From its very beginnings, we can discern two methodological approaches to comparative education; one broadly historical-philosophical-idiographic and another broadly empirical-positivist-nomothetic. ...Friedrich August Hecht's 1795-1798 De re scholastica Anglica cum Germanica comparata (English and German school education compared), with its hermeneutic textbook analysis, represents an idiographic methodology. Whilst the 1816/1817 data-driven research programme of Marc-Antoine Jullien - usually considered the origin of comparative education - represents an empirical-positivist-nomothetic approach. In this essay, we will examine the theoretical orientations of Hecht's study - his ideas of transnationality and national character, and his avoidance of the proposal of borrowing and lending. We situate the beginnings of Hecht's methodology in its social-historical context and analyse the transfer of interpretation methods from philology to comparative education. Finally, we will postulate a combination of Jullien's and Hecht's methodological approaches.
The article argues that observing ‘the Nordic dimension’ as a metaspace in methodological terms harbors rich potential for qualifying educational research, policy, and debate. The metaspace gathers ...critical mass through aggregating the potential of smaller spaces. The five Nordic countries thus represent historical, linguistic, and societal similarities that produced similar societal and educational values, albeit along different trajectories. Understood as a floating signifier in scalar and topological terms, the Nordic dimension allows researchers and others to draw on the diversity that this metaspace represents as a tool for rethinking national solutions. The article draws on educational research and literature with a Nordic focus.
This open access edited volume is a comparative effort to discern the short-term educational impact of the covid-19 pandemic on students, teachers and systems in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Japan, ...Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the first academic comparative studies of the educational impact of the pandemic, the book explains how the interruption of in person instruction and the variable efficacy of alternative forms of education caused learning loss and disengagement with learning, especially for disadvantaged students. Other direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic diminished the ability of families to support children and youth in their education. For students, as well as for teachers and school staff, these included the economic shocks experienced by families, in some cases leading to food insecurity and in many more causing stress and anxiety and impacting mental health. Opportunity to learn was also diminished by the shocks and trauma experienced by those with a close relative infected by the virus, and by the constrains on learning resulting from students having to learn at home, where the demands of schoolwork had to be negotiated with other family necessities, often sharing limited space. Furthermore, the prolonged stress caused by the uncertainty over the resolution of the pandemic and resulting from the knowledge that anyone could be infected and potentially lose their lives, created a traumatic context for many that undermined the necessary focus and dedication to schoolwork. These individual effects were reinforced by community effects, particularly for students and teachers living in communities where the multifaceted negative impacts resulting from the pandemic were pervasive. This is an open access book.
This open access book is written for educators and policymakers who seek to empower young people with competencies necessary for fulfilling lives in the 21st century. It reports how a large group of ...educators from government and civil society organisations, together with researchers from universities, used their curriculum, assessment, and social economy expertise to develop contextualised definitions of life skills and values, and associated assessment tools. The book also reports on levels of these competencies of over 45,000 adolescents, from a household-based assessment conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The results describe how these adolescents vary in proficiency by region, age, and other factors, providing a resource for national education ministries to factor into policy decisions. Given the technical requirements of measuring individuals’ social-emotional and related competencies, how is it possible to capture an adolescent’s life skills across varied contexts? The book provides readers with a pragmatic yet technically robust process for undertaking a large-scale assessment program designed to inform policy.
This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of education in China, covering 12 critical topics including basic education, higher education, professional education, STEM (Science, ...Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, mental health education, and international education and excellence initiatives. Drawing from current research, theoretical literature, and real-life stories, this book examines the developmental trajectories, achievements, and best practices in the above-mentioned topics, to reflect realities of education transformation in China. It also incorporates a global comparison of key indicators to explore strengths of and gaps in Chinese education with its global counterparts. Setting its context in an ever-changing world, this book intends to explore conceptual support to develop “a modern education system with Chinese features and world standards”, to provide implications for further developing quality education in all sectors, and to promote understanding and inspire critical discussion on education development in China and around the world. This book serves as a valuable resource for students, scholars, and policy makers in the field of education studies, as well as for the general public who are interested in Chinese education.
This open access book offers a critical analysis of the history of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) from its founding in 1925 to its integration into UNESCO in January 1969. Based on the ...conceptual and methodological tools of the transnational turn and on archives, fully exploited for the first time by the research team, this book enriches knowledge of the phenomena of globalization. It does so in a field, education, which is currently one of those most invested in globalization, but whose sociogenesis in the era of its first period of institutionalization remains to be explored more profoundly. The authors do this by analyzing how the actors of the IBE tried to realize their aspiration towards universal aims in education, the contradictions they were confronted with, the causes they invested in, their operating mode and the governments and international organizations with which they cooperated.
Recent research from high-income countries and dated research from middle-income countries suggest that home computers and Internet (HCI) may cause more harm than good on students’ academic and ...psychological outcomes. We consider the Program for International Student Assessment 2018 data for 15-year-old students in five middle-income countries with low shares of HCI access: Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, Thailand, and Turkey. We find no negative and statistically significant regression coefficients between HCI access and mathematics, reading, self-reported well-being, and resilience scores. Instead, most HCI coefficients are positive and statistically significant. Therefore, we cannot conclude that HCI access harms the academic and psychological outcomes for the students and countries considered in the study.
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