World Council of Comparative Education Societies – serie

Migration is one of the major phenomena that characterizes the modern world and even more post-modernity. Improved transportation and advanced technology have facilitated transition from place to place and this phenomenon of greater mobility has changed the world and humanity. Given the fact that many countries in both the developed and underdeveloped world face similar challenges due to the current mass migration, comparative research in terms of the responses of government and non-government organizations (NGOs), both local and international, allows for a deeper understanding of ways of approaching the many challenges relating to immigration and education. The comparative dimension enables both scholars and policy makers to compare and contrast different approaches and to weigh up what approach is most suitable for their circumstances.The aim of Migrants and Comparative Education: Call to Re/Engagement is to bring together new research and conceptualizations on education’s complex and evolving role in the immigration process in different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical perspectives. It is hoped that by so doing a better understanding will emerge of the issues and challenges associated with immigration that can assist policy makers and practitioners.

Migration is one of the major phenomena that characterizes the modern world and even more post-modernity. Improved transportation and advanced technology have facilitated transition from place to place and this phenomenon of greater mobility has changed the world and humanity. Given the fact that many countries in both the developed and underdeveloped world face similar challenges due to the current mass migration, comparative research in terms of the responses of government and non-government organizations (NGOs), both local and international, allows for a deeper understanding of ways of approaching the many challenges relating to immigration and education. The comparative dimension enables both scholars and policy makers to compare and contrast different approaches and to weigh up what approach is most suitable for their circumstances.The aim of Migrants and Comparative Education: Call to Re/Engagement is to bring together new research and conceptualizations on education’s complex and evolving role in the immigration process in different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical perspectives. It is hoped that by so doing a better understanding will emerge of the issues and challenges associated with immigration that can assist policy makers and practitioners.

This multi-authored volume draws on the collective experiences of a team of researcher-practitioners, from three Oceanic universities, in an aid-funded intervention program for enhancing literacy learning in Pacific Islands primary education schools. The interventions explored here—in Solomon Islands and Tonga—were implemented via a four-year collaboration which adopted a design-based research approach to bringing about sustainable improvements in teacher and student learning, and in the delivery and evaluation of educational aid. This approach demanded that learning from the context of practice should be determining of both content and process; that all involved in the interventions should see themselves as learners. Essential to the trusting and respectful relationships required for this approach was the program’s acknowledgement of relationality as central to indigenous Oceanic societies, and of education as a relational activity.Relationality and Learning in Oceania: Contextualizing Education for Development addresses debates current in both comparative education and international aid. Argued strongly is that relational research-practice approaches (south-south, south-north) which center the importance of context and culture, and the significance of indigenous epistemologies, are required to strengthen education within the post-colonial relational space of Oceania, and to inform the various agencies and actors involved in ‘education for development’ in Oceania and globally. Maintained is that the development of education structures and processes within the contexts explored through the chapters comprising this volume, continues to be a negotiation between the complexity of historically developed local 'traditions' and understandings and the ‘global’ imperatives shaped by dominant development discourses.

There is a dire need today to create spaces in which people can make meaning of their existence in the world, abiding by cultural frameworks and practices that acknowledge and validate a meaningful existence for all. People are not just isolated individuals but are connected in diverse ways with other persons within our natural and social environment which is part of the whole universe. The African philosophy of uBuntu or humaneness is re-emerging for its timely relevance and potential as indispensable in our quest for global citizenship, peace, and mutual understanding in securing sustainable human development in the broader ecosystem. Comparative educationists have the challenge to devise theoretical frameworks, epistemological and pedagogical constructs as well as pragmatic, useful and effective ways of promoting the virtues of compassion and recognition of our common humanity in eliminating the ills of domination and control that are guided by greed, hatred, jealousy, and intolerance. Comparative Education for Global Citizenship, Peace and Shared Living through Ubuntu paves the way for a better understanding of the critical importance of the collective search and endeavor towards achieving the virtues of nonviolence, peace, shared values of living together, global citizenship, improved quality of life for all and a better appreciation of the positive implications of interdependence.

