On February 22, 2011, Professor Heidi Ross continued to present wonderful academic lectures for us. The topic of the lecture for that day was "A Story, Not a History A Collage, not a Canon: Understanding and Teaching the Field of (North American) Comparative and International Education." Professor Wu Xueping, the Head of the Department of Education, presided over the lecture. Associate Professor Gilsun Song, the head of the Teaching and Research Section on Comparative Education, together with graduate students and Ph.D. students, participated in the lecture.
    In the first part, Professor Ross put forward overviews and questions for our consideration, such as "What is comparative education in North America?" and "How does the field differ between the U.S. and China?" In the second part of the lecture, Professor Ross presented a detailed analysis of CIE in North America, including agreeing and disagreeing across a century of scholarship. Moreover, Professor Ross introduced the human capital theory from the 1960s and the neo-Marxist, dependency, world systems and post-colonial theories during the 1970s and 1990s. Three dimensions of CIE, namely the scientific dimension, the pragmatic dimension and the global dimension were also introduced. In the third part of the lecture, Professor Ross further pointed out the expansion of CIE with the development of the modernization theory, dependency theory and conflict theory. In addition, Professor Ross also illustrated the users of CIE research, and also emphasized that we should be alert to the “abuse” phenomenon of CIE research results. Finally, Professor Ross used a picture of a curved river to describe the fluid boundaries of CIE, and concluded that CIE is a loosely bounded field of bricoleurs and bridge builders. After the lecture, Professor Ross and students had an in-depth discussion about the definition of CIE, the funding sources of CIE researches, and the essence of critical pedagogy, and so on.
    The content of Professor Ross’s lecture was very rich and she shared her teaching experience of CIE with all the participants, which benefited them greatly.

                                                                                                                                                     Recorded by Ph.D. student Yu Hao 
                                                                                                                                                                           Feb.24th, 2011