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Comparative education in Asia: inaugurating the APJE-CESA affiliation

This special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Education (APJE) inaugurates its formal affiliation with the Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA). This initiative is motivated by our shared desire to promote stronger “Asian” voices in the field of academic educational research, thereby helping to address a persistent East-West imbalance in the global academic debate that extends well beyond the field of Education. This imbalance is not necessarily, as some have appeared to suggest, the outcome of any conscious “hegemonic project” on the part of Western scholars, some of whom are among its most prominent critics (see Lim & Apple, 2016). But it does underline the continuing need for a stronger platform within Asia for communication amongst educational scholars and dissemination of their research. Moreover, redressing the East-West balance in this way is something from which all educational researchers – “Western” or “Asian” – ultimately stand to benefit. This vision of strengthening “Asian” voices in the field of educational research crucially informed the establishment of the CESA over 25 years ago (in 1991), and was also reflected in the slightly later (1995) decision to give the former Singapore Journal of Education a wider remit as the APJE. From its founding, the CESA has always seen as one of its central tasks outreach to communities of scholars in Asian societies where Comparative Education as a field is less developed. It has aimed to draw scholars in regions too frequently consigned to the periphery of international debate into fuller engagement with the wider community of academic educationalists throughout Asia and worldwide. This aim is clearly congruent with the APJE’s role as one of the leading Asia-based education journals published in English. Recognizing our common goals, the Boards of the APJE and CESA have concluded that we can pursue them more effectively together. In concrete terms, this collaboration will take two forms. Firstly, starting with the CESA’s next biennial conference (in Siem Riep, Cambodia, in May 2018), the APJE and CESA will organize an intensive pre-conference writing workshop for a small group of scholars, with the aim of coaching them through some of the key steps involved in preparing a paper for publication in English in a peer-reviewed journal. The model for this will be the excellent writers’ workshops organized by Compare, with the support of the British Association of International and Comparative Education (one such workshop was run in conjunction with the CESA’s 2016 conference in Manila). Secondly, each biennial conference of the CESA will henceforth be linked to a special issue of the APJE. The process of compiling this special issue will begin before the conference, on a theme related to that of the conference but more tightly focused. It is expected that most, if not all, of the papers featured in these special issues will be based on presentations delivered at the CESA conference; indeed, the conference itself will constitute a crucial opportunity for authors to receive feedback on early drafts of their papers. The pre-conference writers’ workshop will also provide some authors with the opportunity to receive more systematic advice on submitting papers for publication in the APJE special issue, or in regular issues of this or other international, peer-reviewed journals. This inaugural special issue features several papers presented at the CESA’s latest conference in Manila, in January 2016. It is less tightly themed than future special issues will be, since the process of compiling it followed the decision taken at that conference (by the CESA Board) to propose a tie-up