The research group on International and Comparative Education builds on earlier traditions in the field from Stockholm University and is nowadays an integrated part of the Department of Education. This chapter begins with a retrospective view of the history of international and comparative education at Stockholm University. It describes the development of this research field at the Department of Education and the work with partner organisations, universities and colleagues. The chapter will also touch on the Master’s Program in International and Comparative Education. The current function of international and comparative education at the department in 2021 will be described and discussed as the group continues to develop research with local, national and international scholars, research organisations, colleagues and other educational actors.
World society has recently embarked on a fifteen-year global agenda towards improving our future. Agenda 2030 which was launched by the UN in 2015 refers to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), of which the fourth involves good quality education. While high quality of education is a cultivation of our future, the advent of globalization has impacted on it in unprecedented ways.
In higher education, globalization has increasingly driven the sector based on market ideology using ‘high quality’ as synonymous with ‘internationalization’. This in turn has been exploited to justify the escalating status competition between universities striving to internationalise in a globalized knowledge economy.
This warrants an examination of the extent to which current national reform work on IHE resonates with reasoning on sustainable futures. Central to the theme is a case study comparing how two Nordic countries, Sweden and Finland, respond to globalization through institutional change. Both countries are currently undergoing higher education reforms of the ways in which universities engage in international education. The choice of the two neighbouring countries is motivated by their top place on global sustainability scales. The data consists of two national policy documents on IHE (OKM 2017:11; SOU 2018:3). Comparative analyses across dimensions of sustainability appearing in text articulations of SDG4 will be conducted using a discourse analytic text analyses.
The findings contribute towards comparative methodology applied within and across dimensions of a Nordic example of societal change which is highly relevant for educational research in the region.
This comparative case study addresses a timely issue engaging researchers involved in the internationalisation of Nordic Higher Education, in the context of Sweden and Finland. The study examines a hypothetical imaginary in the transition between university international policy statements and their understandings from the position of a globalised episteme. The investigation forms a tag-project as part of a funded large international research project examining ethical internationalism in times of global crises, involving a partnership between more than twenty higher education institutions in excess of ten countries across five continents. The data was collected using a mixed-methods design, whilst being controlled across the matched data collection period in 2013-2014. Data consisted of policy texts, surveys and interviews. The current research inquiry reports on a within and across comparative analyses of certain policy texts and follow-up interviews with university management. The results yield logical support for a global higher education imaginary driving internationalisation in ways which reveal paradoxical associations between the imagined and the real worlds of international scholar-practitioners.
This presentation responds to the current national strategy work on internationalisation policy underway in higher education in the context of typifying the Nordic model. The current policy formulation of internationalizing higher education and in particular the recent Swedish Government Inquiry Remit is weighed against its comparative value across the top rated SGD Index countries of Denmark, Finland and Norway. Indicators are then weighed against IHE in top performing countries on the Global Sustainable Competitiveness Index (2017) outside the Nordic region.
Of central interest is a comparative analysis of the social rationales on sustainability as formulated within national policy strategies for internationalization in relation to SDG4 indicators. The paper presents a comparative case study enquiry into how sustainability indicators within IHE reform work may or may not identify typologies that influence their enactment in the transfer from policy to equitable action.
This paper considers what value of comparability exists across national IHE strategies. It focuses on examining what comparative, country-specific sustainable conditions might influence the future development of IHE. We explore comparative patterns articulating sustainability across policy directionality looking specifically at the junctures between thought and enactment, visibility and performance and the progression between the imagined and authentic in policy development (Meyer, 2010). In what ways might such comparisons yield indications for developing sustainability across IHE? The paper examines how world society theory and sustainability intersect in IHE policy.
This paper concerns research issues on curriculum, pedagogy and the creative use of method in international higher education. It is motivated by the witnessing of a recent shifting in consensus within the global research communities on international education, towards curriculum renewal of shared knowledge within the field. The article enters into an imaginary of alternative pedagogical routes in IHE and contributes to the collective dialogue by way of a case example using creative writing for transitioning from the actual to the possible in international education. The paper narrates a creatively assembled case study on interdisciplinary methodology. It culminates through correspondence between an international doctoral researcher of Fine Arts and a senior scholar of International Education. The article explores autobiographical research accounts about geographical displacement, the subjectivities produced in international scholarly spaces and their new epistemological imprints on the international student transition experience. The article offers generative curriculum insight that combines interdisciplinary methods through which to feasibly implement pedagogical strategies for renewal of internationalized curriculum beyond times of educational crises.
The advent of globalization is one of the most transformational projects in modern society. As such, its impact has been urgently sensed in the field and the institutions of education, which are publicly recognized as the most effective instrument in nation building.
