Education & Pedagogy

This article begins with a description of Salvador Dali's 1931 work "The Persistence of Memory" which is said to have been painted following a hallucinatory episode. The painting is likened to an assault on rationality, and the author explains the similarities of the past 40 years of teacher education to the surrealism movement in art. One of the more recurrent themes in teacher education of the past 40 years concerns the continuous onslaughts on teacher education by external forces such as governments and their fickle and ever changing policies, and the ever present efforts to regulate, marketize, corporatize, control and blame teacher education across successive governments and regimes of various political persuasions. The author states that the situation where teacher education is so much at the mercy of government policy is not surprising given that every activity conducted in the name of education is a political act. She takes the position that while education as a social activity is impacted upon simultaneously by the social, political and economic contexts of a society at any given time, the fact remains that the policies that guide and direct education as a social activity, emanate from and reside within the political context. The author concludes by saying that just as Dali in the sequel piece to "The Persistence of Memory" entitled "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory" depicted the potential for man to be the architect of his own destruction, the neoliberal turn and the new networks of power to which they have given rise, could also signal the destruction of the integrity, pedagogies, epistemologies and philosophical bases of teacher education that teacher educators wish to perpetuate.

Education to Theatricality as pedagogical and artistic research is experienced by almost twenty years in Italy in laboratories and projects organized in collaboration with universities, schools, theaters, educational centers, cultural centers, educational and social services, associations. Education to Theatricality is a science that includes different of disciplines such as pedagogy, sociology, human sciences, psychology and the performing arts in general. The scientific basis of this discipline allows us to apply it in all possible contexts possible and with any individual, because it keep the man as he is in the center of its pedagogical process. One of the fundamental principles of Education to Theatricality is the construction of the actor-person; the main aim is the development of creativity and imagination through a scientific training leads by the actor on himself. The present theoretical writing synthetically introduces the fundamental elements of the theory. Method: This study discusses relationship between theater and education analyzing the main elements of this meeting. First part presents the theories: the birth of the theatrical workshop, development of Education to Theatricality and the definition of its theoretical issues: I-AM's scheme; creative subject, creative act; laboratory and its aesthetic philosophy: Art as a vehicle. Second part presents theater pedagogy through creative movement. The text presents the exercises on the languages of human communication the method of work. Third part presents projects and planning in education laboratory expressive arts. Conclusions: Education to Theatricality as pedagogy uses the expressive arts into the theatre workshop for to lead the subject to path of growth and training activating the original potential skills of this person.

Several studies demonstrate that Sport Education supports the development of an authentic experience of sport. Social media has the potential to further the development of an authentic sport experience since it is a key aspect of contemporary sport culture and can be a space for individuals to interact during the Sport Education. Yet the evidence-base on the use of social media within Sport Education is limited. The purpose of this study was to explore how social media supports the development of an authentic sport experience within Sport Education. The context of this study was within a female recreational community sport futsal club. Players engaged with Sport Education as a focus for their sessions for 13 weeks. The Sport Education season embedded the six key features. During the Sport Education season, players interacted with each other through Facebook. Data were generated from; (1) researcher/player field journal, (2) Facebook posts and (3) post-season player interviews. Data analysis involved inductive, constant comparison and member-checking methods. Results showed that players' uses of Facebook supported the development of an authentic sport experience. Players' uses of Facebook strengthened the development of three key Sport Education features; affiliation, festivity and season. Based on the limited amount of research on the impact of social media within Sport Education and community sport, future studies should continue to examine the effectiveness of social media as an interactional tool to enhance the development of an authentic sport experience.

In this research, it is aimed to present the applicability of Web Based Distance Education (WBDE) method in instrument (guitar) education for Fine Arts High Schools. In accordance with this purpose, a web-based experimental study is developed within the scope of synchronous and asynchronous models for guitar education. The research is carried out in two different study groups in the 2017-2018 academic year at Aydin Dogan Fine Arts High School in Turkey. In order to evaluate web-based instrument education, the first study group is formed with 8 students in the 11th and 12th grade who have taken guitar education, and the second study group is formed with two students who have never studied guitar in order to evaluate the initial guitar education. In this mixed-method study, pretest-posttest matched control group random experimental pattern method is applied within the scope of quantitative method, interview and observation techniques are applied within the scope of qualitative method. Guitar performance grading scale (GPGS), initial guitar education basic behavior evaluation form, individual instrument course attitude scale, guitar course achievement test (GCAT), structured course observation form and interview form are used as data collection tools. According to the results of the study, the instrument (guitar) education program of Fine Arts High School could be applied by WBDE method and this method could be used as an alternative to traditional instrument education.

