Education and Geopolitics in a Changing Europe: Forty Years of Scholarship in European Education

This article chronicles the history of the journal European Education since its establishment in 1969 by placing it within the larger context of geopolitical changes of the twentieth century and the historical debates on theory and method in the field of comparative education. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 40 journal volumes (158 journal issues and 1,176 articles), the article explains how the journal attempted to return comparative education in the United States perspective to its original geographic epicenter, Western Europe, and provided a space for cross-national comparisons on pedagogical issues like curriculum. The article also demonstrates the various geopolitical pressures on the journal within a cold war and later a postsocialist framework. It concludes by looking at the future of journal by understanding its original purpose and the contemporary debates within comparative education

An American Construction of European Education Space

The construction of the European education space has typically been attributed to European education policy makers, institutions, and networks. Rarely do scholars consider the role of outside, non-European actors in shaping the terrain of European education thought and practice. This article considers the construction of the European education space as a borderless project with multidirectional flows of ideas, policies, and academics. While this project has created an intellectual space for the emergence of new theoretical insights and policy instruments within Europe, it has also had inevitable consequences for the study of comparative education outside Europe. This article explores how American scholars have attempted to influence the development of comparative education as a field in the United States by purposefully constructing specific notions of European education during the cold war (1969–85). Drawing on content analysis of comparative education scholarship in Western European Education — a journal published in the United States — this article discusses the role of journal editors in the construction of European education spaces in order to advance not only a marginalized geographical area of study within the expanding American field of comparative education, but also a methodological vision for the future of comparative education, one free of positivist techniques, quantitative methodologies, and modernization ideologies

Higher education reform and the landscape diversity of higher education institutions in the Kyrgyz Republic, 1991–2015

Following its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Kyrgyzstan experienced processes of change across all areas of social, political and economic life. Higher education reform has been central to this agenda, and between 1991 and today the Soviet-era system of state-funded and Communist Party controlled higher education institutions (HEIs) in Kyrgyzstan has been transformed into an expansive, diverse, unequal, semi-privatized and marketized higher education (HE) landscape. Mindful of arguments that the marketization of higher education does not necessarily generate institutional diversification, that government regulation does not necessarily lead to homogenization among institutions, and that universities’ own institutional strategies and responses to environmental changes shape processes of structural reform in complex ways, this paper assesses the specific character of these changes to the higher education landscape in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. After briefly describing the structure and financing of higher education in the Kirgiz Soviet Socialist Republic from 1917–1991, we consider some key factors which have shaped patterns of the differentiation and diversification of HE in the post-Soviet period. These include the historical legacies of Soviet HE infrastructures, new legal and political frameworks for HE governance and finance, changes to regulations for the licensing of institutions and academic credentials, the introduction of new multinational policy agendas for higher education in the Central Asian region, changes in the relationship between higher education and labor, the introduction of a national university admissions examination, and the adoption of certain principles of the European Bologna Process. The picture of HE reform that emerges from this analysis is one in which concurrent processes of diversification and homogenization are not driven wholly by either state regulation or forces of market competition, but mediated by universities’ strategic negotiations of these forces in the context of historical institutional formations in Kyrgyzstan

Researching shadow education: Methodological challenges and directions

Research on shadow education has considerably increased in volume and has helped to improve understanding of the scale, nature, and implications of the phenomenon. However, the field is still in its infancy. Literature on shadow education reflects confusion over terms and parameters, and data suffer from challenges in securing evidence from actors who may be unwilling or unable to respond to enquiries in a clear manner. Particular care is needed in cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons. Nevertheless, the trajectory of improvement in both conceptualisation and instrumentation gives ground for confidence that shadow education will be progressively better documented and better understood. © Education Research Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 2010.published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 01 Dec 201

Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices