This symposium will address some key global challenges for international research in didactics – learning and teaching and also consider some of the associated epistemological, pedagogical and methodological issues and questions that arise in this process. In doing so we bring perspectives from the UK, South Africa and Australia. The first paper addresses issues of social justice and human rights in education by focussing on the relation between equitable learning and epistemic quality and illustrates this through a focus on developing mathematical thinking in the primary classroom in the UK. The second paper addresses vocational education and training (VET) from a context in South Africa. The question is raised as to whether there are distinct pedagogies in vocational education and training and the needs of teachers who ‘face both ways’ in relation to the classroom and the workplace are considered. The third paper from Australia addresses methodological issues in relation to international comparative research. In particular it proposes that pursuit of commensurability through the imposition of a general classificatory framework misrepresents the way in which valued performances and school knowledge are actually conceived by each community and sacrifices validity in the interest of comparability. It aims to illustrate the compromise that is central to international comparative research studies in education and provides examples of how the production of complementary comparative accounts might honour both validity and comparability.