Purpose: Breastfeeding education in the school setting offers the opportunity to improve knowledge base and positively influence beliefs and intentions for students. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of short education program among secondary school students on breastfeeding knowledge and intentions. Design/methodology/approach: Total of 106 female and 155 male students from four different high schools in Bjelovar were given online questionnaire about intentions to breastfeed and test of knowledge about breastfeeding, both before and shortly after education. The effect of education and school on breastfeeding intentions and knowledge was examined using mixed design ANOVA. Univariate tests were used to examine relation of several independent variables to breastfeeding intention and knowledge scores before and after education. Findings: Results showed statistically significant effect of education on both intentions and knowledge, whereas the effect of school was significant only for intentions. Students show more positive intentions and better knowledge about breastfeeding after education than before education. Research limitations/implications: This paper does not entail validation of breastfeeding questionnaire and knowledge test. Due to comprehensiveness and report length, study on validity and reliability of measures is the subject of another paper. Practical implications: The authors hope that results of the study will influence professional public in Croatia and encourage it to support implementation of breastfeeding education in curriculum. Originality/value: This paper offers the first national intervention data in relation to breastfeeding intentions and knowledge among secondary school students. It provides an evidence for necessity of implementation of well-structured education module in regular curriculum of secondary education in Croatia.

The aim of the study is to determine the effect of zest for work on physical education teachers' perceptions of success and examine it together with some demographic variables. The study is a descriptive study using relational screening design. The sample of the study consists of 402 physical education teachers, 38% (n: 151) female and 62% (n: 251) male, employed within the Ministry of National Education in Ankara and it was selected by stratified sampling method. The "Perception of Success Scale" and the "Zest for Work Scale" developed by Erdogan (2013) were used to measure physical education teachers' perceptions of success and their zest for work levels, respectively. Analysis of the data was conducted via SPSS 21 package program. Significance level was taken as p<.05. According to the results of the study, physical education teachers' zest for work levels significantly predicted their perceptions of success. There was a positive and significant relationship between physical education teachers' perceptions of success and their zest for work levels. It was found a positive and significant relationship between physical education teachers' perceptions of success and their ages. Physical education teachers' perceptions of success and their zest for work levels showed a significant difference in favor of female teachers according to the variable of gender. There was no significant difference between physical education teachers' zest for work levels and their ages and the level of institution. It was found no significant difference between physical education teachers' perceptions of success and the level of institution.

This article analyzes higher education research published in international higher education journals by researchers from China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia from 1980 to 2013. It does so based on publication counts, and co-authorship and cross-citation mapping, examining these countries' publication patterns in terms of thematic approach and community cohesion. The results show that each country has experienced distinct evolutions of higher education research, both in terms of the number of publications and thematic diversity. The research organization analyzed by co-authorship networks shows that higher education researchers in Hong Kong tend more to integrate two higher education research approaches--teaching and learning, and policy studies--into their research work. It is also in Hong Kong where most higher education researchers focus their research on both teaching and learning, and policy topics. Higher education researchers in China, Japan, and Malaysia are more thematically specialized in terms of both their positioning and their co-authorship preference. These findings suggest that a broader integration of different thematic areas may be linked more to path-dependent and contextual characteristics than to differences related to the development stage of higher education systems. This is confirmed by the cross-citation analysis, which shows that higher education researchers based in Hong Kong tend to cite each other more frequently than do those based in Japan, China, and Malaysia, suggesting a much greater community cohesion in Hong Kong than in these other countries. The findings highlight that while the maturity of a higher education system influences community cohesion, other factors influence thematic leaning and integration.

