Education & Pedagogy

Place-based education (PBE) promises greater social and ecological justice at a time of great planetary need. This paper explores the experiences and beliefs of eight teacher educators from Canadian teacher education faculties who were invited to give their perspectives on PBE as they theorize and deliver it in their teacher education programs. Analysis of their interviews identified the participants' pathways to PBE, their terminologies for PBE, their understanding of PBE's purposes, their pedagogical practices, their sense of the structures (systemic attitudes and administrative supports or exigencies) that affect PBE, and their integration of Indigenous knowledges of place. The participants demonstrate a deep philosophical approach to place that could enhance environmental and perhaps Indigenous education more broadly.

Across the globe, the learning goals of elementary, secondary, and higher education curricula emphasize the development of the critical thinking approach. In Kenya, the curriculum mentions developing critical thinking as one of its objectives, but a critical review reveals that the education system prioritizes competitive exams and rote memorization over critical thinking and other vital 21st-century skills. In this paper, I argue that educational authorities can achieve this objective if they critically evaluate the purpose of education regularly to ensure that there is an alignment between the stated goals and practice. They also need to make sure that the education they provide leaves no learner behind.

This study explores anew the issue of providing special education in Catholic schools by viewing the ethical implications from a liberatory hermeneutic. By utilizing an interdisciplinary perspective, the research draws upon liberation theology, liberation psychology, liberation pedagogy, and liberation ethics to support the moral mandate for providing education for all God's children, including those persons with disabilities. The study challenges Catholic educational leaders to reimagine their positions on how schools might promote a more inclusive, liberatory approach to serving the special needs of children with disabilities. Finally, this research provides a Catholic, liberatory, ethical framework for inclusive Catholic education to assist school leaders in the development of appropriate pedagogy and programming to address the issue of inclusion of students with disabilities.

In this study, the education system of the Republic of South Africa was explored. The study focused on the successes as well as problems faced by the educational system. The research questions focused on the quality of education in the country. It also explored the problems faced by students as they try to gain access to schooling at all levels of the education system. Qualitative methods were used to collect data for the study. More than 120 local newspapers were sampled for the study. The main findings from the study are that although some of the universities are highly ranked among universities in the world, the education system contains inherent problems which include poor teacher quality and outmoded curriculums.

Abstract Martin Trow was among the most influential scholar in Higher Education studies in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for his conceptualisation of the development of Higher Education into three stages--elite, mass and universal systems. This article considers, first, his intellectual method and the underpinning theory (or lack of it); secondly, the extent to which his ideas, generated in the exceptional environment of post-war America were, and are, relevant to different national contexts and in the very different environment of the 21st century; thirdly, the strengths--and weaknesses--of Trow's conceptualisation of three stages of Higher Education development; and, finally the new lines of research suggested by an overall assessment of his work.

This article explores the work of history and philosophy in publications by Willystine Goodsell, professor of history and philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the entanglement of Goodsell's approach to scholarship with that of her doctoral supervisor John Dewey. The article experiments with diffractive reading to examine Dewey's and Goodsell's approach to history, as well as Goodsell's configuration of women's historical and contemporary participation in education. It looks at Dewey's comment that women's 'philosophising' would not be the same 'in viewpoint or tenor' as that composed from the 'different masculine experience of things' and investigates the principles that order liberal and vocational education in Goodsell's view of a reformed education for women. The conclusion asks whether diffractive reading is an enhanced form of intertextuality.

The central tenet of the revisions to the Law on the Promotion of Private Education is the implementation of categorized management of private schools, establishing a legal basis for categorized management. Private education is characterized by publicness, and upholding and guiding private schools in exercising their public nature is the target value of legislation on private education. Publicness determines the criteria under standards for the categorization of private schools, and differences in publicness provide an analytical foundation for private school categorization standards. Publicness defines the focal points of private school standards, including the subjects of the law for private education, as well as the rights and obligations of these subjects. [Translated by Carissa Fletcher.]

Preparing classroom teachers to work with students with diverse learning needs is a challenge that has been well documented by the literature. Earning a dual license in general and special education has been posited as one possible solution to this challenge. This paper reports on a qualitative study that examined the differences between dually licensed and traditionally prepared educators with regards to their self-efficacy and ideas about inclusion. Findings suggest that teachers who earn a dual license in general education and special education may have a stronger sense of self-efficacy as well as a stronger skill set for working with students with disabilities and other types of difference.

