This article reflects on the meanings of comparing and contrasting in international and comparative education, using two education utopias as case studies. It is inspired by our visits to schools in rural China and Finland and by our interest in issues of social justice, equality/equity. The article also discusses the meanings of the fashionable…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

Access to higher education is essential to the achievement of social justice and economic development of a society. This study examines differences in the status quo of the equity of college admission examinations between China and the US by comparing news reports in the two countries. Interesting differences were revealed between the two media.…

This paper looks at continuity and discontinuity of teachers' perception and enactment of civic values such as equality, democracy, freedom, cohesion and globalization in China and the U.S. Applying qualitative methodologies, this paper finds that, beyond the myth of citizenship education toward China and United States, there are common ideals and…

This paper analyzes how China has managed to embrace mass higher education in a short timeline, and examines how far this move has followed the existing or established patterns elsewhere through comparing its core aspects with those of four identifiable models of mass higher education: the American model, the Western European model, the Latin…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]