Comparative education in an age of competition and collaboration

Abstract

Comparative education relies on experiences, expertise, data, and criticism derived from multiple contexts and diverse levels to generate insights, facilitate understanding, and explain change. Marked by connectivity, our contemporary era vastly increases the (potential) diffusion of ideas essential for scientific advance. Three interlocking trends emphasise the growing relevance of comparative educational research. Firstly, competition has become more potentamong scholars, their organisations, and within as across countries. Secondly, educational studies, as science more generally, are increasingly conducted in collaboration -across disciplinary, cultural, linguistic, and organisational boundariesenhancing the potential for discovery while producing influential scholarship. Thirdly, while educational research and policymaking are increasingly comparative, comparative knowledge stores are often only selectively used. To counter such reductionism, indepth comparative institutional analysis across divides of academy, politics, and practice remain crucial. The multidisciplinary field must claim its relevance more persuasively, even as scholarly exchange, mobilities, and cultural knowledge endure as vital foundations. Introduction: comparative education between experience, exchange and evaluationComparative education relies on experiences, expertise, data, and criticism derived from multiple contexts and diverse levels to generate insights, facilitate understanding, and explain change. We live in an age marked by extraordinary mobility, an encompassing Internet, and English as the increasingly-dominant scientific lingua franca. These phenomena extend our connectivity and vastly increase the (potential) diffusion of ideasthe essence of scientific advanceand policy learning, as challenging as it remains to adapt solutions found within complex institutional settings to others. Worldwide, institutions and organisations of education and science have dramatically expanded, becoming key sites of exchange and debate that are crucial for innovation. From international conference participation and academic exchange to sabbaticals and even careers abroad, individual spatial mobility has become a sine qua non of the (successful) scientific career (see Kim 2017). For comparative and international education, even more for

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