Will Brehm  0:41
José Cossa, welcome to FreshEd.

José Cossa  0:43
Thank you very much, Will. Thanks for having me here.

Will Brehm  0:47
You have recently written a book chapter on shaping the intellectual landscape of the Comparative and International Education Society. And you look at a few of the Comparative Education Review journal editors and their influence on shaping the field at different times. Why did you think editors of a journal shaped the intellectual field?

José Cossa  1:18
Yeah, there’s two things. They’re pretty much, almost like the gatekeepers in terms of intellectualism. Particularly if the editors are the editors of the key journals in that particular field. So, for instance, in this case, I was looking at Comparative Education Review as one of the main and perhaps the first journal in comparative education. And so, they were the people whom everybody who wanted to publish in the field would want to have their papers sent to. And in that capacity, they’re capable of determining what is it that counts as intellectualism in that particular field. And so that’s the role that I think becomes then the role of shaping a field because then you determine what is it that looks as adequate to be included as part of the field, as part of what discourses should be important for the field and what should not be important. And so, you’re kind of filtering out stuff. And that’s pretty much why I thought there would be key people, key figures in terms of determining what the field needed. And so, you know, looking at the Epstein [1] for instance as one of those informative pieces, was really to lay the foundation in terms of the argument for this, was the fact that they really looked at contours and boundaries. You know, that a field should have certain parameters. And so, editors would be the people determining those parameters because they pick what constitutes what in terms of what a field should look like.

Will Brehm  3:12
So, when was the Comparative Education Review started?

José Cossa  3:16
I believe 1957.

Will Brehm  3:19
And the first editor was George Bereday?

José Cossa  3:23
Correct.

Will Brehm  3:24
So, you selected George Bereday as one of the editors that you research. Who were the other two?

José Cossa  3:33
Well, I also selected Altbach and Epstein.

Will Brehm  3:38
So, that’s Philip Altbach and Erwin Epstein. And why did you select these three individuals?

José Cossa  3:48
Well, in part because my main interest was to look at the archive at Kent State and when I initially went to the archive, I had thought about looking at many others, including Eckstein, and also looking at Kazamias. And when I got to the archives, I realized that really, there was not a whole lot of material pertaining to other editors. And so, these three editors had a lot more material that was worth looking at and including in this study. So, the limitation was based on the availability of material -what files I could find.

Will Brehm  4:45
So, let’s talk about the first person -we’ll go in chronological order. So, the first person that you studied was George Bereday. So, how did George Bereday shape the field of comparative and international education? Or I guess it was known then as comparative education.

José Cossa  5:03
Yeah. Bereday was looking at the field more in the scientific way. In his mind, what scientific really meant was what the natural sciences might have thought of as scientific. So, he wanted to really create a certain kind of a field that could somehow match that sort of epistemological approach to knowledge. And so, he really fought to create that and then made decisions very much based upon what he deemed to be methodologically sound. That had followed all the methods of the regular natural sciences. You know, all the problems, and hypotheses testing and all this kind of thing. So, he was very much leaning more towards that kind of scholarship. And this was more because he wanted to filter out certain kinds of things like very descriptive material. And so, he thought that creating a science, basically making comparative education a science in the sense of the very traditional way of looking at science, that would be much more plausible, and even make the field gain more merit around scholars and amongst other fields. So, really to assert its place in education and in social sciences and everything else.

Will Brehm  6:51
So, what sort of examples can you give of articles that he rejected as not being scientific enough?

José Cossa  7:00
Well, there were several articles he rejected but I will say this to just make this also a little bit clearer is that even though he was attempting really at creating this science around comparative education, or making comparative education a very scientific field, he was still really trying to figure this out. He had not really nailed it because in many ways, he stumbled over his own decisions, his own idea of what exactly this should look like because in rejecting articles that he considered to be not scientific -they don’t really fit adequate scholarly analysis and so on- he many times also ended up accepting and even commissioning or inviting scholars to write very descriptive materials. And so, that having been said, there’s a lot of Bereday that, he didn’t really always meet his own expectation of having the field as very scientific. For instance, he had requested an article from      Walter Murch,[2]  and this was in 1957 for him to write a work that would describe the work in comparative education in Hamburg. Now, that in itself just speaks about description. He was really -he says, and in his own words says, “to write on any comparative subject that you feel disposed would fit”. And so, this was very much things like recent developments in German education as a whole, description of the present work in pedagogy at the university level. And he was interested in description too but in many ways, I don’t think he really was aware at times that he was doing this. And so that’s one example. But he would reject articles like a particular manuscript in which he rejected. He called it very much on technical merits. And that it was based on one country study, and he would reject articles that he thought, “Oh, this is just a mere description of events, and you can’t just write about the United States, you can’t just write about Brazil, you can just write about Nigeria. For instance, I recall this article that he rejected, and it had to do with Nigeria And he said that the article was addressed to Nigerians and that he felt that it should be published in Nigeria. I mean, a statement like that doesn’t cut today. He also rejected one on Brazil almost pretty much with the same kinds of mindset that it is a Brazilian article, and it’s definitely not suitable for comparative education.

