Michele Schweisfurth is Professor of Comparative and International Education and Co-Director of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is Editor of the journal Comparative Education. Her research interests include tensions between global frameworks (such as children's rights, and notions of 'best practice' in teaching and learning) and local and cultural imperatives. She is the author of Learner-Centred Education in International Perspective: Whose Pedagogy for Whose Development? (2013) and Comparative and International Education: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice (2014, with David Phillips).

This collection was produced to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal Comparative Education, one of the most established and prestigious journals in the field, and each chapter was written by a leading scholar of comparative and international education. The book marks a creative and critical engagement with some of the most important topics in contemporary comparative education, including 'big data', pedagogy, adult education, scholarly mobility, and gender. It offers a unique perspective on these important areas of inquiry and the activities, preoccupations, absences and communities which they contain. This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.

Introduction 1. Comparative education: stones, silences, and siren songs 2. Global league tables, big data and the international transfer of educational research modalities 3. Lessons from abroad: whatever happened to pedagogy? 4. From adult education to lifelong learning and beyond 5. The intellect, mobility and epistemic positioning in doing comparisons and comparative education 6. 'Comparatography', history and policy quotation: some reflections 7. Neither orthodoxy nor randomness: differing logics of conducting comparative and international studies in education 8. Among the comparativists: ethnographic observations 9. Thinking about gender in comparative education