Comparative & International Education

World Radio Day reminds us of the power and reach of interactive radio instruction for students—and teachers Blog (/blog)-February 12, 2016 by Mary Burns (/users/MBurns) | In the hyperstimulating, hyperconnected and multimodal technology world we inhabit, celebrating an " old " single-use technology like radio feels quaint. More so since radio and its variants-interactive radio (and audio) instruction (IRI-IAI), broadcast radio, two-way radio-have often been overlooked in the crowded field of more sexy distance-education technologies like online learning and mobile apps.

During the 1990s and 2000s, a policy known as Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) not only became the cornerstone of education reform in El Salvador but also became a global education policy, one which is known for decentralizing to rural families the responsibility for hiring and firing teachers. As is shown in this paper, its rise to fame was not only a product of the particular political-economic context in which it was borne, but was also a product of the impact evaluations produced by the World Bank, which served as the evidence base through which this and other international institutions could legitimately promote the neoliberal model of community involvement represented by EDUCO. Problematically, however, a reappraisal of these impact evaluations reveals, first, that their findings and conclusions around significant effects were not warranted and, second, that the entire impact evaluation enterprise is fundamentally flawed due to the financial-political-intellectual complex out of which these studies emerged and back into which they fed as they were used to advocate for market-oriented policy solutions around the world. Thus, in addition to explaining the reform dynamics that gave rise to EDUCO, this paper (a) systematically reviews the findings and limitations of each of the six impact studies that constitute the international knowledge base around this policy, (b) reconsiders what we can reasonably claim to know about EDUCO, (c) reflects on the national and international implications of the critical review presented here, and (d) remarks on the shortcomings of—and the alternatives to—impact evaluations as a
means to produce policy-relevant findings.

This open access book compares and contrasts the results of international student assessments in ten countries. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released the results of its 2018 assessment in December 2019. This book reflects the debates that typically follow the release of these results and focuses on the causes of differences between countries. Such causes include continuous decline in one country, improvement combined with increasing internal inequalities in another country, or rapid improvement in spite of an outdated curriculum in yet another.
In addition, the book discusses a number of general questions: Is knowledge outdated? Are computers taking over and replacing teachers? Are schools killing creativity? Are we adequately preparing the next generation? Are schools failing to educate our kids? The book starts out with a summary of PISA’s evolution and PISA results, and an explanation of the major factors that play a role in changes in countries’ results. The next ten chapters are devoted to ten specific countries, offering a summary of data and an explanation of the major drives for changes in education results for each one. Each chapter includes a short description of the country’s educational system as well as the impact of PISA and other ILSA studies on the country’s educational policies. The chapters also include a timeline of policy measures and main hallmarks of the country’s educational evolution, discussing the impact of these measures on its PISA results. A final reference chapter explains what PISA is, what it measures and how. While highlighting the 2018 results, the book also takes into consideration previous results, as well as long-term initiatives.
This book gathers the contribution of well-known and respected experts in the field. Specialists such as Eric Hanushek, for the US, Tim Oates, for England, Montse Gomendio, for Spain, Gunda Tire, for Estonia, and all other contributors draw on their vast experience and statistical analysis expertise to draw a set of rich country lessons and recommendations that are invaluable for all of those who care about improving a country’s education system.

In recent years, a great deal has been written about the community participation program that emerged in El Salvador known as Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) (e.g., Edwards, 2015, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2019a, 2019b; Edwards, Victoria, & Martin, 2015). As will be further discussed, the key feature of this program that generated significant attention was the ability of parent councils to manage the school budget and to hire/fire teachers. Following on the fame that this program achieved in the 1990s and 2000s, recent studies have problematized different aspects of its history and implementation. The present chapter continues with this line of research by bringing together and extending critiques that have been made across other publications. Specifically, this chapter seeks, first, to draw attention to the ways that EDUCO’s knowledge base has been mobilized, and not only by international organizations but also in the academic literature; second, to contrast this knowledge mobilization, which has presented EDUCO in a positive light, with a critical understanding of the quantitative studies of EDUCO that are used to present EDUCO as an exemplary program; and, third, to present the weaknesses of this program in practice by drawing on the (largely unknown and ignored) qualitative studies of EDUCO’s implementation. Ultimately, the goal is not only to highlight the fundamentally problematic way that knowledge is produced and used in the global education policy field, but also to argue for a different approach to community participation, one that goes beyond technocratic and instrumental forms of community involvement in school and teacher management to focus instead on community empowerment and community organizing. However, before presenting the critique, this chapter first clarifies the details of what the EDUCO was and how it worked.

