Conference Agenda

In Rethinking Comparison, Simmons and Smith (2021) argue that comparative methods are at the cross-roads of two main trends: a trend towards controlled comparative methods whose main focus consists in the improvement of causal inference - something that often involves taking the route of natural experiments; and an opposing trend towards deconstructing comparison, heavily indebted to postcolonial theory, which sees comparative methods as ‘old fashioned’ and intellectually impoverishing. To these trends, we add a third one consisting of hyper-globalist understandings of globalisation that are challenging cross-country analyses, arguing that the state has been hollowed-out as the main locus of policy-making.

The comparative analysis of education policies is not alien to these challenges and advances. Indeed, such dilemmas have given rise to passionate debates and inspired a number of research innovations and increasingly ambitious research designs. Comparative education policy studies have proven to be a dynamic research field that does not remain passive against the different external and internal challenges it faces. This symposium examines precisely how the field of comparative policy analysis has evolved in the last decade, and how education policy research can benefit from this evolution. The panel aims thus at stimulating reflection on the possibilities opened by the new comparative methods, tools and databases, and on the research questions posed by this changing environment and which merit further investigation. To do so, our panel revisits two recurring debates that have long centred efforts at (re)thinking comparative research, namely, what to compare and how to compare. In relation to the former - what to compare -, we witness how comparative analysis is increasingly open to a broader range of research units. Beyond conventional cross-country studies, comparative research can be conducted within countries, across regions, across time and even compare different kinds of units (Schaffer 2015).

In addition, the role of globalisation in policy formation has been conceptualised in a more sophisticated way. Increasingly, comparative analyses contemplate how different political scales are mutually constituted, how global policy models are being translated differently in different contexts and/or how the impact global forces fluctuates over the policy process. Such trends make the case for expanding the possibilities and perspectives for comparative inquiry. Overall, rather than taking them as a given, we are being encouraged to actively construct the objects of our comparative analyses (Barlett and Vavrus 2017). In a European context, where policy is no longer the exclusive parcel of nation states, and regions and cities play an increasingly prominent role as policy spaces, transcending the cross-country perspective is more necessary than ever.

In relation to how to compare, the old divides between quantitative and qualitative approaches are being left behind. Mixed-methods designs have indeed found their place within European research, and there is a growing appetite for methodological pluralism.. Contrary to traditional conceptions, it is increasingly acknowledged that small-n studies can play a critical role in offering generalisable insights and that big-n studies can play an important role in theory building and identifying causal mechanisms. There is also growing recognition of the need for further disciplinary cross-fertilization and dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences. The comparative analysis of education policy cannot remain insulated from the conceptual and theoretical innovations brought forward by political science, geography and policy sociology, among other.

This double-symposium will include papers that make an explicit effort to innovate in comparative analysis methods and forms of inquiry. It includes a selection of empirically rich studies of education policy covering different contexts and domains, including teacher policy, international large-scale assessments, the role of expertise, public-private partnerships, and accountability reforms.

New forms of teacher recruitment and training have emerged that seek to radically reform educational systems in Europe and beyond (Dumay & Burn, 2022; Nesje, 2021; Tatto & Menter, 2022; Schneider & Abs, 2021). Programmes associated with the Teach For All network serve as one example, and now exist in more than 60 countries, from Slovakia to Spain to Sweden (see Thomas et al., 2021). Despite discursive depictions of accelerating and uncomplicated expansion (Lefebvre et al., 2022), their global proliferation has only been possible because of considerable policy changes in various jurisdictions, due in part to TFAll’s consistent role in advancing and benefiting from heterarchical forms of governance (Olmedo et al., 2013, Thomas & Xu, 2022). With this as a backdrop, this paper examines the varied ways in which Teach For All affiliates have engaged in effecting policy change, both to facilitate their entrée into new policy environments and, later, to further alter them. It analyses cases from across the Teach For All literature and draws on empirical data in the form of interviews, policy documents, and digital ethnography to first provide a comparative analysis of the forms of policy change that may be necessary for alternative programmes to enter new jurisdictions, such as reforming teacher certification and licensure policies. Second, the paper explores the means through which Teach For All organisations have sought to effect change prior to and after their emergence, drawing on examples from specific (sub)national contexts. The paper then offers a typology of policy movements and strategies utilised by Teach For All, including working within, beyond, and between existing structures. The paper concludes by raising critical questions about the future of global teacher education policy as well as the methodological challenges involved in studying its shifts, particularly as advanced by closed networks working across amorphous and dynamic policy spaces.

