Opportunities for The Use of International Educational Platforms in Teaching Comparative Pedagogy

Abstract

This article examines the opportunities for the use of international educational platforms in teaching comparative pedagogy within the system of pedagogical higher education. The study proceeds from the contradiction between the object of the discipline, which consists in living and continuously changing foreign education systems, and the traditional mode of its teaching, which has relied upon secondary textbook descriptions that are frequently outdated at the moment of publication. The author proposes a typology of international educational platforms according to their didactic function, distinguishing data-analytical, content-course, policy-documentary and communicative-collaborative platforms, and elaborates a three-level model of their integration into the teaching of the discipline, comprising the informational, analytical and research-collaborative levels. The principle of contextual triangulation is advanced as a safeguard against decontextualised comparison. The conceptual polemic between A. Schleicher and G. Steiner-Khamsi concerning the value and the risks of cross-national benchmarking is subjected to critical examination. The findings demonstrate that the principal value of international platforms lies not in expanded access to information but in the transformation of the student from a consumer of descriptions into a producer of comparisons.