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The main aim of this chapter is to discuss the conceptualization of comparative pedagogies within Continental European and Anglophone traditions, and to discuss the importance of comparative pedagogy within the contemporary comparative educational research as such. The chapter opens with the issue of naming and translation of the key terminology, notably pedagogy, comparative pedagogy, and vzgoja (Erziehung in German and vospitanie in Russian) – a concept which implies the teacher’s intentional guidance of children in their moral, personal, social, aesthetical, physical, and spiritual advancement. The chapter presents a brief history of the development of pedagogy as a distinctive science, and proceeds with the discussion on pedagogy’s identity. Due to multifaceted understanding of pedagogy in Continental Europe, the chapter focuses on the academic tradition in Slovenia and wider area of former Yugoslavia. Further, the role of comparison in different contemporary historical periods of pedagogy’s development is explained. The chapter shows that comparative pedagogy has different meanings in different academic traditions. The main difference between that Continental Europe and the Anglophone world is in the knowledge base they built on (pedagogy vs. other social sciences), and the focus they place on endogenous and exogenous factors influencing the nature of education systems and pedagogical processes. The author finally proposes a new definition of comparative pedagogy; a definition which takes pedagogy as its knowledge base, but is also informed with a long tradition of comparative education research based on other social sciences.

Since the spread of mass education around the world in the mid- to late-twentieth century, teacher quality has been heralded as the key factor to improve education quality nationwide. National education systems worldwide are also engaged in ongoing and often high stakes cross-national comparisons. As a result, policy-makers and educators in most national education systems are looking at and implementing new ways to improve education overall by raising teacher quality levels, and India is no exception. In India, teacher quality is publicly blamed for both perceived low education quality and demonstrated low average student performance, especially following Indian students’ performance on the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment. Indian education policy-makers are, therefore, looking at teacher quality as a key factor to improve student performance. Little is known about the impact or implementation of Indian policy frameworks on teacher quality and associated student outcomes in India. This introductory chapter identifies and analyzes various measures of teacher quality and how teacher quality varies in India both in response to and in spite of national policies related to teacher quality. It begins by providing evidence regarding the global importance of teacher quality on student outcomes and then addresses the ambiguity of the term “teacher quality.” This chapter then briefly discussed national education policy in India and the role teacher quality has played in these national policies, especially in the early twenty-first century, including NCF 2005, NCFTE 2009, Draft NPE 2016, Draft NPE 2019, and NPE 2020.