Current Issues in Comparative Education

Scaling Training on Trauma-Informed Education in Ukraine During Crisis

2026-02-13T16:27:41+00:00

This descriptive implementation case study examines how trauma-informed education was operationalized and scaled through an online learning modality during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The course was developed through a critical collaboration between the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) at Columbia University, the Ukraine Children's Action Project (UCAP), and educational stakeholders in Ukraine and Poland. The course was designed to equip educators with practical, relational strategies to support children as they navigate education amid war, displacement, and prolonged crisis. Grounded in the dual frameworks of Trauma-Informed Education (TIE) and Education in Emergencies (EiE), the curriculum development process emphasized localization, accessibility, and learner engagement through an iterative approach with expert teachers, psychologists, trauma specialists, and instructional designers from Ukraine, Poland, and the United States. Early evaluation findings from 172 teacher respondents indicated high levels of perceived value and satisfaction. Qualitative analysis further identified ongoing professional development needs related to child-centered trauma recovery, teacher well-being and burnout prevention, inclusive education, and sustaining human connection among teachers, students, and families. These findings suggest that online learning serves as an effective, scalable modality for trauma-informed education during active conflict, while highlighting the broader, long-term support needs educators face in navigating crisis environments.

Editorial Introduction

2026-06-02T14:25:11+00:00

From Transmission to Constructivism in Initial Teacher Education

2026-03-13T03:16:46+00:00

This paper examines how Czech reforms in initial teacher education (2020–2025) reframe the teacher’s role from a transmitter of knowledge to a relational and reflective professional. This agenda gains urgency as schooling is increasingly tasked with navigating contested values and civic life. The study combines a purposive analysis of key policy and curriculum documents with a dialogic and embodied lens informed by Buber’s I–Thou/I–It distinction and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The analysis shows how competence frameworks and related reform texts promote constructivist orientations that foreground learner agency, teacher self-reflection, dialogic interaction, and professional identity formation, alongside cooperative and project-based learning and formative, criterion-referenced assessment. At the same time, persistent implementation frictions are identified, including fragmented early-career learning, mismatched expectations between graduates and employers, uneven treatment of media and civic education, and challenges in assessing relational and embodied competences without resorting to reductive checklists. The paper concludes by outlining implications for aligning programme outcomes, learning environments, practicum, and induction with dialogic and embodied competences in civic/social science teacher preparation.

From North Korean Migrant to “Unification Talent:” Schools, Human Capital, and Neoliberal Future-Making

2026-03-04T20:50:38+00:00

Visions of Korean unification draw not only on historical imaginaries of ethnic nationalism (Grinker, 1998) but continue to be shaped by South Korea’s neoliberal values and aspirations for deeper integration into global market orders (Park, 2015). Despite projections that neoliberalism may be waning (Gerstle, 2022; Vallely, 2024), neoliberal logics continue to organize South Korean state technologies of governance that emphasize self-management. These late capitalist rationalities shape both how North Korean migrants are incorporated into South Korean society and the forms of recognition made available to them. Drawing on human capital theory (HCT), this paper examines how North Korean migrant youth are positioned through neoliberal frameworks of value, productivity, and future-oriented investment. Through interviews with North Korean migrants and analysis of state media and discursive artifacts, this paper argues that South Korean neoliberalism shapes the way state and civil society actors frame North Korean migrants as human capital to be cultivated for the anticipated project of national unification.

From Meaning to Metrics

2026-03-09T23:17:13+00:00

As humanitarian education becomes increasingly reliant on digital infrastructures, moral values governing access, protection, and recognition are now mediated through data and algorithmic decision-making. This paper develops the concept of algorithmic morality to analyze how digital governance systems reorder educational values in humanitarian settings. Employing critical document analysis of policy texts, technical specifications, and documented cases, the paper maps how humanitarian ideals move across the three analytical sites of articulation, encoding, and encounter. Three patterns emerge: relational dimensions of educational value compress into individual metrics, procedural flexibility hardens into algorithmic thresholds, and ethical imperatives transform into severity rankings. Cases from Jordan and Kenya illustrate the functioning and the limits of this logic. The paper makes two contributions. First, it conceptualizes algorithmic morality as a field-level logic that actively constitutes moral worth rather than operationalizing pre-existing values. Second, it introduces a moral-technical analytic for examining digital systems as moral infrastructures. As global disorder intensifies and digital humanitarianism expands, the central challenge is not a shortage of data but a crisis of meaning: the marginalization of relational and contextual dimensions of humanitarian education that resist computational reduction.

Human Rights and Human Capital: The Influence of the UNHCR and the OECD on the Swedish Refugee Education Reform

2026-03-23T02:22:01+00:00

This study analyzes differences between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) global scripts and how they influence Sweden’s refugee education reform. This study examines human rights-based policies as recommended in the UNHCR’s Refugee Education 2030: A Strategy for Refugee Inclusion (2023) and human capital-based policies in the OECD’s Strength Through Diversity: Spotlight Report for Sweden (2019). I compare these recommendations to the enacted policies outlined in the Swedish Ministry of Education’s legal framework, the School Act. I argue that tensions between human rights and human capital in Sweden’s refugee education reform are exacerbated by global pressures, supporting world society theory. The findings reveal the degree of alignment between each international governmental organization’s policy recommendations and Sweden’s refugee education reforms, contributing to the literature on refugee education both globally and in Sweden.