Page 39 - Education in a Digital World

26 Theoretical Approaches

the nineteenth century. As Novoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) point out, the allure of
the ‘other’ has been a longstanding interest of educational scholars – progressing
from early twentieth-century interests in ‘knowing the other’ and ‘understanding
the other’ through to later post-war concerns with ‘constructing the other’ and then
most recently in ‘measuring the other’ (Halls 1990). Given this heritage, it is now
recognised widely within the academic study of education (if not so regularly acted
upon) that comparing different cases with each other can be of distinct advantage.
This has prompted a continuing interest within contemporary educational scholarship
in moving beyond examining two different cases and striving instead to undertake
work that is ‘implicitly comparative’ (Phillips and Schweisfurth 2008).
Perhaps the main benefit that ‘implicitly comparative’ approaches bring to the
study of education is to shift attention away from the Euro-American descriptions
and analyses of education. This is especially the case with educationalists working
from an Anglo-Saxon perspective. Here, the comparative education approach can
encourage educationalists to engage with otherwise marginalised, non-English
speaking traditions of teaching and learning, knowing and doing. As Phillips and
Schweisfurth (2008) describe, comparative studies of education therefore allow
English-speaking writers and researchers to:

show what is possible by examining alternatives to provision ‘at home’;
offer comparisons by which to judge the performance of education systems;
describe what consequences may arise from certain courses of action by looking
at experience in various countries;
provide examples that allow them to see various practices and procedures in a
wider context – throwing new light on what they know.

As this list suggests, one of the general advantages of the comparative education
approach is allowing individual educational systems to learn from the experience of
others and to understand better the nature of the problems that confront them –
what can be seen as ‘learning from comparing’ (Dale 2005). Yet more useful still for
the purposes of our own analysis is what Roger Dale terms ‘explaining through
comparing’. Here, the experiences of other systems are analysed not simply in an
attempt to help improve education provision ‘at home’ or in a normative attempt to
“prescribe rules for the good conduct” (Lauwerys and Taylor 1973, p.xii). Instead,
comparative analyses are pursued with the aim of developing fuller understandings
and explanations of the various re-articulations and re-scalings of education that
result from wider political, economic, social and cultural shifts.
In this spirit of ‘explaining through comparing’ there are many issues that can
inform our proceeding analyses of education and technology around the world.
In particular, a growing theme within the comparative education literature has been
that of exploring the significance of context at all levels and in many forms. The
most successful recent comparative approaches have been those seeking to take
account of “the historical, cultural, social [and] economic contexts in which