This new book, from internationally renowned education scholar Pasi Sahlberg and his colleagues, focuses on some of the most controversial issues in contemporary education reform around the world. The authors devote a chapter to each of these “hard questions”:Does parental choice improve education systems?Is there a future for teacher unions?What is the right answer to the standardized testing questionCan schools prepare children for the 21st-cen...

In 2005 the World Bank released a gender assessment of the nation of Jordan, a country that, like many in the Middle East, has undergone dramatic social and gender transformations, in part by encouraging equal access to education for men and women. The resulting demographic picture there—highly educated women who still largely stay at home as mothers and caregivers— prompted the World Bank to label Jordan a “gender paradox.” In Gendered Paradoxes, Fida J. Adely shows that assessme...

Informative and mind-opening, this text uniquely provides a comprehensive overview of a range of non-western approaches to educational thought and practice. Its premise is that understanding the ways that other people educate their children—as well as what counts for them as "education"—may help readers to think more clearly about some of their own assumptions and values, and to become more open to alternative viewpoints about important educational matters. The approach is deliberately and...

Winner of the Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Book Awards. Utilizing an ethnographic study of a public university and its users, Cicalo analyzes the practical and symbolic potential that affirmative action has to redress historically-produced and territorialized inequalities in the urban space.

Since the Teacher Education Act was in place in 1994, student teachers were educated through diverse educational institutions instead of the traditional normal schools (Taiwan’s equivalent of teachers’ colleges). But such market-based teacher education has been altered by politics, society and culture in the direction of government-controlled teacher education, particularly in the quality evaluation of teacher education. Taiwan maintains teacher education quality by controlling the number ...

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 explores the webs of vulnerability in methodological decision-making that illustrate the deceptive strength of qualitative research. Each chapter will resonate with readers differently as they read themselves into the tensions and tangles of qualitative research when confronted with the challenges of establishing methodological frameworks for educational and social enquiry. The authors are postgraduate, early career researchers and supervisors who analyse their methodological enc...

This cogent analysis of data on education and society from a variety of sources sets out to provide answers to scientific and policy questions on the quality of education and the way it relates to various forms of inequality in modern societies, particularly in Europe. The authors examine not only the well known cross-national PISA datasets, but also the European Social Survey and TIMSS, going further than many researchers by folding into their analyses economic, legal and historical facto...

This book examines seven higher education organizations, exploring their interconnected lines: organizational change and organizational stability. These lines are nested within historical, social, cultural, and political contexts of two nations—the US and Canada—two provinces and three states: Alberta, British Columbia, California, Hawai’i, and Washington. The author studies the development of the community college and the development of the university from community college origins, bring...

Based on ethnographic and policy data collected over a ten-year span at a university in the People’s Republic of China, this book analyses the history of English Language Teaching (ELT) polices in Chinese higher education. The book uses the university as a lens in which to investigate the creative imaginations and divergent (re)appropriations of teaching methods, learning materials, and language use in the Chinese ELT context. Book chapters move beyond mere descriptions of tensions and poi...

This edited collection provides an in-depth exploration of different aspects of contemporary early childhood literacy research and the implications for educational practice. Each chapter details how the research was conducted and any issues that researchers encountered in collecting data with very young children, as well as what the research findings mean for educational practice. It includes photographs of effective literacy practice, detailed explanations of research methods so the studi...

To recapitulate, Greeks differ from Independents and from the academy's value priorities, but for the most part these differences derive from antecedent charac teristics. Moreover, there are some grounds for speculating that these anteced ent differences reflect fundamental temperamental differences (extraversion and gregariousness mediated by social interaction, as opposed to interaction through ideas). Only to a limited degree does the Greek "system" appear to adversely affect the acquis...