For over a decade, Mainland China has been embarking on an ambitious nation-wide education reform ('New Curriculum Reform') for its basic education. The reform reflects China s propensity to borrow selected educational policies from elsewhere, particularly North America and Europe. Chinese scholars have used a local proverb "the West wind has overpowered the East wind" to describe this phenomenon of looking West .
But what do we mean by educational policy borrowing from the West?

• What are the educational policies in China's new curriculum reform that are perceived to be...

Transnational education seeks equivalence in standards and/or relevance of outcomes through the transfer of Western theories, concepts and methods. Utilising a critique-interpretative approach, Jing Qi argues that equivalence/relevance-oriented approaches to transnational education assume the legitimacy of the global knowledge hierarchy. Euro-American educational theories are imposed as defaults in non-Western educational communities of imagined consensus.

Grounded in a study of a five-year transnational teacher education and community capacity-building program in Northern...

History education, by nature, transmits an official version of national identity. National identity is not a fixed entity, and controversy over history teaching is an essential part of the process of redefining and regenerating the nation. France and the United States have in particular experienced demographic and cultural shifts since the 1960s that have resulted in intense debates over national identity. This volume examines how each country s national history is represented in primary schools social studies textbooks and curricula, and how they handle contemporary issues of ethnicity,...

Learner-centered approaches to teaching, such as small group discussions, debates, role plays and project-based assignments, help students develop critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills. However, more traditional lecture-based approaches still predominate in classrooms in higher education institutions around the world. Faculty development programs can support faculty members to adopt new teaching methods, even in situations where they face significant challenges due to lack of resources, on-going conflict, political upheaval, or the legacy of colonialism in their...

In East Asian economies such as China, recent mass rural-urban migration has created a new urban underclass, as have their children. However, their inclusion in urban public schools is a surprisingly slow process, and youth identities in newly industrialized countries remain largely neglected. Faced with monetary and institutional barriers, the majority of migrant youth attend low-quality or underperforming migrant schools, without access to the free compulsory education enjoyed by their urban counterparts. As a result, China's citizen-building scheme and the sustainability of its...

Based on qualitative research focused on literacy and health from three schools in coastal Kenya, this book examines country, school, and family contexts to develop a dual-generation maternal-child model for literacy learning and to connect local-specific phenomena with national and international policy arenas. In contrast to international development organizations educational policies and programs that tend to ignore literacy as a social practice within diverse contexts, the author unpacks the relationship between education and health, and the role of family and mothers in particular,...

An acknowledged challenge for humanitarian democratic education is its perceived lack of philosophical and theoretical foundation, often resulting in peripheral academic status and reduced prestige. A rich philosophical and theoretical tradition does however exist. This book synthesises crucial concepts from Critical Realism, Critical Social Theory, Critical Discourse Studies, neuro-, psycho-, socio- and cognitive-linguistic research, to provide critical global educators with a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework for self- and negotiated evaluation.

Empirical...

Transformative learning is a compelling approach to learning that is becoming increasingly popular in a diverse range of educational settings and encounters. This book reconceptualises transformative learning through an investigation of the learning process and outcomes of International Service-Learning (ISL), a pedagogical approach that blends student learning with community engagement overseas and the development of a more just society. Drawing upon key philosophers and theorists, Bamber offers an integrated, multi-dimensional approach, linking transformative learning to the development...

Showing how youth from one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in Cape Town, South Africa, learn differently in three educational contexts in classrooms, in a community hip hop crew, on a youth radio show this book illuminates how South African schools, like schools elsewhere, subtly reproduce inequalities by sorting students into social hierarchies linked to assessments of their use of language. Highlighting the voices and perspectives of young South Africans, this case study of youth in the global South explores how language is linked to cultural mixing which occurred during...

The Effectiveness of Mathematics Teaching in Primary Schools provides a timely and unique insight into today s mathematics classrooms in England and China and arrives at a time when the world is eager to know how Chinese learners consistently excel at learning mathematics and other core subjects.

Showcasing the kinds of teaching methods that work or do not work within and across countries, this book presents a rich collection of various views, including those from teachers, their native colleagues, their foreign colleagues and the researcher, regarding the quality of mathematics...