This graduate level course is designed to examine conceptual, epistemological, political, cultural, methodological, and ethical insights, opportunities, and challenges faced and addressed by OISE's prospective students and graduates during their learning about and carrying out of both qualitative and quantitative research as well as knowledge production work in non-western, developing countries' contexts. The course's ultimate focus suggests the analysis of the connections between the overall research and knowledge production experiences, the various forces that impinge upon them and how all these relate to curriculum, teaching. and learning, as well as policy making, broadly conceptualized and practically grounded in the participants' particular contexts.

OISE students, graduates, and faculty are increasingly engaged in and exposed to what one might call international, comparative, developmental, and cross-cultural work abroad and at home. During and after their graduation, many of them work outside Canada as citizens, teachers, teacher educators/faculty, researchers, development specialists, consultants, and leaders of educational, development institutions. Working in comparative, international, and development fields is full of challenges and opportunities, but addressing and seizing these challenges and opportunities does not happen automatically. What do these various roles mean in developing countries' contexts that are both similar and different in political, epistemological, cultural, health, and resource terms? How do we, as educators, navigate the various roles, identities, situations, forces, and interests to ensure the success of our research, programmatic and leadership undertakings? What challenges do we face and how do we address them? What models, theories, and approaches exist that provide conceptual and methodological frameworks for successful engagement in the above-mentioned roles/situations?

And if a better solution to education and overall empowerment of students in the comparative, international contexts include development of culturally sensitive pedagogy, relevant curricula, and policy making, what do these mean and how are these produced? How do we negotiate power and privilege, intellectual and research priorities and interests between the context of global north and south? How do we address safety, security, health, intellectual freedom, ethics, and other challenges in the contexts where we are both privileged, but also vulnerable? How do we know that what we do is impactful, sustainable, and promotive of justice and equity and truly reaching out to those who are in genuine need? How do we ward off cultural insularity and intellectual arrogance, and become learners in these new contexts? How can our research, development, consultancy work in the global south become educative experiences for further growth for us and for those with whom we work? What do the learning, thinking, and production of solutions and insights outside western epistemological frames imply? Lastly, how can one create equitable approaches to production of new knowledge based on a critical-constructive synthesis of local and global, western and non-western epistemologies, methodologies, and modalities of research?

Notably, a recent issue of the journal Comparative Education Review ((May 2017, 61 (1)) has also emphasized that the field of comparative, international, and development education needs to reflexively engage its Eurocentric foundations and biases and move towards a pluralist position where non-Eurocentric alternative knowledge production approaches are given space. This course, through its critical, post-colonial, southern, and holistic approaches will try to fill this niche.