides an examination of the characteristics of comparative and international education research published in 2020 as well as an overview of the trends in this research since 2014. This analysis of published research includes a special focus on authors situated in the Global South as well as those authors who are affiliated with organizations outside of academic (i.e., professional, non-teaching organizations). These two focus characteristics reflect the shifting composition of authors and research in comparative and international education in the twenty-first century as well as the professionalization aspirations of the field of comparative and international education more broadly. Evidence from the seven years of data collection suggests that there is a marked shift toward increasingly more co-authored research, a shift from predominantly qualitative methods to non-empirical research content, and a rise in topic oriented research over the otherwise dominant single-country study in comparative and international education research.

Germany has become the most important destination country for young refugees in Europe (Destatis, 2021). Vocational education and training can make an important contribution to overcome educational barriers and gain participation in society (Will & Hohmut, 2020). Since 2015, rural regions have faced new challenges in establishing effective support systems for young apprentices with forced migration experience (Ohliger et al., 2017). The participatory LaeneAs research project seeks to identify educational barriers and to promote successful educational pathways for young refugees in vocational training. In four distinct rural areas in Germany, stakeholders in formal, non-formal, and informal learning environments and young refugees will be brought together in real-world laboratories. The authors aim to open space for a co-constructive knowledge production process between scientific and political stakeholders, educational practitioners, and refugee youth. Real-world laboratories are a socio-spatial methodology that combines research and a sustainable capacity building process. The lifeworld expertise will be used for a contextual condition analysis of structural, societal, and individual barriers to education as well as for practice transfer. Building on the discussion of the current state of research and the identification of significant gaps in the practice and research landscape, this essay will focus on the critical discussion of the methodological implementation of the study.

This discussion essay explores the theory–practice nexus in comparative and international education (CIE) from the author’s role as a third space professional and a budding academic-practitioner (Wilson, 1994) providing academic support to offshore international students at a New Zealand university. It engages with two debates related to the research–practice conundrum in CIE: The first debate relates to the boundaries between CIE and raise questions about the identities of theorists and practitioners in CIE. The author argues that regardless of their identities, implicit theories about why things happened and how things will change in the future are often held by practitioners and theorists alike. The second debate relates to the knowledge hierarchy in CIE and raise questions about who decides the value and utility of the kinds of knowledge produced. Drawing on the politics of knowledge production, the author highlights that it may be the implicit theories held by the theorists or practitioners that ultimately determine the knowledge they saw as useful and valuable.

In this discussion essay, characteristics of the provision of formal and non-formal education for refugee children in Greece will be explored through a comparative approach. The comparison reveals aspects of the social environments in the lives of refugee children. These will be examined through the lens of Uri Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1986) ecological systems theory as a means to understand the context of refugee children’s lives and also propose a more holistic approach to refugee education.

This essay explores how women scholars grapple with gender and racial inequality during a syndemic. Using a culturally comparative lens, two mother-scholars, one Afro-Boricua who identifies as Black and the other Thai who identifies as Asian, examine this topic through a comparative international womanist theoretical framework. This discussion provides a brief overview of the challenges faculty women of color have faced around the world in contemporary history. It also interrogates how the professional identities of these scholars inform their teaching, scholarship, and personal lives during a period fraught with anti-Blackness and anti-Asian hostility, gender bias, familial demands, and heightened fear and isolation. Through counter-narratives, their lived experiences are placed into a global context and insightful comparisons spotlight specific challenges that uniquely converge for women of color in the academy. This analytical discussion reflects trends in the field of comparative education by examining the impact of gender and racial discrimination on women scholars of color within political, economic, social, and cultural landscapes.