In this article, I propose the need to reimagine global citizenship education for a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In this context, it remains unclear what kind of GCE could adequately prepare young people for numerous overlapping global challenges. Most responses to this conjuncture suggest that we revise our descriptions of the problems we face, and cohere around a single prescription for how to proceed in order to either reform or replace our existing system. Drawing on a diagnosis of the present offered by Zygmunt Bauman, and a decolonial analysis of how we arrived here, I ask how we might reimagine GCE in ways that are strategically responsive to current systemic crises, and ethically responsive to the ongoing colonial conditions that are at the root of these crises. I propose an approach to GCE that moves beyond the transmission of static competencies or content, and instead fosters learners' capacities for ongoing self-reflexivity, accountability, and discernment. Toward this end, I suggest balancing concrete policy and open-ended pedagogy, critical and affective literacy, and intellectual and relational rigour. I also suggest the need to identify and interrupt harmful circularities that commonly emerge in efforts to imagine GCE otherwise.

Salvador in early 1991, near the end of the twelve-year civil war. It not only represented an extreme form of decentralization in that it transferred the responsibility for hiring, firing and supervising teachers to rural communities, but it was also the first reform of its kind in Latin America. During the ensuing 20 years, the program has received tremendous attention. Indeed, within the country it became the central program through which the education sector was rebuilt and expanded in the post-war era of the 1990s and 2000s. Internationally, the program has been widely recognized as a successful and desirable example of community-level education management decentralization. In fact, the program has become a "global education policy" in that it has been and continues to be recognized, promoted and adapted around the world.

Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western thought. It is also surprising because Japanese educational practices have resulted in some of the highest achievement outcomes-both cognitive and noncognitive-found anywhere in the world and inculcate a worldview that is distinct. Herein, we thus attempt to make visible the potential contribution of modern Japanese philosophy by outlining some of the core ideas, then turn to sketch resonances with and responses to other projects outlined in this Special Issue. Our approach is elucidation through relational comparison. Through this process, we suggest that the notion of self-negation as a mode of learning may be helpful in explaining why-at the empirical level-the outlook of Japanese students, and perhaps other East Asian students, diverge markedly from their Western peers. Yet we also find that an attempt, such as ours, to link divergent onto-epistemic thought to alternative empirical hypotheses quickly gives rise to various doubts and discomforts, even among otherwise sympathetic scholars.

In providing a view of paideia as dialetheia, we may elaborate the educational dimensions of a view of reality as contradictory, as captured
in the key phrase Double Eyes. In this way, we may be able to connect long-standing traditions in clinical-philosophical pedagogy with a wider range of recent intellectual projects and problématiques worldwide.

This article discusses the role of education diplomacy in the recent UNESCO publication, The Intersection of Gender Equality and Education in South-East Europe: A Regional Situation Analysis of the Nexus Between Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 5 (Gender Equality), authored by Sarah Fuller for the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe (Venice, Italy).

The paper offers a critical appraisal of the global knowledge developments in education using China's contributions in a fashion similar to a case study. The paper scrutinizes the complicity of Western educational research to euro-centric biases and discusses the pursuit of a global epistemological eclecticism. To support this claim, the magnitude of the global knowledge economy, including country-by-country comparisons, is explored together with data pertaining to the success rate of submissions and citations. These data are used as the basis for arguments that the dominant research practices and developmental work serve Western interests, Western thought and a Western economy tied to standardization rather than eastern epistemological interests.

This article was originally published in 'Chorus'. Chorus was ‘a peer-reviewed, open access, online journal based at Sana'a University in Yemen. It link[ed] doctoral researchers from Sana'a University with doctoral researchers from British Universities, it [was] supported by the British Council.’ (Chorus, 2010). Chorus is now defunct and this article can no longer be accessed from its original source. In this article I survey a wide range of published and unpublished research which involves comparing education in different nations. The article was intended to provoke discussion among early career researchers working across nations. To some extent it captures a moment in time. However, many of the issues are still relevant today in 2015.

