CEIMA & CIECAP Comparative & International Education Course Archive Project
One of the resources of CEIMA is CIECAP, The Comparative and International Education Course Archive Project. The CIECAP Project is an on-going special project conducted on behalf of the profession and is a service for the members of the Comparative and International Education Society. CIECAP is an on-line database of salient features of the introductory course in comparative education as taught at universities around the world. It is an important addition to the growing body of research on the nature of the field itself, including its form and parameters. The project's unique contribution to this research is an accessible archive of actual university graduate course outlines in the Introduction to Comparative & International Education. In addition, there is an on-going analysis of key elements of the introductory course including unit topics, referenced articles, journals and texts, as well as the interests and specializations of comparative education course instructors.
The primary purpose of the CIECAP Project is to be a resource for instructors either planning to teach or already teaching comparative education. CIECAP Project resources can become a tool for designing their course syllabi and for comparing their course to what is being taught in other programs. Surveys of CIES members engaged in teaching comparative education have found little consensus in the field regarding influential figures, works, and themes. Rather, the field remains strongly heterogeneous and ever changing. The CIECAP Project is able to illuminate this dynamic characteristic of the field in a way that bolsters critical self-inquiry and allows instructors to situate their course within the broader context of what is happening in comparative education programs nationally and internationally.
An additional closely related purpose to CIECAP is that over time it will provide a rich source of information for analysis of directions in which the field appears to be moving. Working from the assumption that a field's contours and boundaries are best discerned through assessing the thoughts and actions of its practitioners, we believe that ongoing documentation and analysis of the introductory course is an effective form of such assessment.
CIECAP is now being hosted on-line as part of the CEIMA web-site at Bowling Green State University. A brochure and presentation at the CIES conference in New Orleans explained the new organizational structure, with CEIMA as the umbrella web-site and CIECAP a special research project under the umbrella of CEIMA. Both CEIMA and CIECAP are being supported as part of the resources of the new SIG in the Teaching of Comparative & International Education.