As one of Canada's 13 distinct jurisdictions, Ontario is a national leader in developing a competency-based postsecondary education system. Hindered by challenges of a disaggregated system of policy actors in system design, quality assurance and credit transfer, sweeping change has not occurred. Instead, various bodies with operational powers over university, college, or private-provider quality assurance have slowly incorporated concepts of competency-based education into frameworks by introducing learning outcomes. This paper outlines the challenges facing Canadian and Ontario postsecondary education, discusses the roles and responsibilities of agencies involved in quality assurance, and actions made towards developing and implementing learning outcomes at the system level. The research highlights the ad-hoc and unaligned activities, but also demonstrates the commitment to move towards a competency-based education system.

The Identification, Placement, and Review Committee (IPRC) process has been long established within Ontario special education practice and provincial legislation. Borne out of advocacy for advancing the right to education for children with disabilities, the IPRC process is now being critically explored as to whether the process itself creates an infringement on students' access and rights to quality education. Drawing on historical and contemporary shifts in education policy and human rights in Ontario, this paper presents the case that the current structure of the IPRC is outdated and may function as a significant barrier to students' academic futures.

The pandemic COVID-19 has brought the closure of schools of all levels and all universities in Italy, since early March 2020 up to the end of the teaching period (first half of June 2020). However, almost all universities guaranteed the continuity of educational and professional courses by using several distance education modalities. The purpose of this communication is to describe how a course of History of Chemistry and Basics of Chemical Education for first-year undergraduate students was reorganized and delivered during the COVID-19 emergency and to share several considerations that might be useful for the future. Positive and negative aspects emerged during this distance education experience are finally reported.

Service learning (SL) is both a pedagogy and philosophy adopted by many early childhood teacher educators. Extant research suggests the incorporation of service-learning can be effective for facilitating preservice teacher learning of curriculum, pedagogy, approaches to diverse learners and families as well as establishing a professional identity. To guide the intentional adoption of SL and its assessment in early childhood teacher education programs, the authors present the Developmentally Appropriate Practice /P.A.R.E. model and illustrate how the model might be applied in a teacher education program. Challenges to incorporating service-learning in early childhood education programs and future areas of research are described.

It has become commonplace within the educational research community to invoke the transformative power of education. The call to adopt a 'transformative' approach to teaching and learning can be heard in fields as different as adult education and school leadership and as estranged as social justice education and educational psychology. While there is undoubtedly great promise in the idea of transformative education, the fact that it involves deep psychological restructuring on the part of the student requires ethical justification. In this article, I analyze the three most pressing ethical problems that arise within a transformative educational environment: the problems of transformative consent, controversial direction and transformative trauma. In the concluding section, I argue that this ethical analysis urges us to adopt an approach to transformative education as a process of initiation.

In this paper, I defend the viability and relevance of Heidegger's philosophy of technology and consider its emancipatory potential in the field of education. First, I situate Heidegger's philosophy of technology within the broader emancipatory project of his early work--the fundamental ontology of Being and Time--and emphasise the role of language and (self-)appropriation in human subjectivity. Second, in light of the importance Heidegger placed on education for resisting the reifying and alienating effects of technology, I conclude with some critical reflections on recent attempts to develop a positive Heideggerian programme of education. In particular, I reveal some crucial limitations of the pragmatist or 'bodily coping' approach--defended by Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall and argue that an 'appropriative' alternative yields a more compelling philosophy of education, which emphasises the cultivation of moral articulacy.

Vocational education and training (VET) remain overlooked in learning analytics (LA) research. This systematic literature review, using four databases and other sources, was carried out by analyzing selected 60 articles (2012-2017) to study the levels and stages of education that the reviewed LA literature examined. The review indicated that most of the analyzed papers focused on the course level, followed by student and institution levels in higher education. Few empirical studies have addressed LA use during the VET stage, particularly at the governmental level. We also considered ethical concerns and recommendations for further LA development in VET. It is suggested to use LA in knowledge transfer and integration between the classroom and workplace.