September 30th 2016 was Botswana's 50th birthday. Botswana, a deeply impoverished country in 1966 was on that day an upper-middle income country in the world rankings. Its education expenditure was one of the highest in the world, at around 9% of the GDP. It was on record to have provided more than 90% of universal and free primary education. Guided by the 1977 and 1994 education policies, the country committed itself to the universal declaration that education is a fundamental human right. It adopted a priority of reducing the growing percentages of non-enrolled school age children, let alone working around the clock to increase access to basic education schooling. Despite these good policies and sound financial resources, it has not escaped global challenges of unequal access which has denied some learners the opportunity to complete their education programmes. It also faced huge challenges of low school retention rates, particularly in the basic education programme, that is primary and secondary school systems. This article considers these challenges as critical indicators of lack of attention to learner's welfare in public schools. It argues that in the 50 years of self-rule, the basic education program remained trapped in a culture of moral indifference and silent exclusion. The article argues that post 50th birthday, Botswana needs to begin a new chapter, developing an education system that cares about learner's education welfare more than ever before.

As international standards are continually publicized, countries across the globe have adapted educational policies to meet the demands of the global market, which has led to much emphasis on specific subjects and teaching methods. Although modern educational policies tend to focus on rhetoric about inclusion, systematic segregation remains in many parts of the world. In the case of South Africa, the political transition in the 1990s had tremendous impacts on educational policies. However, by studying the policies that were in effect during apartheid, it is easier to understand some of the inequalities that remain. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Bantu education was used as a tool to support the apartheid state. In the 1980s, the People's Education Movement began as a grassroots initiative to promote equal education and the transition to democracy. While the latter was achieved, the people's education vision was largely abandoned in exchange for policies that would allow the state to be most competitive in the global market. Just as the apartheid regime imposed Bantu education on the non-White population, this article argues that international standards are now imposing a Western model of education on South Africa. Although great strides have been made toward a more egalitarian education system, this pattern has been occurring worldwide. Through studying these policies, scholars may better understand how the legacy of apartheid continues to impact modern education systems.

Background/Context: This article describes the fundamental role of social justice in public education and professional teacher education. Purpose: The purpose of this policy analysis is to explicate the theorizing, conceptualization, formalization, and implementation of the first standard for social justice teaching and teacher education in U.S. history, published by the National Council of Teachers of English and approved by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education in November 2012. Design: Using a policy narrative approach, the authors explicate the grassroots political processes, professional political action and advocacy, and policy procedures and scholarship undertaken to construct a successfully vetted, approved, and fully implemented national policy in one subject-area professional association (SPA). The authors demonstrate how other SPAs and affiliated groups may pursue similar policies for socially just teaching and teacher education across disciplines, fields, and contexts across education. Conclusions: Using research to theorize responsive teaching pedagogies and using findings from social psychology research to generate a socially just orientation to teaching in public schools, the authors highlight the ways in which social justice teaching is not simply a possible orientation for professional educators to consider but a fundamental tenet and primary consideration of public education overall. The authors conclude that SPAs and public education professionals not only may but must engage in social justice policymaking for educational equity in order to succeed in attaining education reforms that truly serve the public good.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review three international frameworks, including the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), in relation to one country's higher professional and vocational education system. Design/methodology/approach: The frameworks were examined in the context of English higher work-related education, and areas of mismatch identified. These were investigated to identify the extent to which they were due to weaknesses in the national system or to limiting assumptions contained in the frameworks. Findings: Assumptions based on stages of education are problematic in the context of lifelong higher and professional education, while more open, lifelong-learning oriented assumptions can be too skeletal to aid comparisons between systems of initial vocational education and training. Particular problems are identified with assumptions contained in the ISCED that do not reflect the reality of professional education. Practical implications: International frameworks need to take account of patterns of learning that take place outside of formal institutions and throughout life, but which lead to equivalent outcomes. Nevertheless, it is not adequate to substitute assumptions based only on the level of achievement. Social implications: The assumptions underpinning the ISCED in particular mean that equivalent achievements in different systems can be classified differently, leading to under-reporting of individual achievements, a lack of comparability in international statistics, and potential for policy distortion. Originality/value: The paper builds on the work of Hippach-Schneider et al. by providing additional evidence, from a different national context, for issues relating to the ISCED in the context of higher professional and vocational education, and extends this analysis to the two major European frameworks.

