Call for Papers: Handbook on Policy Transfer in Education

Call for Papers for a Handbook on Policy Transfer in Education

Policy transfer in education is a highly relevant topic in research that has been adressed by various disciplines. Regional, national and international stakeholders are seeking for best practice and answers to reform needs, they strive for exploring other educational contexts as well as enhancing the understanding of their own system. From an academic perspective, policy transfer is a notion with a diversified understanding, depending on the academic discipline, the perspective of interest and the location in the broad field of education in international relations, e.g. as a policy maker, as a practitioner or/and as a scholar.

In that sense, policy transfer is a common and everday phenomenon when it comes to seeking for best practice and improving nation-states’ education systems. This is particularly true in the field of vocational, adult, professional, and higher education where competitiveness plays a crucial role in improving educational structures and measuring outcomes of education. Translating and embedding existing approaches to policy transfer and development into educational contexts is a crucial issue that has been mostly addressed by political science and less by educationalists. It is only recently that researchers and funders have turned to this issue and generated high quality research that points at the need for more research in this field.

We are therefore calling for contributions to our handbook on policy transfer in education, to be published in 2024/2025, that will focus on innovative insights into this topic. The book will represent theory, methods and evidence in policy transfer; it will include national/regional case studies, reviews on fields of investigation and findings that enhance our knowledge on how education policy shapes regional, national and international agendas on education policy and practice.

The book comprises well over forty chapters, divided into the following parts:

• Theoretical Foundation of Policy Transfer Studies
• Methodological Approaches to Policy Transfer Studies
• Historical Reflections on Policy Transfer
• Cultural and Anthropological Perspectives
• Neo-colonialism: Perspectives of Receiver or Adopter Countries
• Driving Transfer Issues in VET and Adult Education
• New Perspectives on Policy Borrowing and Lending
• Macro, Meso and Micro politics in policy transfer

We are inviting you to contribute a high quality paper of between 6,000 and 7,000 words for the book on one of these parts. Chapters should represent the expertise of what is currently relevant in the respective field and provide an innovative contribution to policy transfer in vocational, adult, higher, and professional education, and prospects and/or emerging concepts or issues for the future. We encourage authors to write review chapters and/or national/regional case studies but refrain from presenting single projects or similar.

If you are interested in submitting a paper for this handbook please let us know by 30.6.2022, submitting a short abstract of 500 words to ; ; . Proposals should include an overview, major theoretical or conceptual frameworks used in your study, research methods and (preliminary) findings.

The important dates for the book production are as follows.

• Notification of proposal acceptance: 15.8.2022

• Deadline for full manuscript submissions: 30.6.2023

Kind regards,

Antje Barabasch, Sandra Bohlinger and Stefan Wolf