Dumay, X., & Burn, K. (Eds.). (2022). The status of the teaching profession: Interactions between historical and new forms of segmentation. Taylor & Francis. Lefebvre, E.E., Pradhan, S., & Thomas, M.A.M. (2022). The discursive utility of the global, local, and national: Teach For All in Africa. Comparative Education Review, 66(4), 620-642. Nesje, K. (2021). The origin and adaptation of Teach First Norway. In Examining Teach For All (pp. 63-78). Routledge. Olmedo, A., Bailey, P.L., & Ball, S.J. (2013). To infinity and beyond…: Heterarchical governance, the Teach for All network in Europe and the making of profits and minds. European Educational Research Journal, 12(4), 492-512. Schneider, S., & Abs, H.J. (2021). Professional duties and support for Teach For All fellows as reported by school principals: A case study of two European countries. In Examining Teach For All (pp. 221-242). Routledge. Tatto, M.T., & Menter, I. (2022). Institutional and pedagogical consequences of neoliberal globalization in teacher education. In Emergent Trends in Comparative Education (pp. 195-216). Rowman & Littlefield. Thomas, M.A.M., Rauschenberger, E., & Crawford-Garrett, K. (Eds.). (2021). Examining Teach For All. Routledge. Thomas, M.A.M., & Xu, R.-H. (2022). The emergence and policy (mis)alignment of Teach For Taiwan. Journal of Education Policy, 1-24.

How references to other education systems are constructed and employed in education policy-making has long been an important topic of educational research (see Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). Among other things, they serve to situate education in one’s own country in relation to its environment. However, references to “elsewhere” are not only made to individual “reference societies”, i.e. individual nation states, but also to whole geographic regions (e.g. “Asia”) or clusters of countries that are perceived to be united by a characteristic trait (e.g. “the developing countries”). Also, individual reference societies often are perceived as being embedded in and representative of wider contexts. In this paper, we will take a closer look at points of reference functioning in a similar way to individual reference societies, but comprising larger units than individual countries. We term these “transnational reference clusters”. The paper combines a “borrowing and lending”-perspective with a comparative approach. It studies how transnational reference clusters were being constructed and used in the media discourse on education policy-making in Germany and mainland China in the wake of PISA between 2000 – 2020 (see also Ning, 2023). We will focus specifically on two transnational reference regions which play an important role both in the Chinese and the German media discourse and of which Germany and Mainland China are parts of, respectively: “Western industrialised countries” and “Asia”. The rise of large-scale assessments has had consequences for how education systems situate themselves in relation to others and particularly in relation to a non-egalitarian world order. Both Germany and China were challenged by PISA in how they made sense of their position in this order, since both experienced “PISA-shocks”, although in diametrically different ways: German observers were shocked by the fact that the results of their country were much lower than anticipated, while many Chinese observers were surprised by the positive results obtained by participating Chinese regions and cities (especially Shanghai). The comparison enables us to see more clearly the specific ways in which these shocks were processed in the two cases and how this processing was connected to long-standing perceptions of the world order shaped by colonialism: the German discourse reflects a process of othering “Asia” aimed at reinforcing the discursive superiority of “Western” education. Chinese media adopt parts of the ‘Western-centred’ stereotyping of ‘Asian’ education while at the same time attempting to legitimise the superiority of China’s own education system over others.

Ning, H. (2023). Der Mediendiskurs zu Referenzgesellschaften und PISA: Ein Vergleich zwischen Deutschland und Festlandchina im Rahmen des Projektionsansatzes unter Berücksichtigung der postkolonialen Perspektive. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Waldow, F., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.). (2019). Understanding PISA's attractiveness: Critical analyses in comparative policy studies. London: Bloomsbury.

