Ethnography and Comparative Education. Some Contemporary Trends and Critical Issues

The paper attempts a brief analysis of two of the areas in which ethnographic research can make today an important contribution to comparative education. Ethnography can not only help to outline a descriptive picture of what contemporary education is around the world. Ethnography can also work (both in terms of the “alternative” data it can gather, and of the insights it can inspire in debates on comparative education, via its peculiar approach to knowledge and its rich and diverse epistemological tradition) as a tool to help comparative education to solve some of its contemporary dilemmas. The paper will shortly outline two of such “problem areas” in which ethnography is actually helping to give a new definition to aspects of comparative education. The first to be addressed is that on the controversial role of world culture theory in comparative education. The second is the debate on the relationship of comparative education to a contemporary trend in educational policy, which is based on the “spectacular” use of benchmarks and statistics. In both cases, postmodern versions of ethnography are able to help to “deconstruct” problematic aspects of the discussed issues (which many scholars see as “threats” to the integrity and credibility of comparative education), and show to comparative researchers promising directions to follow in the complex scenery of the study of contemporary education.