Comparative Education in an Age of Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities in Contemporary Italy

In this chapter, I will first describe the field of comparative education in Italy, especially in terms of teaching. I will then describe the topics of interest for comparative education research in 2015. In Italy, not all comparative education studies are singled out as such (Palomba, 2011): some of them formally belong to other areas of educational research. Because of this, it is difficult to draw a topography of what is being done in comparative education. I will rather point at transversal and relevant topics concerning education and Italian society and policy, which are potential subjects for comparative research, today and in the near future. I will close the chapter by describing the activities of the Italian Comparative Education Society (SICESE) and the initiatives they have undertaken to gather in a more cohesive, homogeneous academic space, the researchers who, under heterogeneous labels, de facto, are doing comparative education research in Italy.