Will Brehm  10:28
But the German one that he commissioned was suitable even though that also could have been published in a German publication.

José Cossa  10:37
Absolutely. It was very German, it was very descriptive. And really, it was even of a lesser quality, if I may, than these other ones. The Brazilian article he rejected and said -because this was a struggle against a Brazilian public school. And his whole argument was that it was written for the Brazilian audience. Because it was written for the Brazilian audience, it was naturally more exhortative in nature. And so, we are interested in descriptive and analytical articles. So, he kept going back and forth around this thing of what should the field will look like. But this is very characteristic of anybody who is trying to figure out these boundaries. I mean, you negotiate with yourself, particularly if you are pretty much a one-person show, as Bereday in many ways was.

Will Brehm  11:39
He had no editorial team?

José Cossa  11:41
He had an editorial team, but they were all his buddies. So, I mean, it’s like, I just pick up the people that I think are the best people to work with me. Of course, they’ll say, yes. I mean, in many ways, most of those people are not going to be much of a voice. And also the Comparative Education Review board, the CER board, was established, like, three years after the journal was established. So, for three years, he had a lot of leeway to do whatever he wanted to do to define, to shape the field in the way that he thought the field should be. And it was pretty much him and Reed, his very close buddy read. So, they both did whatever they wanted. And Bereday as the editor pretty much had a lot of freedom. And so, when the board is established, the board is established under that kind of a culture in which he has the last say in this. So, it took a while -I mean it would take a while for anybody who comes on board in a situation like this to actually get to a point of being able to be heard. And I’m not saying Bereday was not a good listener or anything like that but it’s a habit you develop when you work on your own and then all of a sudden, you have to work in a team. You know, it’s not easy.

Will Brehm  13:17
So, he was like a very powerful gatekeeper that used a lot of his own personal preferences to shape the field?

José Cossa  13:25
Absolutely.

Will Brehm  13:27
And can you tell us a little bit about the teachers who used to go on these study tours that the Comparative Education Society ran at that time in the 1950s and 1960s. What did Bereday do with these teachers?

José Cossa  13:48
So, he would send -Well, it was Reed and him would send a team to the Soviet Union, for instance, to go and do studies. And their idea was really, that these travelers, as they call them, should only concentrate on presenting eyewitness accounts. They were not to be coming back and writing this material as scholarly articles because they were not scholars because Bereday had a very clear idea in his mind about what a scholar should be like. So, he needed this material for the field mostly as eyewitness accounts. And that’s pretty much like the pay, right? I mean, it’s like sending your students abroad and saying, collect data and then come back, and when you come back, I will write the article. You don’t write the article, or somebody else will write the article, and that somebody else has to be a specialized scholar.

Will Brehm  14:53
So, the teachers never got any credit on any of the publications that came out of their eyewitness accounts on these study tours?

José Cossa  15:01
Not according to the letters. It didn’t give me that impression at all. You know, it could have been that one or the other could have slipped through but I did not see that in the letters. So, the evidence pointed really in this direction according to his very words that it needed to be written by specialized scholars. And this, you know, seemed like a very fitting kind of decision because he was somehow guarding the field. Wanting to make sure that there was no description-only kind of accounts and there wasn’t romanticized kinds of things. So, he wanted to have a hand and a say in everything that happened around it as he tried to shape it. It’s not to justify his position but to just throw in a little perspective here that he put himself in that kind of position and he was in that position. Perhaps, you know, it was the time in which he lived but he was very careful about that. So, he didn’t want anybody writing stuff so they were like data collectors.

Will Brehm  16:13
So, let’s turn to Philip Altbach who started editing the Journal of Comparative Education Review in 1979. How did Philip Altbach shape the field?

