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Guided by social cognitive theory (SCT), this research investigates the structural relationships among local culture, teacher efficacy, and teachers’ exercise of curricular autonomy. A total of 605 Korean elementary school teachers completed survey questionnaires that underwent structural equation modeling analysis with a phantom model approach to identify the motivational factors and their relationships. The results indicate that teachers’ degree of internalization of mainstream Korean culture and teacher efficacy influence their implementation of the reform agenda, while teacher efficacy mediates the effect of culture. Theoretical and practical implications for scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners are provided.

Jordan, along with Lebanon, has the greatest influx of Syrian refugees in the world. To address the issue of overcrowding in schools, a double-shift system operates in Jordan, whereby Jordanian students receive schooling in the morning; and Syrian and other refugee students, in the afternoon. The purpose of this article is to examine the social ontological perspectives of 92 Arab female youth (Jordanian and Arab refugee) through analysis of their views on citizen identity and the citizenship discourse promoted in 3 all-girl double-shift secondary schools in Amman. The youths’ ontologies are informed by a complex set of identity markers; namely, nationality, religion, culture, ethnicity (Arabness), gender, and developmental stage (youth). The study reveals that youth ontological security is rooted in Arab heritage, Islamic identity, and the state’s emphasis on preservation of peace over student reactions to contemporary political crises in the Middle East. This empirically grounded, qualitative scholarship serves as a call for more youth studies on citizen identity in the Arab world.

My decade-long research on democracy and schooling in a Xhosa township has led to an examination of epistemological influences on democratic citizenship from Western and non-Western (i.e. African) perspectives. While Max Weber advanced the notion of an autonomous citizen within Western democratic states, different philosophical and cultural assumptions operate in South Africa, where the individual is viewed as not separate from, but rather embedded in, the community into which one is born. This theoretical position – a person is a person through other people (isiXhosa proverb) – serves as a thoughtful starting point for theorising a critical democratic citizenship education. This article explores Western and non-Western influences through scholarly literature and practitioner perspectives. The goal is to consider the convergences and divergences between Western and indigenous knowledge with ubuntu (humanness), an African moral ethic, as its key construct.

Post-apartheid South Africa has some of the highest educational and economic disparities in the world. Taylor Salisbury’s (2016) analysis of the National Income Dynamics Study reveals that South Africa’s unequal distributions of income and wealth by race are likely to worsen over time, with Africans the most disenfranchised by low-quality education and low monthly earnings. What is missing from Salisbury’s discussion is that definitions of quality education are analogous to Western democracy, epistemologies, and curriculum. Township schools where most African children and youth attend do not draw upon African epistemologies, values, and languages to support the development of Africans’ productive capacities. Increasingly, capacities are only considered “productive” if they align with modernity and values of the labor market. In this chapter, I argue that South Africa is schooling inequality through the exclusion of African epistemological traditions and the inclusion of mainly Western liberal principles. The notion of divided (epistemological) space – separate, distinct, and apportioned – is examined from the research data I collected with African (in this case Xhosa) primary and secondary students, teachers, and principals in South Africa’s longest-standing township. The intent is to orient the field of comparative and international education to critically problematize discourse that identifies equality as central to social change but that ignores indigenous constructions of democracy informed by different epistemological traditions. This work builds on the growing argument about the need for comparative educators to learn from indigenous perspectives (Freeman, 2004), indigenous knowledge systems (Kubow, 2007), and different educational traditions for comparative study (Assie-Lumumba, 2017).

Guest Editors’ Introduction to the FIRE Special Issue on “The Place and Future of Comparative Education in Teacher Education”. The full text of the article can be found at 10.18275/fire201603011124

The Comparative Education Instructional Materials Archive (CEIMA) is an electronic, publically accessible website for the gathering and sharing of teaching resources among comparative educators worldwide.

Democracy plays an ideological role by helping people to envision social changes they seek as desirable. According to Lynn Davies (1999, 131), democracy “is one of the current ‘grand narratives’” with “the discursive power to legitimate very different value systems.” The democratic concepts of freedom, equality, and agency are central to this grand narrative, and the presumed task is for citizens to actualize those aspects in their respective environments. Although comparative educators have explored a host of global-local dichotomies, much less attention has been given to the complex intersection of the global and the local in relation to democracy and culture and, in particular, the role that both theoreticians and practitioners play in conceptualizing democracy and citizenship within democratic nation-states. My purpose in this article is to explore the roles of knowledge in constructions of democracy. First, I discuss theoretical ways to differentiate among some of the existing perspectives on democracy and citizenship within democratic states. I examine Western conceptions of democracy and democratic citizenship, which draw distinctions between the individual and the citizen, to show how they separate the public and private spheres of citizens’ lives. From the perspective of these distinctions, local culture and indigenous knowledge are often devalued, and capitalism is paired with democracy to form a closely aligned economic and political structure. Implicated in this totalizing narrative are relations between indigenous and nonindigenous groups and between men/boys and women/girls. Second, to explore how global-local aspects shape democracy and citizenship, I consider teachers’ voices from two democratic African nations, South Africa and Kenya. Both countries face challenges to strengthening democratic environments and governance institutions. It is at the local level that “the sharpest institutional conflicts about poverty, entitlement and governance play out” (Brown and Folscher 2005, xv), for party-political dominance has led to corrupt administrations. Citizens’ needs for services, such as housing, are largely unmet. Third, I draw on Western and on African viewpoints to construct a conception of democracy as freedom of mind and human agency. Drawing upon discourse on democracy and democratic citizenship

Introduction to the FIRE Special Issue titled, "Reimagining Internationalization: Critical Dialogues on Global Dimensions of Education". The full text of the article can be found at 10.18275/fire201502021074

The most provocative public policy to grow out of the educational reform movement that began in the early 1980s has been the use of standardized, high-stakes tests to motivate and monitor the accomplishment of state and national goals of academic progress and student achievement. This article considers such proficiency testing as a cautionary lesson in the formation of public policy. Primary research conducted by the authors regarding the impact proficiency testing has had on an upper-middle-class school district reveals the perception of constituents most affected by proficiency testing. The thesis that emerges is that political power can dictate compliance, but commitment will emerge only when there is open dialogue in formulating and improving policy.

This discussion essay explores trends and issues in the teaching of comparative education. We argue that the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) must give more attention to the aspect of teaching, as comparative education courses are increasingly being affected by diminishing devotion to social foundations of education programming in many institutions of higher education and schools. Ironically, despite growing pluralism, the rise of economic utilitarianism has led to technicist-driven curriculum and less inquiry about philosophical, historical, and cultural assumptions underlying educational policy and practice. Another challenge in the teaching of comparative education is that students are often ill-prepared to understand and utilize the most basic social science concepts. Recognizing that teaching and research in CIE are inevitably linked, it is argued that a transformational model that advances CIE across disciplines, schools, and departments may reinforce its importance and ensure that the benefits that comparative inquiry affords – namely critical reflexivity, insight about school–society relationships, and possibilities for educational improvement – are addressed and safeguarded in tertiary and teacher education. An understanding of cultural and national contexts is important to educational reform and enables educators to view globalization in terms of how it benefits or undermines humanistic aims, namely the importance of individuals and the uniqueness of cultures.

(2000). Fostering Democracy in Middle School Classrooms: Insights from a Democratic Institute in Hungary. The Social Studies: Vol. 91, No. 6, pp. 265-271.