Chapter 4 reveals the tensions in ETL--between its transformative orientation and transmission-based implementation--and among different policy actors. If there is no common or shared understanding about ETL among the policymakers, how local actors can make sense of the policy anyway? This is the central question that this chapter tries to unpack.…

Many comparative education researchers have tackled the question of how we could understand the relationship between social and cultural contexts and education. Based on the criticisms of School Effectiveness research that prospered during the 1980s, researchers started to pay closer attention to the embeddedness of education in the broader…

The World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand, in March 1990 was influential in the spread of student-centered pedagogies in low-income countries (Ginsburg, 2010). A document prepared in this conference considered the active and participatory teaching approaches as "particularly valuable in assuring learning acquisition…

The definition and goals of education are mercurial, varying widely across time and space. In Cambodia, which has experienced both flux and reflux over time, education--particularly in schools--has strongly reflected the political circumstances of the time. Education as a fundamental human right is a very new idea: it was, and still is to a…

The meaning of a certain policy is not given. It is shaped by the interaction among written policy, people, and contexts in which people do the policy (Honig, 2006). From this perspective, pedagogical reform is a complex social practice in which various actors construct and reconstruct the meaning of teaching and learning. In the case of…