The latest issue of the International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives (IEJ:CP) arrives at a moment when comparative and international education is increasingly grappling with questions that are deeply human.
Questions of belonging.
Of language and identity.
Of mobility and inequality.
Of how education systems shape — and are shaped by — the emotional, cultural, and relational realities of the people who move through them.
Published by the Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES), Volume 24(2) brings together scholarship from across the Pacific and Asia that explores education not simply as policy or structure, but as lived experience.
Across the issue, one of the strongest recurring themes is belonging.
In her article exploring the experiences of Pacific Islander women studying online across Hawai‘i and Micronesia, Vanessa Ghersi Cordano from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa argues for a “belonging-centred” approach to distance education. Her work reminds readers that online learning is never only technological. It is also relational, cultural, and deeply connected to questions of identity, place, and community.
That attention to lived experience and human connection echoes across the issue.
Another contribution examining study abroad experiences and “global mindedness” comes from Haoming Tang of Trinity Western University. His meta-analysis asks important questions about what international education actually produces. Does mobility automatically create intercultural understanding? Or do students carry existing assumptions and inequalities with them across borders? Drawing on qualitative accounts from study abroad participants, Tang highlights the complex realities of navigating emotional disruption, discrimination, language barriers, and intercultural learning, while also challenging the often idealised narratives surrounding “transformative” international experiences.
Together, these articles challenge simplistic narratives of global education and instead foreground the complexities of navigating multiple worlds, languages, and identities.
Questions of translation — both literal and cultural — also feature strongly throughout the issue.
Mitsuhiro Kimura from Okayama University of Science and Shizuko Umetsu from University of Tsukuba explore how teachers in Japanese International Baccalaureate schools move strategically between English and Japanese within multilingual classrooms. Their research highlights the realities of globally oriented education systems operating within local cultural and linguistic contexts — a tension increasingly familiar across comparative and international education worldwide.
Another thread emerging across the issue concerns pressure, accountability, and wellbeing within education systems themselves.
An article by Kwok Kuen Tsang, Xiaoyu Wang, and Yunfei Yan examining teacher burnout and accountability systems explores the emotional and professional impacts of increasingly performative educational environments. The study contributes to growing international conversations about workload, policy pressure, and what happens when educational success becomes narrowly measured through data and accountability frameworks.
Taken together, the issue reflects a field increasingly concerned with the relational and emotional dimensions of education.
Not simply:
- how systems function,
but: - how people experience them.
This feels especially significant within the broader direction of OCIES itself.
Across the stories featured throughout this newsletter — from reflections on SOPER 2024 to preparations for the upcoming 54th OCIES Conference at Solomon Islands National University — recurring themes continue to emerge around relationality, equity, Indigenous knowledge, sustainability, and educational futures grounded in community realities.
In many ways, the latest issue of IEJ:CP sits comfortably within these conversations.
It reminds us that comparative and international education is not only about systems, policy, and comparison across nations. It is also about people: their identities, relationships, aspirations, vulnerabilities, and ways of making meaning within rapidly changing educational worlds.
OCIES warmly encourages members, students, researchers, and practitioners to explore the latest issue of International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives and engage with the important conversations emerging across its pages.
The full issue of International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives Vol. 24(2) is available online.