Education in the 21 st century has shifted from teacher-centered to learner-centered approaches where cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains are key in preparing school graduates for the world of work. The role of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is to ensure the artisans and technicians acquire expected attitudes, skills like creativity, innovativeness, digital literacy, and problem-solving for the prosperity of an economy. TVET sub-sector has a poor image and is seen as a domain for the academic dwarfs. It has been poorly endowed with resources, especially in developing countries. The use of digital literacy, e-platforms have been sparingly applied in TVET when it comes to enhancing teaching and learning. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, there have been disruptions in learning due to the closure of institutions and this has led to the adoption of online teaching. This paper is grounded on desktop research which presents results from studies conducted on how instructors and learners in TVET institutions have been affected by Covid-19 and opportunities during the pandemic. Some challenges include widened contact between the teachers and learners, digital imbalance, limited demonstration of required competencies, ICT Competencies, and lack of virtual remote labs/workshops where the learners can continue with the learning of the competencies. Some opportunities include the creation of virtual labs, instructors were able to programme for tutorials that would allow students to access eplatforms at their own time, online learning had no limited space compared to physical learning and institutions had time to review their curriculum.

This dissertation is an ethnographic case study of a community-based teaching program (CBTP) in public health at a medical college in South India that explored how the CBTP produced particular ways of seeing and understanding rural and urban poor communities. Drawing from critical, feminist, and postcolonial scholars, I suggest that the knowledge produced in the CBTP can be understood as "science/fictions", that is, as cultural texts shaped by transnational development discourses as well as medical teachers' and students' sociospatial imaginations of the rural and urban poor. I explored how these science/fictions mediated medical students' performative actions and interactions with a rural and an urban poor community in the context of the CBTP. At the same time, I also examined how knowledge produced in students' encounters with these communities disrupted their naturalized understandings about these communities, and how it was taken up to renarrativize science/fictions anew.

The following article examines the methodological considerations involved in carrying out a trinational comparative survey of pupils' attitudes to learning French, German and English (as foreign languages) at comprehensive schools in England, Germany and the Netherlands. The research was conducted as part of a Ph.D. study aiming to describe the nature of the pupils' attitudes and to examine and compare the pupils' perceptions of educational and socio-cultural influences in the different contexts. A discussion of the broader theoretical framework in which the study is located is followed by an analysis of research design and decision-making. This includes a detailed review of country, sample and instrument selection, along with an examination of the practicalities of access, piloting and analysis. Finally, a number of ethical issues are considered.

Religious experience  is a dimension of human experience which deals with the interpretation of concrete events according to evaluative categories. This is rooted in the essence of religion itself whose task is to provide an explanation of nature comprehensible to an individual or a collectivity in terms of the meaning it provides. Thus, religious experience is distinguishable from scientific experience in that, while both depart from and interpret concrete events, their purposes vary. The former aims to reach a higher mystic state the attainment of which symbolically unites  the individual or the collectivity with the environment whereas the latter bifurcates the two by regarding mind and matter separate.
          The task of the following discussion is to elaborate on this religious perception. Accordingly, an effort shall be made to define the categories of knowledge and method in Islam, those in Philippine Islam in particular. In this regard, the nature of religious experience shall be explored and defined in the context of contemporary efforts by Filipino Muslims (or Moros) to search for a "national" identity and, in addition, the experience of the Ummah in Philippine history shall be traced.
          This discussion should particularly be surprising and  insightful to those who tend to regard Islam as rigid or unyielding particularly with regard to the commonly misused and misunderstood concept of jihad, which means also intellectual exertion, not simply physical. If one were to engage in a play in words and reversed the title of this piece to read "Secular Experience in the Formation of the United States Empire", and examine the role of force and violence -- including torture -- in this process from the beginning to this day, one might have a more somber view towards Islam.

This article explores the mobilization dynamics of a school-based minority language revitalization initiative in the French Basque Country, known as the Ikastola Movement. Bringing the study of language revitalization into dialogue with social movement theory, I discuss how the solidarity of Basque language activists was influenced by state-level structures of power. Focusing on an early phase of mobilization from 1975 to 1981, I consider how political opposition to the Ikastola Movement created a series of ideological and institutional struggles for activists. I then examine how these experiences of struggle strengthened the solidarity of activists in the long run. Ultimately, I argue that the discursive and organizational solidarities mobilized by activists were crucial in allowing them to realize important political gains during the 1980s to 1990s. By way of conclusion I suggest avenues for future research on school-based revitalization movements that draw attention to the horizontal and vertical dynamics of collective action.

