Comparison and Context: The Interdisciplinary Approach to the Comparative Study of Education

Abstract

The symposium on Rethinking Culture, Context, and Comparison in Education and Development brought together several groups of noted scholars. Of those, I would like to focus on two: those that utilize a disciplinary lens versus those that apply an interdisciplinary, or rather multidisciplinary approach to the comparative inquiry of education [1]. A very brief sketch of institutional history may be in order here, given that the Department of International and Transcultural Studies sponsored the symposium in spring 2013. For several decades and until 1997, the program in International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, was situated in a department titled "Philosophy and the Social Sciences" alongside all foundation studies or disciplines of education: anthropology and education, economics and education, history and education, philosophy and education, politics and education, religion and education, and sociology and education. Students were able to study comparative education in combination with one of the seven disciplines in the department. An eighth program was in that department labeled "International Educational Development" (nowadays subsumed under the name International and Comparative Education) that drew from methods and theories of inquiry from several disciplines. By definition, the program in International Educational Development (IED) is, to this day, interdisciplinary. At some universities, the international and comparative programs were associated with area studies and offered a concentration in a geographic region. Similarly to developments at other universities in the United States, starting in the 1960s the program in International Educational Development attracted a much larger number of students than the discipline-based programs. The number of graduate programs, the size of professional associations, the reach of academic journals but also jobs associated with the field of International and Comparative Education expanded rapidly over the last twenty years. Due to a series of reorganizations at the college level, the Department of International and Transcultural Studies now hosts two reputable programs: the large interdisciplinary program of International Educational Development and a smaller program in Anthropology and Education. As such, the IED program closely collaborates with faculty and students that are spread out throughout the college and the wider campus at Columbia University. Said this, the stark contrast between anthropology and comparative education, which anthropologist Herve Varenne suggested during the closing panel of the symposium, rests in my opinion on a false dichotomy. The debate should be, in my opinion, between disciplinary versus interdisciplinary approaches to the comparative study of education. I argue that the method of comparison relies on an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand and generalize findings on similarities and differences between educational practices, beliefs, and systems. As I will argue throughout this essay, sample size (N) matters a great deal in this debate.