Dr Donella J Cobb

The theme of the 2018 Oceania Comparative and International Society (OCIES) conference held at Victoria University of Wellington, in Wellington, New Zealand aimed to explore, celebrate, and deepen Oceanic relationalities. This special issue of the International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives responds to this call for scholarship to examine how Comparative and International Education (CIE) can be repositioned around the notion of relationality to contribute theoretically, practically, and spiritually to education at global, regional, national, and community levels. In this Special Edition, we celebrate the work of seven new and emerging researchers from OCIES. This paper introduces us as a community of scholars, connected geographically by sea, yet it is our shared commitment to relationality that has enabled us to further the scholarship of CIE within our region.

The quest to enhance the quality of teaching in low-income countries has encouraged international aid agencies to look for alternative platforms to provide teacher education. Open Educational Resources have attracted the attention of the international community because of their ability to provide accessible and cost-effective teacher education programs across diverse cultural contexts. Yet, despite increasing support, little consideration has been given to whose knowledge, values, and cultural norms are legitimized within these open education platforms. This paper responds to such concerns by drawing on Bernstein’s (2000) notion of regulative discourse to examine the Open Education Resources for English Language Teachers (ORELT) teacher education modules. Findings reveal that regulative discourse is strongly framed within these ORELT modules, which supports the socialization of teachers and their students into Western culture, values, and beliefs. This paper challenges the assumptio...

Open Educational Resources (OERs) have become a global educational phenomenon because of claims that they are a panacea for issues of access and quality. However, little consideration has been given to the social significance of this digital platform, particularly for teachers and students in low-income countries. This article draws on Bernstein’s (2000) notion of recontextualisation to investigate the influence of structuring conditions on pedagogy within OERs. The findings of this research demonstrate how wider economic agendas have influenced the recontextualisation of pedagogy within OERs to de-centre learning from the pedagogic relationship.

Research conducted by postgraduate students is a significant source of new knowledge in universities. While it is increasingly available in digital databases, it is not frequently published, and thus accessible, in the form of academic journal articles (Kamler, 2008; Kwan, 2010; Lassig, Dillon, & Diezmann, 2013). In this article we explore the notion of an academic writing group as a pedagogical arrangement to scaffold international postgraduate students into writing for publication. We draw from our experiences of facilitating collaborative writing workshops with five international postgraduate students from The University of Waikato. These workshops provided a pedagogic space for international students and academic mentors to collectively bridge the often obscured path between thesis writing and writing for academic publication. We explain how a focus on reflexivity offered a way of foregrounding the 'backstories' of each student's research experiences and established a platform from which scholars could discuss and write. We also give consideration to the linguistic and discoursal resources that supported emerging writers to foreground reflexivity in their published text. Each of the articles in this special section celebrate the outcome of this academic writing group by showcasing the published articles that have been written by the international postgraduate students involved in this collaborative writing project. We conclude this article by offering our experiences of a collaborative writing group as one way to facilitate a pedagogic bridge between thesis writing and writing for publication.

Undertaking doctoral studies in a different cultural context presents a plethora of challenges for doctoral students. This chapter documents the experiences of one researcher navigating the early stages of her doctoral journey in a cultural context significantly different from her own. While the development of the initial research framework has taken careful development, it has been the ethical considerations throughout this initial stage that have presented ongoing challenges, particularly when considering research from a critical perspective. This chapter highlights some important reflections for doctoral students undertaking research in developing countries, particularly in relation to communication, in-country ethics procedures, time delays and financial considerations. The difficulties encountered on the doctoral journey have highlighted the need to take a critical and reflexive stance throughout the development of the initial research proposal and to be flexible to change the direction of the research if and where needed. Because of a recent change in political circumstances, this nation will remain nameless throughout this chapter in order to protect those who may be implicated with the original work.

In 2018, PISA introduced an assessment of global competence to equip young people with the skills, knowledge, attitudes and values to create "an inclusive and sustainable world" (OECD, 2018. 1). Throughout this article, we take the OECD seriously at their claims around inclusion. We look critically at the global competence framework to ask what PISA means by inclusion, and trouble the idea that inclusion can function effectively within a global standardised assessment. We put Bernstein's (2000) notion of recontextualisation to work to demonstrate how inclusion takes on new meaning as it moves between each iteration of the global competence framework. We show how this recontextualisation re-orientates inclusion from a social justice imperative towards supporting young people's inclusion into a globalised market economy.