Comparing “incomparable” schools? Extended case method and reflexive comparative study of teaching practices in Brussels and São Paulo

Comparing dissimilar social realities inexorably raises the question of the way to establish a basis for comparison that respects the specificities of the cases studied while not at the same time considering the context as negligible. Seeking to highlight the contributions of Burawoy’s extended case method to addressing these challenges of comparative research, this article retraces the iterative design process of a multicase socio-ethnographic study of teaching practices carried out in Brussels and São Paulo public high schools. Revealing a sharp contrast between a teaching to transgress kind of critical pedagogy in the Brazilian case and a more conventional form of status quo education for democratic citizenship in the Belgian one, the research thus sheds light on the role of contextual dynamics in the emergence of these ideological divergences between two instances of public education. Unlike the inductive approach and its logic of generalization based on the search for lowest common denominators—relegating context and case specificities to the background—this article thus argues that the least intuitive comparisons are, in fact, the most likely to stimulate sociological imagination, questioning the obvious in the studied societies and opening up to a deeper understanding of each case.