Editorial

‘We are all comparativists now!’ This dictum of David Phillips and Michele Schweisfurth (2014: 184) marks a turning point in the development of international and comparative education (ICE). It describes an epistemological shift from historical and hermeneutic methods to social sciences and their orientation towards natural sciences. This became obvious in the European Conference of Educational Research (ECER) in 2006, as Waldow (2015) reports. Here numerous proposals dealt with issues of international assessment studies, whereas the ECER thematic network ‘comparative education’ could not arouse sufficient interest and was liquidated.

With the advent of international large-scale studies such as PISA, comparative education for educational policy makers increased in popularity, since these studies provide an opportunity to compare educational performance by using independently created tests. They lead to ‘a huge increase in publicity and influence of international largescale educational assessment projects, which in turn has led to considerable discussion and debate among the various stakeholders’ (Braeken, 2016: 196). The reason why descriptive studies gained such public attention may also be due to the different communicative styles and the different methods of comparing used in presenting their findings. Here, descriptive statistics have a great rhetorical advantage: they are, or seem to be, understandable even without further background knowledge. Qualitative studies are based on a literal code, while quantitative findings can be visualized by numerical and geometrical relations of more or less, higher or lower, larger or smaller. Such data are easy to compare and translate into political argumentation and education reforms.

That a nation holds a higher ranking in international league tables does not mean that its educational practices would also suit other nations. Rather than a focus on statistical tables and charts, the main focus of ICE is to learn from educational policies, practices and cultures of other nations through historically contextualized examples. To deal with this challenge successfully, all ‘forms of evidence’ (Ludvigsen, 2016) are needed, studies ranging from single phenomena to quantitative large-scale investigations. Educational policy borrowing should be carried out very sensitively, considering the complex relations between the macro- and micro-level. This is the focus of ICE, a complex, multi-relational field, which demands to understand society and the individual as interrelated in manifold ways. It is not sufficient to identify what is better or worse with regards to some kind of fixed norm.

With this in mind, this special issue focuses on the central question ‘Why comparing?’. It discusses methodological and methodical issues of comparative research through examining the education systems in the United Kingdom and Germany. It aims to enhance the discourse on comparative educational research and the mutual understanding of education and educational research traditions in the two countries. The different parts indicate the value of comparison and plead for a nuanced and differentiated approach in comparison and in educational policy-making.

The following articles result from a cross-thematic session of the Anglo-German Educational Research Group (AGERG), held at the conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) in Glasgow 2016 and the AGERG conference ‘Collaborative Research in Comparative Education – The Anglo-German Educational Research Group (AGERG) and beyond’ in Munich 2015, funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

AGERG aims to contribute to the philosophy of comparing, focusing on education in the United Kingdom and Germany (http://agerg.org). It was initiated by David Phillips in 2004 after 30 years of work on the comparison of the British and German education systems and their mutual influence on each other’s educational policy-making. AGERG’s remit remains to initiate and support studies with a focus on comparison of the United Kingdom and Germany, to establish Anglo-German research contacts and to strengthen the friendship between the two countries. The group is currently chaired jointly by David Phillips (University of Oxford) and Rudolf Tippelt (LMU Munich).

‘Why comparing?’ reflects the diverse research interests of the AGERG members. It contains historical, empirical and theoretical studies in comparative education. It discusses particularities and similarities in the educational systems of the United Kingdom and Germany and provides commentaries on their current development. Education and its underlying philosophies in these countries have distinct features, visible not only in historical but also in very recent developments. Both countries are characterised by divergent traditions in education and educational research as Hubert Ertl and Klaus Zierer describe in their article.

Although, national education systems have been increasingly influenced by international policy developments, individual, even divergent directions in educational policies in the two countries can be nonetheless identified. This applies, even if a number of those international trends were inspired by Anglo-Saxon educational concepts. This includes the EU education policy and the European Qualification Framework (EQF) (Clarke and Winch, 2015) and the Bologna reform process.