The authors write as three education practitioner-researchers with different disciplinary and professional backgrounds and locations, and who met through their involvement in comparative and international education (CIE). The authors’ connections with each other, and with CIE, have grown through their engagement with their regional society, Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES). This engagement has spanned the transition of the society from the Australia and New Zealand CIES (ANZCIES) to a more regionally representative identity. In this discussion paper, the authors set out to trace intersections of personal, shared, and collective “becomings” as CIE practitioner-researchers, through vignettes over the arc of these past seven years since their first meetings. The authors connect their observations and reflections about annual conference locations and themes visited during this period of accelerated decolonization of OCIES, through topics salient in contemporary CIE and wider debates: identification, identities, and positioning, including ethnic, gendered, and racial dimensions and discriminations, as markers of identification. The authors engage with concepts of decolonization, foreign-ness, and insider/outsider/neither formulations. Discussion reflects on their coming to know each other, CIE, theirselves, and their praxis. Among and around these spatial and temporal locations, the authors situate observations and reflections that have variously influenced, marked, and spanned their early career relationships and sharing, with reference to global and regional CIE works. These reflections accompany their own published, and fresh, perspectives in this sense-making and sharing of their discussions, ongoing, with CIE readers as a wider audience (Fonua, 2021; McCormick, 2017; Shah et al., 2017; Spratt & Coxon, 2020).

In this discussion essay, the authors examine the development and implementation of the mitigation policy and practices that shaped Cairo American College’s (CAC) reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic. An international school located in Cairo, Egypt, CAC was the first and only school in Egypt and much of the Middle East to reopen in August 2020. This essay discusses stakeholders, policies, and practices that shaped the reopening process from utilizing research and data from leading international health organizations to working within the local community and the Government of Egypt’s COVID-19 mandates. Successes and challenges of this process are discussed with a focus on the importance of research-to-practice in policy development as well as collaborating with international schools in the region and beyond as a comparative model for other schools. Ensuring trust and buy-in from parents, faculty, and staff was paramount to the successful implementation and continuation of the reopening process. Research played a foundational role in creating and maintaining this trust amid the lack of comparable school reopenings. Recommendations for a safe and effective reopening plan are provided along with the necessary role of all stakeholders for its success including leadership, teachers, and the community.

In response to COVID-19 global outbreaks, Canada, and Australia, two favored destinations by international students, as the contexts of this essay, have enacted different international education policies, which will be investigated through the narratives. The authors discuss transnationality and mobility as key terms in the internationalization of higher education (HE) studies through their experiences as three Vietnamese doctoral students in Canada and Australia. Transnationality is attended through a narrative of a Vietnamese returnee struggling with bringing unfamiliar knowledge of gender and sex education from the West into a Vietnamese HE context. Mobility is unpacked through stories of a Vietnamese doctoral student in Canada stuck in Vietnam due to the COVID-19 despite inviting policies from the Canadian government to international students. This experience is connected to another Vietnamese student’s experience in Australia about a controversial act to discourage international students from staying in Australia if they cannot support themselves during the pandemic. The authors’ stories are created and retold personally for introspective and contemplative reflections on what the authors have experienced and offer considerations for how transnationality and mobility in international and comparative education could be understood through education, equity, and inclusion.

The aim of this essay is to contribute to the international discussion on the consequences of the pandemic in education. This essay focuses on the case of school education (ISCED 1–3) in the Czech Republic, where a complete, long-term, nationwide school closure was implemented. Schools faced an unprecedented situation and rapidly changing teaching practices. First, the Czech context is briefly introduced with a description of the year-long anti-pandemic measures. A critical reflection of school experiences during the pandemic follows, mainly focused on the roles and activities of main actors, teachers, parents, and students in distance education. Changes in the forms, methods, and contents of teaching and learning are reflected, as is the role of governmental policy toward schools. Further economic consequences and impacts of the anti-pandemic measures on the health of the Czech school population are pointed out. Following a review of the main shifts in schooling, the concluding considerations discuss challenges for the future and possible inspiration from on-line education for the further development of school education. The essay is based on data from monitoring and thematic reports, national surveys, public discussions, and continuous observations made by the author during the course of the pandemic.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a fast-moving pandemic that has brought about calamities and challenges to the human world. In the field of international higher education (IHE), it problematizes and challenges the operation of neo-liberal mentalities and rationales, while generating disruptions and impediments to the flows of globalization. Drawing upon extant research on IHE across spatial and cultural contexts, this essay aims to: (1) unravel the deficiencies of neo-liberal mentalities and rationales in coping with the challenges of COVID-19 to IHE; (2) assess the impacts of COVID-19 on the developments of globalization and internationalization of higher education with particular focus on the complications therein; and (3) explore the possible spill-over effects on and implications for the re-positioning of IHE in the post-COVID-19 era. Albeit the negative impacts of COVID-19 may not last, its spill-over effects are bound to cast a long shadow over IHE’s future development. This essay explores how IHE can persist in spite of deficiencies in neo-liberalism and fluidity in globalization.

