This volume documents the significant changes that have occurred in Japanese schools since the collapse of that nation’s economic bubble. Before the recession, Japan was the country that most educational reformers sought to emulate due to its students’ performance on standardized tests. Now, however, a different and more complicated picture of the Japanese education system emerges. This book places Japanese education in a global context, with particular attention given to how t...

The book's focus is the hegemonic role of so-called modernist, Western epistemology that spread in the wake of colonialism and the capitalist economic system, and its exclusion and othering of other epistemologies.Through a series of case studies the book discusses how the domination of Western epistemology has had a major impact on the epistemological foundation of the education systems across the globe. The book queries the sustainability of hegemonic epistemology both in the cla...

The New Plantation examines the controversial relationship between predominantly White NCAA Division I Institutions (PWI s) and black athletes, utilizing an internal colonial model. It provides a much-needed in-depth analysis to fully comprehend the magnitude of the forces at work that impact black athletes experiences at PWI s. Hawkins provides a conceptual framework for understanding the structural arrangements of PWI s and how they present challenges to Black athletes academic success; ...

This book compares two challenges made to American public school curricula in the 1980s and 1990s. It identifies striking similarities between proponents of Afrocentrism and creationism, accounts for their differential outcomes, and draws important conclusions for the study of culture, organizations, and social movements.Amy Binder gives a brief history of both movements and then describes how their challenges played out in seven school districts. Despite their very different const...

Through innovative analysis of theory and practice, this book offers refreshing critical perspectives on service-learning in higher education. It constructs a theoretical paradigm for service-learning which extends to critical pedagogy, and investigates critical reflection and academic reflective writing, supported throughout by empirical evidence.

In a recent international comparative study, the United States public schools did not fare well with the rest of the world. To the disappointment of many, the No Child Left Behind law did little to improve student achievement. Nevertheless, a small pocket of poverty schools worked against the odds of limited resources and performed to new heights of academic excellence. These high-poverty, high-performing schools were studied to identify the common trends and to reveal their secrets of suc...

This book explores the decades-long use of the notion of interculturality in education and other fields, arguing that it is now time to move beyond certain assumptions towards a richer and more realistic understanding of the ‘intercultural’. Many concepts such as culture, identity and intercultural competence are discussed and revised. Myths about interculturality are also unpacked and dispelled. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, this book proposes a very useful framewor...

This book provides scholars, teacher educators, as well as reflective school leaders and teachers with valuable insights into what it is to be a teacher in the 21st century. It does so by presenting original research based on a study of several New Zealand schools between 2013 and 2015, and in particular, a focussed study of four of those schools in 2015.The book draws on the findings to take stock of some of the central manifestations of 21st-century learning, especially digital p...

The book is the outcome of a unique venture: a team of Chinese geographers and a team of American geographers collaborated on a new Comparative Geography of China and the United States. The book meets a high demand for comparative information about China and the United States, as the home of the two leading economies in a globalizing world. Comparisons of the two countries include the similarities and differences in their physical environments and natural hazards, the growth and changing s...

Analyzing educational landscapes – the fundamental values, principles and institutions of the sector – is a highly complex and demanding task for any researcher. Like shifting desert sands, these aspects of education are in a constant state of flux, changing according to the unpredictable economic, social, cultural and geo-political circumstances of late modernity. Key aspects of the intricate, fluid and multifarious contemporary setting can always escape the researcher’s necessarily selec...

In the US, the university administration runs its own office of “insti- tional research” in order to base its decisions on systematic information. Furthermore, higher education research can rely on a relatively stable academic basis if study programmes on higher education exist. Again, this is most frequently the case in the United States. Finally, governments and other macro-societal actors sometimes have their own offices or institutes of policy research and prepare the policies of the a...

This book offers a perspective on Education for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood (ESDEC) that is far removed from the ‘business as usual’ notion of an extended, predominantly environmental, educational curriculum for preschools. It presents a vision of sustainable development that has relevance to Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) from birth to school; it is relevant as much to homes, family support and health settings as it is to educational settings, and is as much conc...