Beijing International Review of Education

This introduction explores the trends, challenges, and possibilities of comparative and international education (CIE) as identified by six comparativist scholars and incorporates some of my own work on this topic. The scholars’ work had diverse foci; however, the overall theme was CIE needing to (re-)center goals of ending socio-historical oppressions. This is with reflectivity that CIE forms a contested terrain of histories, and too-often current trends, of being political tools for sustaining/intensifying oppressions and dominance over Nature. The authors’ calls of CIE for peace, justice, and sustainability were discussed through the following themes with many intersectionalities between the articles: decoloniality, citizenship education that counters citizen/non-citizen othering, globally holistic and planetarily sustainable development and education, and humanizing education that grounds collectivity and de-alienation.

In reflecting on the range of my own and others’ work (and how it is mis/understood), the state of the field, and this special issue, I argue that if one remains vigilant and does not assume or take for granted that the inherent risks of saturation and issues such as aesthetic failure, around, for example, ontologies, epistemologies, and geographic locations are resolved (they aren't), CIE is a field that can be widely expansive. Yet, in the spirit of my previous work around the interconnected dynamic of moving “from discoursal vigilance to concrete possibilities for inclusion” (Misiaszek, 2019), the field's expansiveness is only important if it results in new, concrete contributions to education as a project of social justice in this unprecedented historical moment.

Education is viewed, in general terms, as conductive to social development, intended her as the overall and contextual wellbeing of individuals, communities and societies. Both the ideational and select practices of development emerged and expanded in the past 70 or so years. With colonial education continuing unchallenged in ‘postcolonial’ Africa, complemented by the importation of prepackaged, non-functional development schemes, the need for knowledge and learning reconstructions are urgently needed in the continent. It is with that in mind that this paper undertakes both historical and actual analysis of the situation, beginning with the critical readings and relevant analytical, counter-colonial problematizations of Eurocentric and by extension, monocentric modalities of knowledge, education and development. To be sure, the arbitrary constructions of both the terra and persona Africana by European and EuroAmerican thought leaders who served as the theoretical vanguards for colonialism and contemporary global capitalist domination has led to, and sustains the current situation with respect to African educational and social development contexts. The appreciation of the historical analysis here, as critically attaching to current situations, is important in achieving the needed counter-Eurocentric discursive formations and related reconstructive educational and development possibilities.

This article addresses long standing and inter-connected tensions within Comparative and International Education (cie) as a field of research: those of an inadequate theorising of ‘context’ and of a continued and deeply ‘entangled’ colonial legacy. While supporting many of the arguments outlined in recent theorisations of context as ‘assemblage’ we propose a more explicitly relational cie approach, drawing on both Southern Theory's inter-epistemic project and our learnings from Indigenous scholars of Oceania.

Over the past two decades, a wide range of research literature emerged in the field of Comparative and International Education (cie) engaging in comparing Global Citizenship Education between nations. However, there is scant analysis that explores the research trends and findings in those comparative inquiries focusing on the theorizing and implementation of gce in different national contexts. Through a systematic review of 12 research papers drawing from major cie journals and relevant databases, the current inquiry will assist the international community of cie in understanding the contribution and limitation of this important body of research, and its implications for future comparative studies on gce. The analysis shows that the comparison reference in the existing literature on comparative gce tends to be curriculum documents and frameworks while underrating the experiences and perceptions of individuals involved in the teaching and learning process. Moreover, the national settings where the comparative inquiries of gce were conducted are highly limited in scope, mostly the developed countries in West Europe, East Asia, or North America. This trend limits the possibility to decolonize and transform cie scholarship, which could be reversed with inclusion of new and diverse perspectives and knowledge in future gce research.

Although the phenomenon of student mobility can be traced back to over a thousand years, a remarkable increase began from 1995 when the World Trade Organization released the General Agreement on Trade in Services, making higher education a tradable commodity. International mobility programs have the potential to provide the environment for global citizenship by empowering students to be resilient and become citizens of the world. Higher education institutions are clamoring to prepare students for living in highly diverse societies, and countries use the soft power of international exchanges to develop goodwill. However, the striking increase in student mobility has suddenly come to a dramatic halt in recent months globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact on international students has been most severe. In this context, this paper briefly discusses the evolution of student mobility and how it fosters global citizenship.

In this paper, we examine how alienation plays out in conditions of advanced neoliberalisation in education. We discuss two examples which exemplify the depth and extent of alienation. First the attacks on critical thinking in education that have been spearheaded by the ‘School without [political] parties’ ['Escola sem Partido'] project in Brazil. Second, the mental health crisis that is rampant among staff and students in the UK higher education. Drawing on Freire, we explore how ‘the organization of alienation’ can fuel acts of resistance and praxis which can help us reclaim education and society from the forces of the market. The examples we draw on in relation to Brazil and the UK have not yet become mainstream strategies, especially internationally, that can sustain a resistance movement in education, but they form successful local, in some cases national even, strategies that seem to be able to open new possibilities which can eventually help us find creative and effective ways to make the organisation of alienation the project for Being More that Freire envisaged.

This article discusses the perspectives of teaching faculty on the growing number of international students in their undergraduate classrooms. Our analysis takes note of expressions of emotion in faculty accounts and uses these to draw attention to the careful deliberations by which faculty reconcile personal commitments with the changing conditions of their work. We highlight moral and epistemological tensions in the project of internationalizing higher education. While these tensions have been considered for some time in critical comparative education circles, they are rarely acknowledged at the level of the mundane, daily practices of teaching. Our findings lead us to propose an alternative figuring of internationalization as a moral project. We believe that shifting the discussion toward moral tensions embedded in the lived reality of the contemporary university provides a rich ground for resolving any number of vexing dilemmas and, perhaps, to realizing the promise of internationalization.