Recent findings show that racism, as defined by biased attitudes toward blacks or members of other minority groups, has declined, at least in the USA. Concomitantly, school achievement differentials by race are less likely to be attributed to genetically inherited capabilities. Yet, despite this decline in racist attitudes, protests against racism have reached unprecedented levels. The reason for this paradox is that while racist attitudes have diminished, income and social inequality have not, and, indeed, have actually increased. Consequently, underlying racial grievances are aimed at inequality far more than racism. The key to understanding this paradox of rising inequality in the face of declining racism lies in the fact that inequality is structural, ingrained in social and economic institutions, schools in particular. In most countries, schools give wealthier children an unfair advantage, thus exacerbating inequalities rather than providing an equal opportunity to succeed on the basis of merit alone. Several countries have addressed this dilemma by providing tuition vouchers and scholarships to poorer students, allowing parents greater resources with which to choose better schools for their children. This policy of expanding school choice generally seems to be effective in addressing racial disparities.

The COVID-19 pandemic is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime emergency. While it seems that the end is nigh, there is also a renewed talk of the looming fourth wave spurred by the mutated Delta, Delta+, and other variants. The pandemic has made several fault lines visible in almost all societies. These include but are not limited to the tentativeness of our knowledge (especially science), the precariousness of our health systems, and failings of the educational systems, particularly citizenship education. While the COVID-19 pandemic will be long remembered as the health crisis of our times; we contend that the pandemic is also an educational crisis. Results of neoliberal neglect of citizenship-related education are now apparent in form of unethical, unjust, racist, and socially irresponsible attitudes and behaviors of individuals, collectives, and states. At the individual level, these are obvious in the irresponsible behaviors that endanger the lives of fellow citizens. At the community level, the failure of citizenship education is evident in vaccination inequality both within and between societies. Finally, at the level of international community, one can see vaccination nationalism, and politically and economically motivated vaccination diplomacy as markers of unethical citizenship.

In this piece, the author invokes Beck’s (1997) conception of “zombie categories” to discuss how the virus of neoliberalism has infected ideas and key actors within a highly stratified teaching community in Malaysia. Drawing from the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the author employs a zombie metaphor as a heuristic to trace the stages of a neoliberal apocalypse. The author first considers how neoliberal ideologies have mutated into a new strain of virus that have infiltrated the teaching landscape by comparing teachers employed by the Ministry of Education against teachers who have been recruited by Teach For Malaysia in the public schooling system. The author then explores how sources of zombification have contaminated actors using governmentality (Foucault, 1991) through intensification, corporatization, marketization, metricization, and performativity. This is followed by an attempt to construct a survival response to the apocalypse by suggesting how specific neoliberal competencies are coveted and the implications behind it. Finally, the author outlines how the forces of neoliberalism engender a crisis in education that mirrors a zombie culture of breeding a contagion that could widen existing educational inequalities and inequities. The author concludes by offering a tentative containment plan that considers existing alongside this neoliberal virus that refuses to die.

This chapter reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan. The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonization in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonization discourse. The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonization of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.