There is a dire need today to create spaces in which people can make meaning of their existence in the world, abiding by cultural frameworks and practices that acknowledge and validate a meaningful existence for all. People are not just isolated individuals but are connected in diverse ways with other persons within our natural and social environment which is part of the whole universe. The African philosophy of uBuntu or humaneness is re-emerging for its timely relevance and potential as indispensable in our quest for global citizenship, peace, and mutual understanding in securing sustainable human development in the broader ecosystem. Comparative educationists have the challenge to devise theoretical frameworks, epistemological and pedagogical constructs as well as pragmatic, useful and effective ways of promoting the virtues of compassion and recognition of our common humanity in eliminating the ills of domination and control that are guided by greed, hatred, jealousy, and intolerance. Comparative Education for Global Citizenship, Peace and Shared Living through Ubuntu paves the way for a better understanding of the critical importance of the collective search and endeavor towards achieving the virtues of nonviolence, peace, shared values of living together, global citizenship, improved quality of life for all and a better appreciation of the positive implications of interdependence.

This volume contributes to the advancement of comparative education in the world, more specifically in expanding understandings of the discourse of comparative education vis-à-vis educational transformation. Throughout the text, three critical elements that reflect comparative education as an open, inconclusive discourse come up: (1) There is sufficient pedagogical space for dissonance. It is always possible to compare one’s own authenticity with the epistemological position others hold dear and argue for. (2) The contributions in this book should not be read as absolute pieces of writing as that would undermine the flexible nature of education. It is important to point out that the opinions of the authors are temporary moments of attachment to persuasive claims. However, these claims are not cast in stone as new views continue to emerge from epistemological (re)positioning. (3) Our own reading of the book corroborates our interest in comparative education as a continuous discourse in the making. The contributions of scholars at the third symposium organized by WCCES provided a platform for them to pursue their knowledge interests. In addition, these interests have and will or ought never to be homogenous for that would be incommensurate with a defensible practice of comparative education.

This volume contributes to the advancement of comparative education in the world, more specifically in expanding understandings of the discourse of comparative education vis-à-vis educational transformation. Throughout the text, three critical elements that reflect comparative education as an open, inconclusive discourse come up: (1) There is sufficient pedagogical space for dissonance. It is always possible to compare one’s own authenticity with the epistemological position others hold dear and argue for. (2) The contributions in this book should not be read as absolute pieces of writing as that would undermine the flexible nature of education. It is important to point out that the opinions of the authors are temporary moments of attachment to persuasive claims. However, these claims are not cast in stone as new views continue to emerge from epistemological (re)positioning. (3) Our own reading of the book corroborates our interest in comparative education as a continuous discourse in the making. The contributions of scholars at the third symposium organized by WCCES provided a platform for them to pursue their knowledge interests. In addition, these interests have and will or ought never to be homogenous for that would be incommensurate with a defensible practice of comparative education.

In this book, emotional teaching-learning is explored as it is cultivated based on teachers’ and learners’ attraction to reasonableness and emotions and can give rise to a plausible form of decoloniality or decolonisation in and through education. It is argued that when the latter manifests, the democratic transformation of education might ensue. Put differently, decoloniality and/or decolonisation of education is a substantive way to look at the democratisation and, by implication, transformation of education and schooling. Readers are invited to engage with the meanings espoused throughout this book in the quest to cultivate a genuinely decolonial form of education in universities and schools, where values education should be enacted reasonably and emotively in such educational institutions. Teachers and learners cannot remain silent when oppressive and hegemonic forces of modernity continue to guide educational practices in institutions.Contributors are: Ahoud Alasfour, N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, Emiliano Bosio, José Brás, Juan Carlos Rodriguez Camacho, Michael Cottrell, Lucimar Dantas, Amanda Fiore, Carla Galego, Maria Neves Gonçalves, Logan Govender, Beatriz Koppe, Sibonokuhle Ndlovu, Phefumula Nyoni, Adaobiagu Nnemdi Obiagu, Peter Oyewole, Theresa A. Papp, Martyn Reynolds, Kabini Sanga, V. Sucharita, Yusef Waghid and Emnet Tadesse Woldegiorgis.