The paper addresses questions concerning the place and role of Canadian sociology in the larger global context. In what ways can
Canadian sociology complementglobal sociology? What challenges face Canadian sociology in universities today? The authors review trajectories and paradigms of Canadian sociology, its history, and recent developments. The institutional structures of Canadian sociology are observed in the framework of 'sociology as a scientific and academic discipline' (SaSAD). The article provides a brief historical account to the Anglo/French division in Canadian sociology, examines its relationship with the country's legacy and complex interplay between social movements, political parties and social science. The case of Canada helps to address principal questions concerning the place of sociology as a scientific and academic discipline in the contemporary university.

Tierney, G. (2018). Alternative Schools in the United States: How History, Policy, and Definitions of Success Define Alternative Schools and the Youth Who Attend Them. In McCluskey, G. & Mills, M. (Eds.) International perspectives on alternative education: Policy and practice. Institute of Education (IOE) Press, London.

Alternative schools fall into an interesting space in education by being able to provide innovative and supportive opportunities that are different from mainstream schooling, yet also acting as part of a mechanism for sorting youth on the margins of education (Vadeboncoeur, 2009). This sorting process allows many schools to discard unwanted youth and narrowly defines what success can mean in mainstream high schools. In the U.S., the term " alternative school " is used to describe a wide array of schools, with differing perspectives on youth (Raywid, 1999) and differing relationships with the school districts in which they exist. In many cases, the policy context of alternative schools can be seen through the types of alternative schools that have been created throughout the past 50 years. This chapter explores public alternative schools in the United States, discussing the modern history of alternative education and the range of definitions of alternative schools that exist in the U.S., also looking ahead to how a changing political climate may impact on alternative schools in the United States. In this chapter, I will discuss the scope of alternative education in the United States and define the various forms of alternative education that exist. In doing so, I also discuss some cultural views of alternative schools and the youth who attend them. This is all done with the goal of better understanding the landscape of alternative schools and the challenges those schools face. Specifically, this chapter seeks to answer the following questions: What is the current landscape of alternative schools in the United States?

In this article we analysed some tendencies of modern natural science education development in Lithuania and Latvia. This is a comparative research. The authors state, that in the past fifteen years, the Baltic States, including Latvia and Lithuania, experienced considerable changes in the educational system. Natural science education development has also experienced essential reforms. Also we indicate some differences among Lithuanian and Latvian pupils.

The essays in Globalization on the Margins explore the continuities and changes in Central Asian education development since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reflecting on two decades of post-socialist transformations, they reveal that education systems in Central Asia responded to the rapidly changing political, economic, and social environment in profoundly new and unique ways. Some countries moved towards Western models, others went backwards, and still others followed entirely new trajectories. Yet, elements of the “old” system remain. Rather than viewing these post-Soviet transformations in isolation, Globalization on the Margins places its analyses within the global context by reflecting on the interaction between Soviet legacies and global education reform pressures in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Instead of portraying the transition process as the influx of Western ideas into the region, the authors provide new lenses to critically examine the multidirectional flow of ideas, concepts, and reform models within Central Asia.

Notwithstanding the variety of theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and conceptual lenses, the authors have one thing in common: both individually and collectively, they reveal the complexity and uncertainty of the post-Soviet transformations. By highlighting the political nature of the transformation processes and the uniqueness of historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of each particular country, Globalization on the Margins portrays post-Soviet education transformations as complex, multidimensional, and uncertain processes.

This book presents three resources to support global citizenship education: A protocol to develop a school wide strategy of global education; A protocol to design a coherent and rigorous curriculum aligned to a framework of global competencies; and a prototype of a sixty lesson global citizenship curriculum aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals

