Education & Pedagogy

Co-teaching is described as the pairing of a general education teacher and a special education teacher in the general education classroom for the shared instruction of students with and without disabilities. Many teachers struggle to form unified partnerships, especially in mathematics classrooms. The MathMATES project was developed to address a need for joint special education and mathematics professional development aimed to support teachers in merging their individual strengths and expertise through shared content development and relationship-building exercises. Over the course of the year-long academy, teachers developed strong knowledge-sharing partnerships that resembled co-mentoring partnerships. We compare their progression with research on co-mentoring to suggest a framework for developing more unified mathematics co-teaching teams.

The potential benefits of OER have led many European governments to implement policies supporting their creation and use. This chapter aims to put these OER policies in context, discussing their focus and scope and highlighting challenges and bottlenecks. On the basis of the analysis of the current state of the art, it is argued that one of main barriers to reaping the benefits of OER is fragmentation combined with a lack of clear and uniform legal frameworks. The recent European "Opening up Education" initiative is presented as a way to overcome these barriers by creating synergies and joining efforts across Europe.

This article addresses the change in the transitional process from secondary school general education to gainful employment within the framework of societal modernisation processes in Germany. We analyse the relationship between the options for and restrictions upon individual educational mobility under the conditions imposed by the various socially institutionalised educational segments, which comprise a structure of opportunity. The database for our study consists in the longitudinal findings of the "Hamburg Biography and Life Course Panel" (HBLP) from 1980 to 2007, which examined the processes of vocational education mobility for a sample of the Hamburg graduating class of 1979. How do these people manage their educational strategies? What do they experience in terms of vocational education and continuing education within the institutional structure of opportunity? Do the career paths differ after gender?

In this paper, we trace selected strands of the German path to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). We start by addressing pre-ESD research, and move to the concept of "Gestaltungskompetenz," the core concept of German ESD. The concept had to be realigned as to become more compatible with international research on learning outcomes (competencies). Compared to its beginnings, the meaning of "Gestaltungskompetenz" has much advanced, e.g., influenced by German competence research in science education, to which the Göttingen Model for socioscientific reasoning and decision making contributes. The paper presents a new competence dimension on "Evaluating and reflecting solutions quantitatively-economically" for this model. The contribution highlights the integrative and interdisciplinary scope of the educational challenges posed by Sustainable Development.

During the past 15 years of his career, John Furlong's research and writing has focused--in part--on digital technologies and people's everyday experiences of education. While hardly a technology expert, his work has shown an acute awareness of the significance of computers, the internet and mobile telephony in making sociological sense of education. This paper contrasts the limited visibility of such issues within the sociology of education over the past 30 years with how the present situation appears to be improving during the 2010s. The paper also identifies opportunities for future work that engages more in the co-production, development and design of new forms of educational technology. As such it is concluded that a future sociology of education and technology needs to be developed that acts not only against, but also in and beyond, the dominant field of education technology.

The United States and much of the world is struggling with what "education" and being "educated" mean. Daily media are replete with debates on issues ranging from gender and class rights to the ideological and practical purpose of education. Prominent among these debates are discussions about whether education should be geared toward vocational purposes and employability or toward the creation of engaged, informed, and intellectually aware citizens. In this article we problematize the role and limitations of current research on drama and theater in and as education. To do this, we first share a sampling of the current state of research in this arts area. We then articulate the role this diverse range of research methodologies and foci play in shaping national and global educational policy.

Valid, scientific research is critical for ascertaining the effects of instructional techniques on learners with disabilities and for guiding effective special education practice and policy. Researchers in fields such as psychology and medicine have identified serious and widespread shortcomings in their research literatures related to replication and bias, leading many to question the validity of research findings in these fields. Replication and bias have not been systematically examined in special education research. In this article, I explore research on replication and bias conducted in other fields, discuss the likelihood that problems in replication and bias may exist in the special education research base, propose a research agenda for investigating replication and bias in special education research, and make initial recommendations for increasing replication and reducing bias in intervention studies in special education.

Innovative programs for restructuring the entry phase of mathematics teacher education programs have been implemented at various German universities within the last few years. This article reports about the design and the results of a longitudinal evaluation study of the effectiveness of two of these programs aiming to improve mathematics teacher education by altering the conditions in university teaching (the so-called Teacher Education and Development Study TEDS-Telekom). The development of prospective teachers' professional knowledge in academic mathematical content knowledge, knowledge in elementary mathematics from an advanced standpoint, and mathematical pedagogical content knowledge from the innovative programs were compared to traditional university programs. The study points out that the innovative programs only partially succeeded in improving the acquisition of professional knowledge for prospective mathematics teachers.

