Rolland G. Paulston

Rolland G. Paulston devoted much of his academic career to addressing how comparative and international education research is analyzed, represented, and practiced. His hope was to avoid duality or binary struggles of opposites. Paulston's postmodern imaginary of concept mapping helps to compartmentalize visually spatial modes of free spontaneity, material possibility, and panoramic perspective, and informs figurative intertextual fields of comparative and international education and paradigmatic trajectories. Paulston would classify objectivity as representational forms of emergent potentiality. Upon re-examination of Paulston’s work, his research has helped to classify a continuum of theoretical perspectives that have been used in comparative and international education to support educational reform strategies and to suggest how individual choice behaviours follow from basic philosophical, ideological, and experimental orientations to perceived social reality. Paulston reinforced the need to continue to focus on contextual elements of local needs and socio-cultural considerations.