Revisiting comparative pedagogy: methodologies, themes and research communities since 2000

ABSTRACT

This article provides an analysis of contemporary comparative research on pedagogy, as published since 2000. It explores this sub-field of comparative education inquiry over this period, including how it has responded to new global movements, changing balances of power, and methodological advances. While these have shaped the field in recognisable ways, differing responses to these among researchers from contrasting research traditions have resulted in divergence as well as convergence. This divergence has created distinct typologies of studies that reflect particular epistemic communities of researchers, depending on how context and the purpose of research are perceived. The scoping review is based on a survey of 51 articles identified through a systematic search of 10 English-language journals in the field of comparative and international education.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• comparative education
• research methodologies
• teachers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Association for International and Comparative Education, who funded this research through the Seedcorn Funding Grant Programme. The idea emerged as a result of a previous Early Career Mobility Scheme grant from the University of Sydney.

2. We used “pedagog* as a search term in order to include all associated terms.

3. Any studies that conduct current/historical analysis of national and/or international reform measures, national curriculum, policy documents, existing cross-national data (e.g. TIMMS, PISA), textbooks, or instruction manuals in schools were excluded.

4. The broader hierarchies of knowledge production certainly shape the field of CIE (see, for example, Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell 2017), and we acknowledge the limitations of conducting a review primarily in top-tier international journals housed largely in the West/Global North. Moreover, we also acknowledge the inerrant value of reading, reviewing, and disseminating knowledges within journals considered to be at the periphery.

5. See, for instance, Thomas (2018) on academic publishing in Tanzania.

6. ‘The IJED does not encourage articles which may be more appropriate for journals of pedagogy ….unless the relevance to feasible public policy is clearly demonstrated.’ See https://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-educational-development.

7. Any attempt at classification of countries (e.g. North/South, East/West, Developed/Developing) is problematic, so herein we rely on the OECD’s (2016) designation to highlight cross-ODA comparisons.

8. As many studies utilised two or more research methods, the numbers in Table 2 necessarily total more than 51.

Table 2. Research methods

9. The minus or plus do not refer to positive or negative judgements of the researchers’ approaches but rather our understandings of the articles’ positionings. A seven-point scale (−3 to +3) was selected by the team due to its affordances in creating notable distinctions whilst minimising issues related to reliability (−5 to +5 would be too fine-grained to have confidence in the distinctions).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE).