Race, Politics, and Geography of the Malaysian Education System: An Imaginary Piece on How Comparative and International Education Can Benefit Malaysia

(Re)territorializing the Field of Comparative and International Education in Malaysia: Adventures in Cartography through the Fisher, the Weaver, and the Shadow-Puppeteer

“…With CIE knowledge accumulated under the tutelage of his professors, Dr. tavis d. jules and Dr. Noah Sobe, he decided to write a short article focusing on how comparative research can benefit the Malaysian education system in the face of the nation's diverse population. In the article, he argued that equipping Malaysian teachers with a comparative perspective would enable them to understand the pluralistic nature of Malaysia which is often taken for granted (Balakrishnan, 2019). In order to share the benefits of CIE to a bigger platform, the fisherman-in-training decided to send a beacon out into a Facebook group that gathered Malaysian education enthusiasts in the wake of the election of Dr. Maszlee Malik as the new Minister of Education.…”

“…Thus, from fishermen-in-training, we began assuming the role of weavers, exchanging our knowledge and experiences related to CIE in the wake of our respective training in the field. The spirit of exchange and dialogue led Pravindharan to expand his aforementioned article for publication in the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education (Balakrishnan, 2020).…”

Transitions in education: Educators, digitalisation, and datafication

“…Globally, digitalisation and datafication in both schools and higher education have been relatively well researched-and the effects of digital surveillance practices, concerns regarding online safety and children's rights, technology and education policy and practice, and issues relating to the role of technology companies in education, are becoming a growing concern (Human Rights Watch, 2022; Thompson & Sellar, 2018). There is a relevant growing literature from the Global South (see, for example, Balakrishnan, 2022;Shukla, 2022) with pertinent research from Latin America investigating the infiltration of big tech into the educational sector (Amiel et al, 2021;Parra et al, 2018). While the extent of these companies' penetration in South Africa cannot be easily ascertained, it would be fair to agree that issues such as privacy, fake news, profiling, targeted advertising, and the like, which have been the focus of societal scrutiny, can become a substantial concern when these same free services are offered and targeted specifically to education, particularly when involving younger students.…”