One of the foundational principles for comparativists researching pedagogy is that what happens inside classrooms is shaped by what is outside – that is, the full range of contexts within which teaching and learning are situated. Context is important across a range of scales, from institutional and local to regional and global, and includes potentially infinite influences, from policy drivers to cultural traditions. However, knowing which things, how they matter, and to who, and also how they also affect each other, places challenging demands on comparative researchers. Historically and across different research traditions, attempts to tame the complexity of context have led to a range of approaches, each of them a useful tool but ultimately unsatisfactory in its own way. Methodologically, context often becomes a relatively inert background, packaged in methodological nationalism or other containers for social action, with scales larger or smaller than the national remaining beyond the scope of enquiry. In this paper we start by outlining briefly how comparativists over time and from different research paradigms have come to terms with context. We consider what these conceptualisations have allowed us to see and to do, and what limitations and challenges they present in accounting for the intersections of different contextual influences and actors or the mechanisms through which they entangle in the world of the classroom. We look to other disciplines which have perhaps been quicker to grapple with and theorise these complex entanglements in ‘the spatial turn’. Where ‘context matters’ has become a mantra in sociology and comparative and international education, ‘space matters’ has become a recent adage across the social sciences more broadly (Ferrare & Apple, 2010). In the final section, we turn to an exploration of Massey’s (1994, 2005) conceptualisation of relational space, and how it was utilised in a recent study of learning across home, neighbourhood and school spaces, and the implications for pedagogy in Tanzanian primary schools (Brown, 2022). No single theory or approach can operationalise context in a way that both embraces its complexities and analyses and presents them in meaningful and digestible ways. However, we see in the work of Massey promising avenues for accounting for how context not only contains but creates social action, for managing the burden of choice in selecting aspects of contexts to explore, and for opening up and representing the dynamic and polyscalar nature of context and the multiple histories embedded in it.

Brown, R.B. (2022). Perceptions and experiences of urban school, home and neighbourhood learning spaces, and implications for pedagogy in Tanzanian primary schools. A comparative case study. PhD, School of Education, University of Glasgow. Ferrare, J., & Apple, M.W. (2010). Spatializing critical education: Progress and cautions. Critical Studies in Education 51(2): 209-221. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage Publications.