A prominent and very recent example of divergent perspectives is the continuing education reform in initial teacher education (ITE) in England (see Beauchamp et al. (2015) on differences in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales). The result is a fragmented ITE system in England, created by policy makers who perceive teaching as a craft best learnt in employer-specific school-based programmes and with rather marginalized theoretical inputs (e.g. Kuhlee and Winch, 2017). Whereas in Germany, teaching is still seen as an academic profession, England seems to prefer its de-academization.

In contrast, the current reform policies of English Vocational Education and Training (VET) aimed to foster apprenticeships is a very recent example of a more convergent development. The recent VET reforms also include a shift in focus towards input-related values, such as length, contact hours and curricular design of VET programmes, a clear departure from the former output-oriented VET system (Ofqual, 2016; Sainsbury et al., 2016). Both changes bring the English reforms closer to the general ideas of the traditional input-oriented German dual apprenticeship system.

Broader international trends and developments in education, however, have to be considered and reflected upon when looking at developments in Germany and the UK. PISA and neoliberal inspired educational reform initiatives, for example, have not only gained global relevance but also had specific impacts on the two countries, as discussed by Peter Kelly and Hans-Georg Kotthoff and by Imke von Bargen in this issue. By contrast, while the Bologna process has strongly influenced German higher education (HE), as shown by Dina Kuhlee, it does not seem to have had a similar impact on the English HE sector (Sin and Saunders 2014).

The following provides a brief description of the articles in this issue. They represent ICE’s various epistemological positions, as they are discussed by Manuela Pietraß, who examines comparative methods and methodology, adopting the meta-perspective of philosophy of science. With quantitative empirical research becoming ever more influential, two research orientations within ICE have developed: the idiographic orientation stands in the historical tradition, while the nomothetic has its roots in the social sciences. Epistemological differences between both lead to separate research discourses, which hinder joint contributions to issues of common interest. The fact that both approaches are usually compared by contrasting their differences serves to reinforce this perceived dichotomy. To avoid this, Pietraß uses the concept of ‘systematicity’ (Hoyningen-Huene, 2013) as tertium comparationis, which helps to show commonalities between both research positions. It may function as a bridge for co-operation, which allows researchers to retain their own style of thinking.

The various methodical and methodological positions of ICE’s research are exemplified by the further contributions to this issue. This starts historically with David Phillips’ essay on ‘Writing the history of education in the British Zone of Germany, 1945–1949: A note on sources and challenges’, which gives an insight into the historical research. It begins with setting into order an empirical field, which is only accessible by recordation, remembrance and files. The historian, who steps into a new terrain, is confronted with a dilemma: He still has to find the guidelines he already would need to approach his material. To manage this, he has to figure out how to systematize his findings in the course of finding them. Otherwise he could not see his material without a preconceived view, and his research would not follow the historical writings but instead follow his biased idea of what happened. Phillips demonstrates this challenge on the historical example of research on ‘re-educating’ the Germans after the Second World War. To avoid repetitions it is not possible to approach such a field by chronology, since some policy strands or educational processes cannot be attributed to only one period. Intertwined with the historical findings, this order is the main outcome of historical research: a step to understand the historical uniqueness of educational phenomena, to unfold the dynamic of this field and the contextual dependencies education has to envisage.

David Phillips’ contribution to historical comparative studies plays an important role in Rudolf Tippelt’s article. His review focuses on two central publications that compare the English and German education systems under specific historical perspectives. His analysis focuses on ‘Investigating Education in Germany. Historical studies from a British perspective” published in 2016. This collection of essays represents Phillips’ work of the last 30 years on the comparison of the English and German education systems and issues of educational transfer and borrowing between the two countries. In addition, he introduces Volker Lehnhart’s new edition of ‘Fredericus Augustus Hechtius: De re scholastic Anglica cum Germanica Comparata’ (1795–1798) (Lehnhart, 2015), a very early comparison of German grammar schools and English public schools and their curricular design at the time. Tippelt indicates the value of these historical perspectives. He highlights their importance for the analysis of pedagogical transition processes and the comparative research on present borrowing issues such as the German HE reform initiatives in the context of the Bologna process.

