Embodied comparative education. Issue 1 (2nd January 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cowen, Robert
• Is Part Of: Comparative education. Number 54:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 10
• Page End: 25
• Publication Date: 2018-01-02
• Subjects: History of comparative education -- methods in comparative education -- Nigel Grant -- Edmund King -- Brian Holmes -- Joseph Lauwerys -- reading the global; Education -- Periodicals; Comparative education -- Periodicals; 370.9
• DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2017.1409554
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-0068

Abstract

ABSTRACT: One way to look at some of the scholars in English-language comparative education in the 1960s is to see them as being concerned with 'methods'. They themselves emphasised that they were re-thinking 'method' in comparative education. Victories were won and courses were rewritten. That 'historic' moment is taught (if it is taught at all nowadays, because history can be made to disappear) as if all that was at stake is mistakes in method. The general argument of this article is that the complex kaleidoscope of our history can and should be tapped. There was more to the scholars of the 1960s than mere 'method', and there is more to be learned from them, for us now. At a time when – especially in England – it is becoming conventional to stress the importance of technically rigorous empirical fieldwork as the kind of 'robust and relevant research' work that politicians and national academic quality control agencies think the nation needs – it is sensible to pause and ask: is our 'history' of the 1960s, with its remarkable emphasis on discussions about method, a simplification of something more complex? What have we been missing? What questions should we take to the archives, to illuminate the present?