Terminological “Communities”: A Conceptual Mapping of Scholarship Identified With Education’s “Global Turn”

Professor Claire Maxwell from the Department of Sociology has contributed to the journal Review of Research in Education with the article Terminological “Communities”: A Conceptual Mapping of Scholarship Identified With Education’s “Global Turn”.

The article is co-written with Heela Goren, University College London, Miri Yemini, Tel Aviv University and Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal, Tel Aviv University.

The article presents an innovative, cross-disciplinary methodological approach to systematically reviewing and comparing large bodies of literature using big data, Natural Language Processing, network analysis, and supplementary qualitative analysis. The approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the literature surrounding four common concepts within the scholarship related to the global turn in education: 21st-century skills, global citizenship, intercultural competencies, and cosmopolitan education.

Through the analysis, the authors highlight some benefits of the outlined methodology in identifying overarching themes across bodies of literature, locating differences in how topics are approached within the context of each concept, revealing blind spots and caveats in specific areas of scholarship, and being able to outline distinctive characteristics of the literature related to each concept. Limitations and potential uses of the method are subsequently discussed.

There is open access to the article, which can be found here.