Comparative Educational Administration: Considering Context in Research and Practice

• In Event: 66.021 - Contexts and Challenges for Educational Leadership and Administration: Research From an Americas Perspective

Abstract

Twenty years ago, Dimmock and Walker (1998) critiqued the field of educational administration for the “relative absence of cross-cultural analyses” (p. 559) and called for “mapping a distinctive territory of comparative educational administration” (p. 560). Using data from a systematic review of 87 articles published about school level leadership and administration in 8 key comparative education journals from 1995-2018, we present an inductively-developed conceptual framework that helps to shed light on how comparativists understand the interaction between context and important processes of leadership, management, and school level organization. The presentation will describe the research patterns evident in the 87 articles as well as our framework of 3 overlapping analytical levels: organizational culture and school context, national social contexts, and global policy borrowing.

Author

• Joseph J. Flessa, University of Toronto - OISE