In order to make policy planning and global monitoring of national developments “evidence-based” (Karseth et al., 2022), state authorities voluntarily apply international standards for the sake of improving their own practices (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2017). By tracing how regulative, normative and cognitive orientations of reform trajectories evolve, the present study aims at better understanding of how education policy-making unfolds under the influence of major international policy brokers. In particular, we have compared topologies and examined semantical shifts by the creation and recreation of discourses. IN the Norwegian part of the POLNET-study (Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison), we applied computed text-mining procedures to a large corpus of official documents. This corpus consists of 503 full-text white and green papers published or referenced by the Ministry of Education Norway between 1990 and 2020. In our analysis, we mapped bibliometric reference networks, detected word associations that form topologies and clarified discursive shifts by examining time-space relations (Sivesind et al., 2022). The results show that a new topology on constitutional norms, democracy, the freedom of expression, and human dignity appeared in the 2000s. Moreover, compared to the 1990s, semantic shifts in reform policy during the 2000s reflected a more departmentalized discourse on school reform. Political discourses and conceptualizations of reform during the 2000s reflect an increased differentiation that reflects how state authorities regulate their education system by law. At the same time, word associations and associated discourses for different realms of school reform policy and higher education policy, reflect externalization processes and an increased interest toward cognitive-scientific rationalities of international large-scale studies and evaluations with normative undertones. It is somewhat surprising that that there is an increased attention towards national and international regulations and standards simultaneously. Nonetheless, we consider these trajectories as an outcome of the ways national policy makers and international experts receive and translate ideas and standards, and the ways narratives and discourses resonate within particular contexts.

Karseth, B., Sivesind, K., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.). (2022). Evidence and Expertise in Nordic Education Policy. A Comparative Network Analysis. Palgrave McMillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91959-7 Pollitt, C., & Bouckaert, G. (2017). Public management reform: A comparative analysis-into the age of austerity. Oxford university press. Sivesind, K., Tiplic, D., & Johnsen, L. (2022). Surveying Policy Discourses across Time and Space: Internationalization of Knowledge Providers and Nordic Narrative. I D. Tröhler, B. Hörmann, S. Tveit & I. Bostad (Red.), The Nordic Education Model in Context: Historical Developments and Current Renegotiations. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003218180-21

Drawing on a network ethnography, this paper presents a mapping and an analysis of the actors which develop International Large-Scale Assessments (i.e. PISA, TIMSS) for the OECD and IEA. ILSA contractors emerged from a small, informal IEA network where capitals were accumulated and then used to stabilize the current network of contractors. In seeking to understand the rationales of ILSA contractors to carry out ILSA contracts, the paper drew on a key CE theory, policy borrowing and lending theory. Despite it traditionally making sense of state actors, the theory did prove useful in understanding non-state actors but suffered from ‘educationalism’. To visualise this network, ILSA contractor differences (i.e. size and tasks of each contractor) had to be done away with and commensurability had to be imposed. Imposing categories on the actors (i.e. public/private) was problematic. Comparing differences between IEA and OECD ILSA contracting put the emphasis on IOs rather than the contractors. Mapping and analysing this global network through comparison appeared to create more problems than it provided analytical insights. Questions arose such as: When is network ethnography a comparative education methodology? How can the study of a global network be comparative? Comparative Education (CE) assumes some kind of comparison. Historically, comparisons were made between and amongst educational systems (Bereday 1964; Bray et al. 2007). The main CE theories seek to understand how global theories travel and are adopted; how contexts shape the way policies are translated; how educational systems converge and diverge (Philips & Schweisfurth 2014). But what does CE offer when what is being studied does away with context (i.e. ILSAs treat context as noise) and the unit of analysis is a single global network? How can we understand market logics in education without the contribution of theories that explain business behaviour? Ultimately, this paper is an invitation to discuss the opportunities and limitations of CE methods and theories when studying a global network and business dynamics in education.

Bereday, George (1964) Sir Michael Sadler's "Study of Foreign Systems of Education." Comparative Education Review 7(3): 307-314. Bray, Mark, Adamson, Brian & Mason, Mark (eds) (2007) Comparative education research: Approaches and methods (Vol. 19). New York: Springer. Philips, David & Schweisfurth, M. (2014). Comparative and international education: an introduction to theory, method, and practice (2nd ed). London: Bloomsbury Academic.