Turkey has been hosting the largest Syrian refugee migration in the world since 2011, which has necessitated a continuous change in state-level measures to cater for the deficiencies of a forced displacement ranging from economic to social and educational instruments. Despite constructive national policies and legislation of the Turkish government and financial support, refugee access and enrollment in higher education (HE) stand as an issue for a number of reasons. The chapter aims to highlight opportunities and challenges that Syrian refugee students (SRSs) have been experiencing since their immigration to Turkey and it examines HE policies in socio-economic, cultural and political contexts. The study, while making use of Bronfenbrenner’s (2001) bioecological theory of development, adapts it to the context of refugee students in HE. Discussions are supported by reports, laws and circulars to make note of the main principals of the HE policies of Turkey for SRSs as well as their implications in both Syrian and Turkish contexts. During this process, the international and comparative nature of the study is maintained by referring to similar policies for refugees in other host countries and implications for the international arena.

West Papua is a non-self-governing territory without much prominence in international debates. While offering an overview of the province’s political, social and environmental troubles, this chapter chiefly focuses on concrete issues in the field of education (such as its literacy and early school drop-out rates, inequality in opportunities and access to education, poor infrastructure or the low quality of teaching) through analysis of the educational resources that Indonesia, as administrator of the region, offers to West Papuans. In general, the control that Indonesia exerts over West Papua could be said to rely on the use of violence, repression, expropriation, depopulation, and even indiscriminate killings. Therefore, the chapter also encourages debate on the geopolitical status of West Papua by placing it within the framework of postcolonial studies and suggesting that the notions of necropolitics and necroeducation should be taken as a complementary perspective from which to approach its situation in the study of comparative and international education.

This chapter presents an analysis of the constitutional definitions of the right to education. Four countries of the Southern Common Market are selected: Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay (member countries) and Chile (an associate State). A conceptual definition of the right to education -from the human rights-based perspective- is provided in order to analyze, from a comparative standpoint, the constitutional norms of each country. In recent decades, these countries have experienced recurrent school reforms which, as they are framed within legal definitions, have regulated the right to education as a premise for overcoming social inequalities. First, a definition of this concept is provided. Second, the national constitutions of each country are analyzed so as to identify the definitions they have in this field. Subsequently, a comparative discussion of the underlying regulatory definitions of the right to education is carried out. Finally, the scope and limitations that the constitutional texts of these countries have on the right to education are discussed, which allow for a better understanding of school reform processes that were carried out during the last decades and that had the right to education as an object of regulation and reconfiguration.

Given the global surge toward the decolonization of curriculum and greater educational equity during the past year, this study helps us to understand the forces and factors that support or inhibit greater equitable access to quality education for all children. In this chapter, the authors analyze and compare a myriad of challenges experienced by the United States and South Africa as they attempt to move beyond a history of racial segregation and apartheid to more equitable access to quality education for all learners. The chapter begins with a brief historical synopsis of each country’s attempts to move beyond years of entrenched racial segregation and/or apartheid governance to greater life chances for all individuals. This discussion includes the role and negative impact of race, ethnicity, geography, language, and/or socio-economic status on enhanced access to equitable education for all. A review of key theoretical perspectives follows and will help to explain how such inequities have survived, as well as how they might be transformed into agents for positive social change. The chapter concludes by suggesting a “way forward” derived from positive historical examples of exceptionally high quality education experienced by some learners, even during difficult periods of racial segregation.

Faced with the outbreak of the pandemic, Chinese government quickly postponed the opening of schools and advocated “classes suspended but learning continues” project through online learning. In order to understand the teaching effect of online learning and explore a possible transformation of the application of educational information technology in the future, questionnaires have been used in this study to collect data of students, principals, and teachers across China. Most students and principals are satisfied with online learning, while teachers suggest that it is considerably difficult to teach online. Meanwhile, students, schools, and teachers are facing problems, including insufficient adaptation to online learning methods, poor learning quality, imperfect information infrastructure, insufficient learning resources, and so on. Based on the results, the authors propose to explore systematic solutions to guarantee a fair and high-quality development of online teaching. For one thing, the whole education system must ensure the fairness of learning conditions, encourage all-round development, and promote school–home cooperation. For another thing, it is necessary to clarify the connotation of online learning, guarantee the construction of information infrastructure, provide training in information technology and classroom management capabilities, and improve the evaluation system of online learning activities.