José Cossa  16:26
So, Altbach had to somehow continue the works of Noah and Kazamias. And who were also trying to continue the work of Bereday. So, particularly, Noah was very much in that building of what Bereday had already established. You know, the scientific and so on. And then Kazamias came on board. I didn’t find much about Kazamias, in terms of actual correspondence. I mean there was a lot of material there but it wasn’t relevant to what I was doing. So, it really didn’t give me any insight as far as how he actually evaluated the material which gave me also the impression that -so, from Bereday, to Noah, to Altbach, I still had not found anything that really talked about how they evaluated this material. So, Bereday had established this very haphazard, random kind of way of looking at the field but at the same time having a very fixed idea in his mind, and in the minds of those whom he invited, about what the field should look like. So, Altbach takes that and at this point he adopts or develops something called this manuscript evaluation form. And that’s when I began to realize, okay, so now the field, as far as editorialship, now we’re getting into something here. There is sort of a criteria becoming established as to what exactly it is that should be the measurement for accepting or rejecting articles. No longer how I feel about it. But at least there’s something -this manuscript evaluation form. And this had instructions for reviewers to type their evaluations and to sign it, and then date it. So, at least you have something tangible now to look at and say, “Okay. So, this article was rejected but based on a particular evaluation form that was filled, and this is how the evaluation was conducted. This is what the actual evaluators were thinking about it. So, he really wasn’t so much driven into the methodology and so on. But he was more a structure person. He wanted to build more structure into this field, into the acceptance-rejection modes of articles so that perhaps any other editor that came after him would have something to work with. No longer this is how I feel about the article but here’s how we evaluate the articles that we receive. So, that’s how I see Altbach’s contribution as there was not really a lot more than this in the correspondences that I saw.

Will Brehm  19:44
What sort of criteria was on the evaluation form?

José Cossa  19:49
So, there was reference to the evaluation form more than an actual evaluation form. This was the limitation, is that -so, the whole idea that the journal should still continue to be rooted in methodological rigor, and a bit more of theory. You know that there has to be theory in each one of the articles that are submitted. So, it wasn’t a lot. And there’s also another idea that was included in this evaluation was the concern for data interpretation and presentation of data. So, it wasn’t like a very meticulous structure, a very meticulous kind of form, but it was a form to orient the writers to understand that there is limitation in length of articles. And that there’s also that if you’re presenting anything as data, you have to interpret it, and how you present it also matters. So, it was really this kind of orientation. It wasn’t anything as we would probably look at as criteria today, but it was a really huge step forward in that not only methods mattered but also a little bit of theory mattered. Not so much, but a little bit of theory mattered. And that articles have to follow a particular length and they had to have interpretation of data and presentation. So, that’s pretty much what the criteria was.

Will Brehm  21:44
After Philip Altbach came Erwin Epstein and Epstein edited the journal from 1989 until 1998. So, a good 10 years. How did Erwin Epstein shape the field of comparative education?

José Cossa  22:05
So, Epstein builds on what Altbach had begun. So, Altbach has now this evaluation form, but Altbach also did something interesting, which was the diversity in the field in terms of even the editors themselves and so his editorial board. Before this, the field was very monolithic. It was very much macho, males dominating the field and, as you can imagine, it was white American males and some European males. So, it wasn’t really very diverse at all. In many ways it wasn’t diverse. So, Altbach now begins to bring some gender diversity in and specialization too because he’s not caught up in the whole idea of the field becoming scientific. So, there’s now a little bit more of diversity in specialization and methodology. And so, Epstein carries on from there and he moves beyond the evaluation form now to really creating more of criteria to evaluate the articles on the basis of very specific things like originality, relevance to comparative education, the use of data, if the article has used any data or not, it has to be clear. So, the clarity of expression that the articles have to be written in a very cogent manner, and contribution to the advancement of knowledge. So, this is something that we see to this day. This kind of tendency towards looking at these elements -originality, relevance to the field, and use of data, and quality of expression, and contribution to advancement or knowledge- and so that’s how Epstein really comes in. And he also introduces these double-blind peer reviews which were not there before. And now you begin to see it in a more clear way. And for instance, one of the things that happened was that one article had slipped through this evaluation and the name had been left there. And so, the reviewers basically knew who wrote the article and that jeopardized the review process. This is seen, at least based on my assessment of the letters, for the first time in the Comparative Education Review where something like this actually appears as problematic that you actually know who’s writing the article as a reviewer. So, his correspondence with Gail Kelly in 1989, kind of gave that impression that now they’re taking things very seriously. And this double-blind peer review becomes a critical step towards the future of the field. So, it’s no longer whether I know you or not. And if I know you or not, then it doesn’t matter. It’s what it is that you’ve written. And if it follows the criteria then we will go from there. Obviously not a perfect point in the history of the field but a good leaning towards progress or towards where we are today.

Will Brehm  25:36
It’s a clear example of the power shifting from what was under Bereday, where he seemed to have total control over what was in and out of the journal, to now, kind of pushing that power to the blind reviewers, the people who are reading these articles, not knowing who anyone is, and making an evaluation based on some set of criteria. It seems like that would take power away from the editor in some ways.

