Appropriating global trends: How can comparative education help?

While the precise nature of globalization has attracted much controversy, there are clearly trends in education policies that have travelled across political, cultural, economic and geographical boundaries. These policies have affected the governance, financing, curricula and practices of education. The trends have been accelerated by governments engaging in what is variously described as the adoption, borrowing, transfer or (the term I prefer) appropriation of policies from other education systems, often with mixed results. Policy research using comparative education methods have identified the dialectic between the global, regional and local contexts as a process that can facilitate or hinder the effective implementation of a policy initiative at the grassroots level. Using lessons learned from studies of Outcomes Based Learning, assessment reforms and the reorientation of higher education, this paper presents a facilitative model for policy appropriation and identifies a role that comparative education can play.