Journal Editor Professor (Dr.) ​N'Dri T. Assié-Lumumba

Preface from the Editor
 
N’Dri T. Assié-Lumumba
Editor, Global Comparative Education: Journal of the WCCES
President, World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES)
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA
3 November, 2022

As Editor of Global Comparative Education: Journal of the WCCES, I am delighted to present this issue, which constitutes the first of the series of special issues of the Journal. Each special issue will be edified by one or several invited guest editors. This inaugural special issue is based on papers presented at the 3rd WCCES Symposium, which was originally planned to be held in Lisbon (Portugal) in July 2022 to be hosted by Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias but was eventually held virtually through Zoom due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. It was held from November 25-27, 2020, on the theme Teachers, Teaching Profession, and Comparative Education: Fostering Values Education and Engaging Academic Freedom amidst Emerging Issues related to COVID-19.
Participants of the Symposium who presented papers were invited to revise and submit them for consideration in WCCES publications outlets: 1) Global Comparative Education: Journal of the WCCES, 2) in an edited volume of the WCCES-Brill Book Series, or 3) World Voices Nexus: The WCCES Chronicle. The authors of the articles included in this special issue submitted their papers for consideration in the Journal.
This inaugural special issue of GCE as well as a forthcoming book out of the 3rd symposium are co-edited by Professor Yusef Waghid and Professor Zehavit Gross. They have titled the special issue Engaging Academic Freedom amidst Emerging Issues related to COVID-19: On activist citizenship education through comparative education. The final list of papers was made following the usual rigorous peer-review process. It is worth mentioning that, likewise, several papers presented during aforementioned symposium have been published in World Voices Nexus: The WCCES Chronicle following the regular peer-review process.
WCCES Symposia have become a regular feature of between-congress events in providing continuity to academic discourse in contributing to past and emerging issues within the comparative education community, as is the case during these tough times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the first Symposium in 2018 hosted by the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and in 2019 by IBE in Geneva (Switzerland) two books have been published. The 4th Symposium was held in 2021 and the 5th Symposium is lined up to be held in November 2022. For the 4th Symposium 17 member societies of WCCES served as co-conveners. A record number of 18 member societies of WCCES have enthusiastically expressed their support as co-conveners of the 5th Symposium. This level of collaboration accentuates my vision for the Council at the time of my election as its President in 2016, and again in 2019 for a second term, which has extended due to Covid-19 pandemic.
We would to continue to publish revised and accepted papers of the 4th and 5th symposia in the WCCES Journal, Chronicle and book series towards the XVIII World Congress of WCCES to be held in 2024.
On behalf of WCCES, I express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Yusef Waghid and Professor Zehavit Gross for their unrelenting support always and hard work in editing this special issue.
I wish you good health, safe living in this tumultuous global environment and happy reading.