José Cossa  26:04
Absolutely. It is a shift of power. And now you have a diversity of scholars from various parts of different areas in the field, different interests, different methodologies. And so, if you have a blind review, it becomes and also trying to balance those powers, it becomes a bit more interesting the kinds of stuff that transpire in the paper. No longer monolithic, no longer just the stuff that your buddies in the club would like to read but everybody that is actually interested in this thing called comparative and international education will actually find something in there for them to read. The other thing that he also did that appears during Epstein’s time was this engagement with ideology. You know, in the past, I didn’t see any evidence of ideology being an issue that really merited a lot of attention as far as problematizing ideology in the field. So, Epstein brings that into the field and looking at it in terms of how it relates to epistemological and ontological orientations. Now, Epstein has a very strong training in the positivist tradition and coming into this place where he also encounters other people, and in this space of comparative education as a field that is changing from the Bereday era to the Noah era and now his time in which the field has become so much more complex. I believe that this shift is not something that Epstein just came up one day, woke up one day and said, “well, I’m going to begin to look at ideology as problematic”,  but it’s something that really should be credited to the advancements in the field. That people at that point were beginning to think critically about what’s happening in the world. So, looking at ideology and how stuff like epistemological and ontological orientations were really embedded in these things became very critical for his editorship that to this date, we are talking about epistemologies. I mean, at some point, we forgot about this stuff but now we’re kind of resurrecting these conversations. And this was stuff that was happening in the 1980s.

Will Brehm  28:44
Having researched the history of some of these editors, what do you make of the field today?

José Cossa  28:51
Well, the field is still far from being where I think it should be. These editors contributed tremendously to the field and we can learn a lot from them. One of the things that I think the field today could really benefit from is having these developments, based on these editors, and these shapers of the field, keeping them in perspective as we move along. Because some of these conversations they had were very deep, were very intellectual. They were not just about practice but they were also about theory. They were also about methodology. They were also about what really shapes a field. What really characterizes and differentiates a field. What I see today is that we are struggling with that. Sometimes I say to people, well, if I can submit an article to the Comparative and International Education Society and submit it to another society in another conference and another conference, if the same article can be submitted in all these conferences, what makes my article really a comparative and international education article? Or in terms of even submitting not just articles but I’m talking about papers for conferences. What is it that distinguishes this from everything else? And I think that’s what Bereday was fighting for. I mean trying to make a distinction. And then it was built on with Noah and Kazamias. And Kazamia is still talking about the soul of the field being lost today. I think you heard that somewhere if you go to conferences. You know, so, there was this passion for something about this field that had to be different,  to differentiate this field from others. And I don’t think we have really got it. I mean, I think we have in some way, lost some of that passion. We have become victims of a lot of the stuff that’s happening out there, which is really, not only the marketization of education, commodification of education but it’s also this crisis of identity. What exactly is this field? And I remember when Epstein gave his Kneller lecture during this conference. And you can sense the room not much at ease because they don’t think this is actually relevant at all. It’s like your grandpa telling you back in the days when we were doing this, you know. But those things are important to keep in perspective because your grandpa is indeed a wise person. You know right, your grandma is wise, your grandpa is wise. I mean, they have lived experiences. So, it’s good to at least pay attention to some of it. I mean, you don’t have to take it all but at least pay attention to some of what they’re saying. And this is where the perspective is. These guys had done a lot of work in terms of really thinking theories, and methods, and thinking about what exactly constitutes good pieces of research and what distinguishes us from everything else. This is not about comparative and international education should be distinguished from just practitioner-oriented pieces. Just the fact that you’ve traveled -I mean, we talk about all these traveler’s tales and whatever and things of the past, and we just talked about it in the introductory course of comparative education. But we do need to keep in mind that this stuff, today, we’re actually endorsing some of these things. That just going abroad, and doing some research constitutes a comparative and international education. Now, what I like about what’s happening right now is, under the presidency of N’Dri T Assie-Lumumba, we have seen a shift, or at least a very strong push towards a shift. And that is the epistemological shift. So, we have gone through this crisis of identity, and we have not asked ourselves very deep questions about who we are and what direction we are going. So, with N’Dri bringing the Ubuntu paradigm into comparative and international education, it really raises very critical questions about who we are and what kinds of epistemologies we have endorsed and embraced, and just quietly allowed it to come in and creep in. So, this is a very important crossroads in our conversations, is: who are we? And how do we see ourselves in the world? So, yes. This is an epistemological time. A time to talk about theories and methods, again. To revisit the methodological questions and revisit not the methodological questions in the way that Bereday was looking at methodology. But to revisit the methodological questions in today’s context. In the context of having alternative epistemologies and alternative methodologies also included in the field. So, this is a good time for us to really shape this. And so, I think we’re in a good place despite the crisis of identity. It’s a good place to now make very serious commitments to saving the field from being completely lost in space.

Will Brehm  34:34
Well, José Cossa. Thank you very much for joining FreshEd.

José Cossa  34:39
Thank you very much, Will, for having me. It’s a pleasure.

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