The robust relation between maternal education and child language that is observed in monolingual populations has not been reliably replicated among bilingual children from immigrant families in the United States. We hypothesized that a variable that operates in immigrant populations--the language in which mothers achieved their highest level of education, is relevant to the benefits of maternal education to children's language growth. The participants were 92 U.S.-born bilingually developing children (47 boys, 45 girls) with native Spanish-speaking immigrant mothers. The mothers varied both in their level of education and in the language (English or Spanish) in which they had achieved their highest level of education. The children's expressive vocabulary in English and Spanish was assessed at 6-month intervals between 30 and 60 months. Four sets of multilevel models, which included estimates of children's relative amount of input in each language and mothers' age of arrival, found that maternal level of education in English was significantly related to children's English skill, but not their Spanish skill, and that maternal level of education in Spanish was related to children's Spanish skill, but not their English skill. These language specific relations between mothers' levels of education and their children's language development potentially explain previous findings in immigrant populations. These findings further argue that maternal education benefits children's language because education changes mothers' use of the language in which that education was achieved. There was no evidence of a language general benefit of education, as might arise from increased knowledge of child development.

In mathematics education, researchers have proposed a wide range of improvements of teaching practice in school, but only a few of these proposals have sustainably changed mathematics education in the desired form. This article takes off with the assumption that this gap between ideals and practice can be understood and challenged through a better understanding of the social functions of mathematics education. Functionalism is a sociological paradigm, which is based on the assumption that sub-systems of society support each other. The application of this theory to mathematics education seeks to illuminate the social connectedness of classroom practice and incorporates various studies from the field of mathematics education and beyond. Its originality lies in its ability to integrate and order results from many different socio-political studies in mathematics education and to identify research desiderata in the field. On this basis, I show that in spite of official discourses on the use-value of mathematics, we lack evidence that mathematics education is functional in providing socially necessary qualifications in mathematics. Instead, possible other functions of mathematics education such as the training of economically beneficial character traits, the legitimisation of mathematics as a social tool of power, the transfer of social advantages from parents to children, the training of a bureaucratic mentality and the projection of societal wishes and fears are discussed. The results do not only provoke further debate on educational goals of mathematics education but may form a basis on which to plan educational innovation with particular attention towards social constraints underlying mathematics education.

This article seeks to shed light on current dynamics of stratification in changing higher education and proposes an analytical perspective to account for these dynamics based on Martin Trow's work on "the analysis of status." In research on higher education, the term "stratification" is generally understood as a metaphor that describes a stable vertical order. In sectors that are experiencing considerable change, such an order is still in the making. In following Trow, we propose to look at stratification as an open ordering process that constructs verticality. We distinguish between sector and field stratification, i.e., between stratification through coercive regulation by the state and through status judgements by a wide range of stakeholders. Within the last decade, field stratification has grown in importance as governments in continental Europe have provided universities with more leeway. Specific devices (rankings, etc.) channel such judgements and construct images of how a field appears. By applying this concept to two empirical cases from German higher education, we will show how devices redefine verticality in higher education through specific field images. First, master rankings in business administration/economics expand the topological boundaries to include degree programs outside national sectors, raise the importance of alumni and increase the recruitment of female students. Second, the Excellence Initiative triggers the construction of a new unregulated sector of doctoral education; excellent graduate schools model themselves along the scales of the field image as selective, interdisciplinary, international, and part of a holistic university image.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the state of undergraduate business statistics education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and assess its alignment with the best practices in equipping business graduates with the knowledge and skills demanded by the labor market. Design/methodology/approach: A survey of 108 instructors from 80 business schools in 17 MENA countries was conducted to gauge information on the delivery of business statistics courses. The survey results were bench marked to a proposed framework for best practices in business statistics education. Findings: The gap analysis identified deficiencies in the delivery of business statistics education in the region as compared to international best practices. This study revealed a need to revise statistics education as part of a comprehensive reform of business education with the aim to meet international quality standards in business education. Research limitations/implications The study relied on the self-reported responses of business statistics instructors in MENA. One hundred eight questionnaires were completed, corresponding to a response rate of 40 per cent. Moreover, the study did not measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning in business statistics courses. Practical implications: Recommendations from the study are intended to guide business statistics instructors in improving the quality of business statistics education through adopting more effective ways to enhance student learning experience and graduate employability. Originality/value: This study is the first of its kind to investigate and assess the business statistics education in the MENA region.