Kategoria BISAC: Education >> Educational Policy & Reform

Reflecting the increased use of English as lingua franca in today s university education, this volume maps the interplay and competition between English and other tongues in a learning community that in practice is not only bilingual but multilingual. The volume includes case studies from Japan, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Catalonia, China, Denmark and Sweden, analysing a range of issues such as the conflict between the students native languages and English, the reality of parallel teaching in English as well as in the local language, and classrooms that are nominally...

Washington State is about to enter a new phase of the "math wars." Since the late 1980s, the debate over how best to teach mathematics to schoolchildren has raged worldwide among educators, politicians, and parents. The stakes are high. To operate effectively in a global, twenty-first-century economy and polity, the United states must provide an education in mathematics that is both excellent and equitable.

In this volume, four scholars at the Washington School Research Center (WSRC) at Seattle Pacific University present original research drawn from statistical studies of state...

This powerful and timely analysis takes stock of race and education sixty years after the historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision. This volume examines education as one of the most visible markers for racial disparities in the US as well as one of its most visible frontiers for racial justice. Featuring original research, educators' insights, and perspectives from communities of color, it documents the complex impact of social/educational policy on social progress.

Chapters on charter schools, curriculum content, performance measurement, and disproportionalities in...

The media is full of reference to failing schools, troublesome pupils, underperforming boys, disappearing childhood and a teaching profession in crisis as more and more teachers contemplate abandoning their careers. Key Questions in Education looks at the current and historical debates of each of these issues, examining how a multitude of stakeholders have viewed, and still view, childhood and schooling. In highlighting how these same or similar issues have persistently been debated throughout time, John T. Smith shows something of their complexity and the need to break apart these...

The achievement of academic excellence is inherently competitive. Deliberate government policies, globalisation and changes in communication technologies mean that competitiveness in the academic world is sharper than ever before. At the centre of this is the seeking of prestige, at all levels from the national system to the individual. Prestige in Academic Life aims to increase understanding of motivation in universities by exploring the part that prestige plays, for good and ill. The book's focus on motivation and prestige helps to answer fundamental questions that run through...

The achievement of academic excellence is inherently competitive. Deliberate government policies, globalisation and changes in communication technologies mean that competitiveness in the academic world is sharper than ever before. At the centre of this is the seeking of prestige, at all levels from the national system to the individual. Prestige in Academic Life aims to increase understanding of motivation in universities by exploring the part that prestige plays, for good and ill. The book's focus on motivation and prestige helps to answer fundamental questions that run through...

This important book builds on recent publications in lifelong learning which focus on learning and education in later life. This work breaks new ground in international understandings of what constitutes later life learning across diverse cultures in manifold countries or regions across the world. Containing 42 separate country/regional analyses of later life learning, the overall significance resides in insiders' conceptualisations and critique of this emerging sub-field of lifelong learning and adult education.

Working with Underachieving Students in Higher Education: Fostering Inclusion through Narration and Reflexivity presents an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationships between narrative devices and reflexivity in higher education. Stemming from a collaborative European research project called INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn), it focuses on an innovative model aimed at promoting personal resources and reflective competencies in non-traditional, disadvantaged and underachieving students.

The book is divided into three parts,...

How can we explain the study of education in terms of its social and historical development? And how has its survived as an academic subject in the changing world of the 21st century? The character and role of the study of education in the UK have always been contested and often challenged, so what are the underlying tensions that have served to shape its growth?

While key disciplines such as history, sociology, psychology and philosophy have been vital, education has been an unstable coalition of interests rather than a discipline in its own right. This has given rise to tensions that...

Within the broader context of the global knowledge economy, wherein the "college-for-all" discourse grows more and more pervasive and systems of higher education become increasingly stratified by social class, important and timely questions emerge regarding the future social location and mobility of the working classes. Though the working classes look very different from the working classes of previous generations, the weight of a universal working-class identity/background amounts to much of the same economic vulnerability and negative cultural stereotypes, all of which continue to...

Social Justice, Transformation and Knowledge: Policy, Workplace Learning and Skills examines the policy contexts in which lifelong learning, vocational education and training and skill development is set. It provides a critique of neo-liberalism and its impact on vocational education and training and lifelong learning. It interrogates potentially progressive policy interventions that take for granted capitalist relations as these can become a form of comfort radicalism that whilst calling for structural change remain lodged within capitalism. Such analyses are limited,...