Chapter 2: Trends and Directions in the 2020 Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (ARCIE): A Meta-analysis

The Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (ARCIE) represents a forum and an opportunity for scholars worldwide to discuss and examine trends and directions in comparative/international education, highlighting relevant developments in these fields, related to educational contexts, climates, and reforms in these contexts. Changes and reforms within these contexts and areas can have significant impacts on various education stakeholders, agents, and societies. Given the need to identify and prepare for these changes, the objective of this chapter is to discuss recent trends and directions in the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE). The method employed to identify these trends was a meta-analysis of the 23 chapters published in the 2020 edition of ARCIE. The 23 chapters composed the corpus of texts analyzed in this study, with the support of an online platform for corpora processing. Results of the analysis were contrasted with relevant literature in the field and suggest that (among the three main missions of universities) teaching and research received more attention than outreach/services, considering the corpus analyzed. In addition, teachers and students received more attention than administrative staff. Therefore, we conclude that more attention is necessary toward these aspects (outreach and administrative staff) in the pursuit of social justice and UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Finally, the prevalence of topics related to language and sustainability suggests a need for more representativeness, in terms of regions and languages studied in the field of CIE.