This article begins with the proposition that inter- and transdisciplinarity offer an important methodological grounding for collaborative HE research addressing complex agendas such as HE internationalization. Internationalization acts as a figure for the ‘troubled’ nature of higher education; hence we begin with the larger problem, discussing the current crises of disciplinary knowledge as the background question. We set out a framework for understanding and conceptualizing inter- and transdisciplinarity as a meta-theoretical approach that problematizes reductive and disciplinary approaches, in favour of research and analytical strategies which can work with, and across, differences. To work further through and operationalize different possibilities offered by inter-and transdisciplinary approaches to HE internationalizations, we discuss the use of tools such as social cartography to do ‘bridging work’ across different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds and contexts. A non-formal practitioner–collaborator project is discussed to highlight emergent dimensions of collaboration that might otherwise be overlooked. Inter- and transdisciplinarity are not pre-specified specialized ‘methods’ but, rather, are orientations that may take reductive, convergent, divergent or emergent pathways. Inter- and transdisciplinarity can perhaps be best treated as a problematizing and open-ended methodological approach that foregrounds plurality and contestation, orienting research frameworks towards inclusiveness, tensions, unpredictability and complexity.
This chapter reports on recent mixed method research investigating the comparability between assessment in relation to linguistic and cultural diversity. It takes as its premise that assessment is an integral part of instruction that becomes a main component for attaining of equal opportunities. Therefore, assessment plays a key role in terms of the wider consequences at both individual and societal levels. One of the central functions of assessment is its measure of quality assurance and comparability for grading to such an extent that it is readily employed to indicate evidence of student achievement of standards and quality. This may sometimes present issues in terms of learner diversity. We focus on the challenges facing teaching in linguistically diverse learning settings in which a foreign language may be used as an alternative to instruction. Here we draw on a recent study from two separate multilingual learning contexts in Sweden. We shed light on the generic questions arising from such disjuncture in these linguistically diverse educational sites as evidence on a call for much needed scholarly attention on the quality aspect in assessment.
This paper presents a methodological solution to a main challenge quantitative research has to meet: The construction of measurement equivalence. Using an international research project investigating future teachers’ career choice motives, the paper demonstrates a validation approach for scales obtained from confirmatory factor analysis across countries. Measurement invariance analyses provide information on whether cross-country differences result from cultural bias, misconceptions or mistranslations during the construction of the instrument. Thus, the methodological approach helps to ensure the validity of quantitative transnational research by incorporating the demand for comparability into the instrument. The results show country specific differences among future teachers’ career choice motives that can be linked to different political and social framework conditions, including the appreciation of altruistic motives, working conditions or the universities’ content structure of their teacher training programs.
This contribution presents results from the career choice motives of German, Romanian, Swedish and Californian students enrolled in teacher training programs. It compares their intrinsic, extrinsic, and pragmatic motives and presents first assumptions how structural conditions might shape the career choice motives. The countries were selected due to their differences regarding socio-economic (e.g. salary), political (e.g. the way the teacher training is structured) and cultural (e.g. the appraisal of altruistic motives) conditions. This paper presents the full quantitative analysis of the aforementioned countries for the first time and draws connections with specific structural conditions. The subsequent steps of the project will use qualitative methods to enhance the understanding of the quantitative differences.
This paper focuses on the study and career choice motives of students of early childhood education in the context of different job profiles and paths to professionalization. It is based on a comparison between Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. The study and career choice motives of students of early childhood education (N = 416) from the three countries are determined and compared using MANOVAs. Main differences lie in the orientation of intrinsic motives (clientele vs. society based) and in the value of extrinsic motives. The findings are discussed with regard to recommendations for the process of professionalization of early childhood education in Germany.
The present study compares student teachers’ career choice motives and their relationship with stress-inducing thoughts across five European countries. A previously established factorial structure for career choice motives embedded within self-determination theory was supported. The factors consist of intrinsic motives, such as interest in educational work with children, and extrinsic motives, such as financial security. Furthermore, differences in the importance of these factors in choosing the teaching profession across countries were found. Results further revealed evidence for a link between extrinsic motives and stress-inducing cognitions. Conclusions and implications for teaching practice are discussed.
Writing letters as discursive practice can materialize the desire or need to interact across distance by disclosing a multitude of expressions and traditions. Letters form a means of representation of everyday life, in art, in literature, and as a strategy for data collection in social research. This case study traces accidental, yet autonomous research encounters spanning over ten years in three global continents and is structured by adaptation of Bruner’s (1986) narrative theory which relates to the concept of the imaginary as a significant meaning-making device of human experience. The chapter explores how auto-ethnographic perspective and arts-based research narrate experiences lived in letters, revealing scenes that would otherwise be hidden and developing critical reflections about the subjectivities produced in international scholarly spaces. We present the creative weaving of cross-cultural dialogue which brings to life an aesthetic dimension from artistic methodology and teaches us about our experience of being in the world.
The present study compares career choice motives of future early childhood educators studying for a tertiary qualification. Suitable analyses of this kind are still missing. Diverging training systems, traditions and professional images in the different countries are related to certain motives. These motives are categorised according to a theory that is used as a theoretical framework. The study takes into account 468 student teachers from Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Romania and is methodologically based on variance analyses. Overall, intrinsic motives were found to be of greater significance. This applies equally to all countries. Furthermore, addressee-related motives are more pronounced among Swiss and German prospective early childhood educators than among those from Sweden or Romania. On the contrary, extrinsic motives have a stronger presence among Romanian student teachers. Income and prestige, as the only exceptions, are important for students from Sweden and Switzerland. The results are discussed referring to country-specific working conditions and the current status of professionalisation processes existing in problem areas.