In the following part, three studies within the idiographic tradition are presented by Dina Kuhlee, by Peter Kelly and Hans-Georg Kotthoff and by Imke von Bargen. All explore current educational policy discourses in England and Germany. Dina Kuhlee investigates aspects of policy transfer and borrowing in education using the example of recent transformations within the German HE sector, influenced by Anglo-Saxon concepts. Using data from an empirical case study, she examines the implementation and internalisation processes of the Bologna reform in German university-based teacher education. Her analysis focuses on the different perspectives, understanding and reinterpretations of reform features by stakeholders, from political macro-levels down to university micro-levels, and how these influenced the way stakeholders acted during the implementation process. Her article highlights the impact of unintentional reform effects on lecturers’ approaches to teaching and on students’ approaches to studying and learning. As a result, she indicates specific problems of educational borrowing when it comes to the implementation of reform features and specifies the need for detailed analysis and comparison of educational system characteristics and their function.

In ‘PISA, national and regional education policy and their effect on Mathematics teaching in England and Germany’, Peter Kelly and Hans-Georg Kotthoff discuss a phase of education policy where global consortia such as the OECD set the educational agenda for single nations based on the sharing of ‘performative’ similarities. The authors are interested in how far such de-nationalized policies affect everyday classroom teaching practices. Their study centres on mathematics teaching in England and Germany in the light of the impact of the PISA studies. Here, the research question focuses on findings contextualized within national settings, and shows its strength in the description and effects of educational discourse. Differences between both countries lie in the focus on the market (England) and the more humanistic understanding (Germany) of education. To understand mathematics teaching the authors rely on Bernstein’s concept of teaching subjects, more related to everyday life, or more specialized and complex. They observe types of pedagogic discourse in a qualitative study with 16 teachers. The effects the authors show become visible by contrasting the two nations.

Imke von Bargen’s article also concentrates on current education reform. She investigates the often-central role of the nation state as a unit of comparison and connected to this looks on methodological nationalism and negative points of reference as problematic issues in comparative research studies. Her paper discusses the global trend to introduce neoliberal reform measures in education, which Sahlberg (2012) termed the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), as an example and showcases essential aspects of this reform trend for England and Germany. It reflects on the regular and problematic use of English reforms as a negative comparator in the German discussion. Imke von Bargen introduces methodological frameworks that focus on communalities among nations without neglecting their particularities to avoid the danger of overemphasizing the latter. To this end, she introduces an empirical study on the effects of neoliberal reform measures on teachers’ self-perception in the two countries, and discusses the impact of the research methodology used here. Based on her findings, von Bargen argues for a broader set of criteria for comparative research in the era of globalisation to avoid simplistic conclusions about educational phenomena.

Referring to the significance of comparison in education in general, Michael Hoelscher discusses possible methodological problems of international comparisons based on quantitative data. His article focuses on the interrelation between methodological approaches in comparative research and theory development. He argues that methods applied and data used are central influential factors for analyses and results of research studies and, hence, for the development of theory within the field. Using the example of the ‘Variety of Capitalism’ approach, he shows the relevance of empirical data and methodology used, and discusses in which way these might influence the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses about possible differences in HE systems. He argues for a stronger integration of different approaches in comparative research work, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to avoid false conclusions in comparative research.

The collection closes with a study on both the research discourses of ICE in leading journals from England and Germany. In their article ‘Why comparing? Some insights from a comparison of publications in educational journals in England and Germany’ Hubert Ertl and Klaus Zierer, ‘aim to highlight some of the challenges in comparing two contrasting traditions of educational research’. To achieve this aim, they compared the leading three educational journals in England and Germany in the three areas of authors, methods and themes. This self-reflective approach, research reflecting its own discourse, stands in the German tradition of ‘science research’ (Wissenschaftsforschung). It allows a metaperspective that helps the authors to understand how the respective national discourses on education are mirrored in the discourse of research. The methodical challenge here was a two-fold one: the analysis had to be able to capture the national specifics, and be able to lead to comparable results. The analysis of discourse can be seen as a tertium comparationis established to build a bridge that allows different traits to become comparable. As the authors conclude with regard to their findings: ‘Without looking at scholarly activities and their outcomes in another country the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own academic context are not visible’.