ICT  plays  a  very  important  role  in  education  and,  thus,  many  countries  have  developed policies  to  incorporate  ICT  into  education  delivery  in  schools.  As  ICT  has  proven  to  be  very relevant  in  the  field  of  education,  teachers  need  to  have  adequate  ICT  expertise  to  utilize  in teaching  and  learning  activities.  This  is  what  called  as  ICT  competence  of  the  teachers.  This study  was  done  intentionally  to  analyse  teachers’  ICT  competence  of Teachers in  public  secondary schools in Tanzania and was subjected to Rungwe  District as  a  case study. Constructivism,  self-efficacy  and  UNESCO  ICT-CFT  theoretical  framework  guided  the whole  study  since  teachers  acquire  ICT  competence  from  experiences  but  also,  teachers  can assess on their  own  about their individual  ICT  competence  in  relation to vari ous variables as indicated by UNESCO  ICT-CFT and their  ICT  competence  need to be judged according  to needs of the  21st  century  driving  forces. A  cross section  survey  design  was used  in  this  study  supported  by the  mixed  research  approach with  questionnaire  which  was  used  to  gather  all  important information  concerning  teacher’s recent  ICT  competence  status, teacher’s  challenges towards  enhancing their  ICT  competences as  well  as  to  examine  the  strategies  for  improving  teachers’  ICT  competence.  A  total  150 (16.6%)  of  all  teachers  in  Rungwe  District concerned findings. For  the  fulfilment  of  this  study, were  used  in  the  data  collection,  analysis  and  all Microsoft  Office  Excel  software  and  Statistical  Package for  Social  Sciences  (SPSS)  version  20.0  were  altogether  used  to  convert  the  collected  data  in frequency  tables,  averages,  and  percentages  for  different  var to iables,  but  also  an  instrument permitt ed a  researcher to  analyze  data qualitatively. Furthermore,  the  study  revealed  teachers’  ICT  competen internet  related  programs  like  web  design  compared  to  nonce to  be  limited  especially  in internet  programs  such  as  word processing  and  presentation  software .  The  study  revealed  challenges  hindering  Teachers’  ICT competence  such  as  the  absence  or  lack  of  ICT infrastructures,  lack  of  inservice  training, insufficient  ICT tools in schools, teachers’  attitudes in using  ICT and other  challenges. The  study  recommends  that,  there  is  a  need  to  effectively  give  all  teachers  in  public  secondary service  with ICT  training  to  schools  in  order  to  improve  teachers’  ICT  competence  since, the  study  shows  that  97%  of  all  teachers  are  ready  to  develop  their  ICT  digital  literacy challenges can be  surmounted with clear strategic  solution.

The increasing number of international teaching assistants (ITAs) in American undergraduate courses presents continued sociocultural, linguistic, and pedagogical challenges. Remaining underdeveloped, ITA training has attracted less attention in recent years. I urge a renewed enthusiasm for developing effective training curriculum. I review the focus of the ITA training curriculum over the past 30 years in terms of its content, implementation process, and context, and examine the missing elements that can make the training effective. I incorporate theories of multicultural education and postmodernism, and situate the discussion in the framework of professional development. As a conceptual analysis, this paper focuses on the why of integrating the missing elements, rather than the how of improving the curriculum in concrete steps.

Just as the geography and landscape of Costa Rica and Finland are contrasting, so were
the context and history of these two nations that influenced and shaped the emergence
and goals of their first instrumental music schools, until the second half of the twentieth century. However, since the latter part of the twentieth century, both countries have
undergone similar challenges in regard to the goals of music school education, due
to societal demands.

In this book I offer a critical, comparative and empirically-informed defense of Islamic schools in the West. To do so I elaborate an idealized philosophy of Islamic education, against which I evaluate the very different empirical situation in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States. I examine in detail notions of cultural identity and cultural coherence, the scope of parental authority v. a child's interests, as well as the state's hypothetical role in regulating religious schools.

'what literacy does.'' First, the article reviews in-depth the ways in which development discourses define literacy, and the claims made in development discourses about the ''consequences'' of literacy for economic and political development. I then draw on 24 months of ethnographic research in Brazil with 41 highly impoverished literacy students from four literacy programs in two cities in order to demonstrate that there is no predictable ''impact'' of literacy on development. Instead, I show that the opportunities afforded by literacy depend greatly on the types of literacy and the types of literacy programs made available to students, as well as students' cultural understandings of literacy and the social, political, and economic contexts within which they attempt to assert new literacy practices. The article concludes that we should not consider literacy as an actor with some ''impact''; instead, we should examine how people use literacy in ways that are conditioned by social and cultural forces. r

In today's schools the number of students who receive additional resources to access the curriculum is growing rapidly, and the ongoing expansion of special education is among the most significant worldwide educational developments of the past century. Yet even among developed democracies the range of access varies hugely, from one student in twenty to one student in three. In contemporary conflicts about educational standards and accountability, special education plays a key role as it draws the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion. Comparing Special Education unites in-depth comparative and historical studies with analyses of global trends, with a particular focus on special and inclusive education in the United States, England, France, and Germany. The authors examine the causes and consequences of various institutional and organizational developments, illustrate differences in forms of educational governance and social policy priorities, and highlight the evolution of social logics from segregation of students with special educational needs to their inclusion in local schools.

