Knowing others and knowing self: patterns of differentiated publishing in education journals from the North South - Karen Biraimah

Centres of scholarship based in North America, Europe and Australia (often referred to as the North) freely publish critiques and analyses on African, Asian and Middle Eastern educational systems and issues, while rarely including articles that focus on their own country or region. In contrast, journals with a more regional focus based in Africa or Asia (often referred to as the South) devote the majority of their journals to articles directly linked to educational issues within their own nation or region, with little attention paid to educational issues of the North or in other regions of the South that exist beyond their own without a rigorous academic debate on their own systems of education by scholars from the South.
It also deprives the educational community of invaluable academic exchanges between various regions in the South. This article will examine these and related issues, including the false dichotomies between comparativists and international educators and those between researcher and practitioner. The article will address these concerns through an examination of four education journals publishied in the US, Europe and Australia - Comparative Education Review (US), Compare: a journal of Comparative education (UK), the Australian Journal of Education (Australia) and the Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (UK) - and three journals from Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean region - the Southern African Review of Education (Botswana), the Journal of Maltese Education Research (Malta) and the Asia Pacific Education Review (Korea).
From: SARE with EWP, Vol. 12 no. 2 (2006), pp. 81-92