Low educational attainment is frequently pointed out as a barrier to social and economic development and most governments aim at increasing participation in higher education. However, effective strategies to increase aggregate demand require information on its most relevant determinants, which is difficult to obtain because applications to higher education are usually not organised at the country level. In this study, we utilise a large sample of data on applications available in Portugal to estimate a model of aggregate demand for higher education. Our estimates suggest that the economic context is relatively less relevant than policy orientations, and thus that sustaining or increasing higher education participation may be more dependent on political choice than on economic circumstances. The only relevant economic determinant in the model is unemployment which contradicting some previous research appears to exert a negative impact upon aggregate demand.

Policy decision-making in Malaysia has long used an approach based on intuition, ideology, or conventional wisdom. But as Malaysian society matures within an increasingly complex policy environment, a move toward an evidence-based approach to public policy-making is called for. This paper discusses the experience of the National Higher Education Research Institute ("IPPTN") in its attempts at linking research to higher education policy formulation. The main aim is to understand the perspectives of the "IPPTN" researchers regarding the use and impact of higher education research on policy-making, and the challenges they experienced. The findings provide insights into the future of evidence-based higher education policy-making in Malaysia and the "IPPTN's" capacity and capability for evidence-based policy research.

This paper makes a plea for the construction of a common agenda for higher education and science, technology and innovation (STI) policy research. The public higher education and research sector in all countries is currently in the grip of several challenges arising from increased accountability, internationalization and in some cases dwindling resources. Even as the sector is struggling to come to grips with these new developments, policy-makers the world over are being exhorted that their best route to sustainable economic development is investment in higher education and research. Scholars in STI policy and higher education research currently address these issues separately. This paper argues that a joint research effort from both these communities would push the research frontier further for each respective field and improve the evidence base for policy.

In this paper, I argue that rethinking questions of inclusive education in the light of the value of educational equality--specifically conceived as capability equality, or genuine opportunities to achieve educational functionings--adds some important insights to the current debate on inclusive education. First, it provides a cohesive value framework which clarifies the relationship of education with the aims of a just society. Second, it suggests a focus on the demands of equality, as well as the quality of educational provision as perhaps more fundamental than questions on the location of education, which have long dominated the inclusive debate. At the same time, it places the well-being and the agency of all children, and children with disability and difficulties in particular, at the centre of the educational process. These dimensions entail reconsidering schooling systems not only in terms of policy, but also of curricular elements and teaching and learning strategies.

What are the capacities of visual arts curricula to engage learning within narrow frameworks of overly "scientistic" standards (Lather, 2007)? With growing emphasis in schools under STEM initiatives and evidence-based standards, the possible cross-pollination of effects that art education may have on a science-centric education may be a lifeline to budgets and relevancy. Yet, focal points to ponder these possibilities illuminate not only what art education has to offer, but also, what contradictions in scientific visualization and representation offer to art educators. Seeing in science can be just as much a cultural practice as seeing in art. The potential insights that art educators may gain from investigating the tensions in representation in scientific visualization and the temptations of digital image manipulation may allow them to look anew at their own relationship to non-digital visualizations, such as observational drawing.

Environmental education can deliver benefits to individuals, society and the environment, but few studies have asked practitioners or participants what they feel these benefits are. This research compares the perspectives of practitioners and participants in environmental education projects, using questionnaires, focus groups and participant observation. Practitioners and participants listed a large number of outcomes, with increasing knowledge about the environment mentioned most frequently. For participants, this was often in relation to gaining new skills. Social outcomes, such as making new friends, were more prominent in participant than practitioner responses. Practitioners did not spontaneously mention any negative outcomes of environmental education, and few were suggested with prompting. Participants suggested more negative outcomes than practitioners, notably damage to the environment. The differing views suggest a need for greater discussion between practitioners and their participants.

Turkey regulates the special education of students with disabilities and, particularly, those who have intellectual disabilities (ID) based on international and national legal texts. However, the gap between law and practice cannot be denied. The existence of obstacles to special education for students with disabilities or ID continues in Turkey. This brief report is composed of four parts. First, it describes Turkey's basic characteristics related to disability and its judicial framework. Second, it aligns the basic obstacles to attaining universal education that includes students with disabilities, including educational segregation, discrimination, ambiguous schooling and external factors, respectively. In the third part, some recommendations are presented that aim to fill the gaps in special education. The commentary concludes with a discussion of the attainable targets for future directions.