This presentation makes a case for ROTA’s research-based, strategic focus on education provision (formal, non-formal and informal) for children and youth at the secondary-age-level, especially those located in Conflict Affected Fragile States (CAFS). It provides preliminary findings from an analysis of how ROTA’s work contributes to global, national and local efforts to provide access to quality education, especially in challenging development contexts. This analysis of primary and secondary data seeks to understand the efficacy of ROTA’s programmatic responses on the Asian continent and to also identify key contextual educational issues, particularly for children and youth. In other words, gaining intimate knowledge about issues such as:
• The educational implications of the increasing youth bulge within the Middle East, which comes with concerns about substantial youth unemployment and education financing challenges for even stable, wealthy economies.
• The many factors contributing to low quality education provision in the Asian and Middle Eastern contexts in which ROTA works.
• The character and needs of the numerous out-of-school children and youth, especially in CAFS, which comprise mostly of young women and girls, IDPs, refugees, rural populations, persons with disabilities, and other minority populations.
In doing so, ROTA intends to better determine its future entry points for research, programming, policy-making and advocacy on the above and other issues, while also recognizing and planning for insufficient research and development on education that liberates.

La configuración del nivel medio en la Argentina se origina con la creación de los colegios nacionales durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. A lo largo del siglo XX se observa la expansión constante de la escuela secundaria. Si bien se trata de un crecimiento sostenido en el tiempo, se observan períodos de fuerte aumento de la matrícula entre los años  ́50 y  ́60 y entre mediados de los años  ́80 y fines de los años  ́90. Este aumento de la matrícula se acompaña de un importante índice de desgranamiento desde los orígenes de la escuela secundaria en la Argentina.
En este trabajo sostendremos que la masificación de la escuela media en la Argentina se produce desde una matriz de incorporación y expulsión en forma simultánea y que estos procesos se relacionan con el modelo institucional de la escuela secundaria cuyo origen radica en el modelo institucional del colegio nacional. A partir del análisis de datos cuantitativos (evolución de la matrícula, creación de oferta institucional durante la masificación del nivel, evolución del desgranamiento) y datos cualitativos (análisis de los modelos institucionales) este trabajo se propone ofrecer información y argumentos que fortalezcan la reflexión acerca de la masificación de la escuela secundaria en la Argentina y su relación con los modelos institucionales a los que históricamente se incorpora y expulsa alumnos en forma simultánea.

Pardàs, L. (2014). Music education policies in New Zealand and Catalonia: A comparison between antipodes. In P. Gouzouasis (Ed.), ISME 17th Biennal International Seminar of the Commision on Music Policy: Culture, Education and Media (pp. 125-130). Vancouver, Canada: The ISME Commission on Music Policy and The University of British Columbia.

Comparison is a valuable and widely touted analytical technique in social research, but different disciplines and fields have markedly different notions of comparison. There are at least two important logics for comparison. The first, the logic of juxtaposition, is guided by a neopositivist orientation. It uses a regularity theory of causation; it structures the study by defining cases, variables, and units of analysis a priori; and it decontextualizes knowledge. The second, the logic of tracing, engages a realist theory of causation and examines how processes unfold, influenced by actors and the meanings they make, over time, in different locations, and at different scales. These two logics of comparison lead to distinct methodological techniques. However, with either logic of comparison, three dangers merit attention: decontextualization, commensurability, and ethnocentrism. One promising research heuristic that attends to different logics of comparison while avoiding these dangers is the comparative case study (CCS) approach. CCS entails three axes of comparison. The horizontal axis encourages comparison of how similar policies and practices unfold across sites at roughly the same level or scale, for example across a set of schools or across home, school, religious institution, and community organization. The vertical axis urges comparison across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels or scales. For example, a study of bilingual education in the United States should attend not only to homes, communities, classroom, and school dynamics (the micro-level), but also to meso-level district, state, and federal policies, as well as to factors influencing international mobility at the macro-level. Finally, the transversal axis, which emphasizes change over time, urges scholars to situate historically the processes or relations under consideration.