Education & Pedagogy

In this paper, we review various challenges in regard to educating children with and without disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. The challenges discussed include (1) biased assessment that results in mis- or overrepresenting CLD students in special education, (2) difficulty distinguishing between disability and differences, and (3) lack of competent bilingual special educators. As recommended practices, we propose to use the response to intervention model in identifying and instructing CLD children with and without disabilities. We point out that future research should examine how collaborative service delivery models contribute to referrals of CLD children into special education and the instruction of these children. Future research should also focus on how to expand teachers' knowledge about both the sociocultural and learning contexts to aid in producing positive outcomes for CLD children both with and without disabilities.

This research reflects neoliberal economic policies by demonstrating the privatization of education in Turkey. The increase in the number of students of private schools and private schools in Turkey along with the relationship between public education investments and household income of education have been explained by using the document analysis technique from qualitative research methods. As in many countries, public education in Turkey has been removed from the basic human rights and commercialized and transformed into a commodity that has been bought and sold. Neoliberal transformation aims to generate a strong and dependent structure that eliminates political and economic freedoms. The documents published by the Ministry of National Education and the Turkish Statistical Institute were obtained from the relevant institutions and the data were analysed. It has been concluded that education has undergone a rapid privatization in Turkey, while investments in public education have decreased rapidly. Also the funds required to be allocated to public schools have been transferred to private schools, and the education rights of the children of poor families have been diminished.

In India, most of the deliberations on social inclusion in higher education focus on enhancing the gross enrollment ratio (GER) among socially disadvantaged people. New colleges and universities are started in backward areas which are diagnosed with low GER and more deprived students get access to higher learning. A quantitative approach which merely focuses on increasing the number of students would not be sufficient in order to really effectuate an equitable society. A qualitative paradigm which addresses the content part of education too is necessary. Though the authorities enthusiastically work on renovating higher education, adequate attention is not given to reform the curricula in a representative/participatory manner. The article argues that the very concept of inclusive education is faulty and substitutes it with participatory education. Evoking Paulo Freire, the article sums up that authentic education is not carried on by "A" "for" "B" or by "A" "about" "B," but rather by "A" "with" "B."

In Afghanistan, the education system from primary school to higher education has faced longstanding problems related to access, quality, limited resources, and equal opportunity. The nation is one of the most impoverished, ravaged, and beleaguered in the world. Since 2001 and the collapse of the Taliban, both the government and the international community have been exploring opportunities to reform the education system. However, despite billions of dollars having been spent on reforming curricula, training teachers, upgrading facilities, and procuring equipment and resources, their efforts have not been successful. This is because often, only current needs were addressed while the roots of the challenges were neglected. Identifying the major factors and understanding the changes the education system has undergone are integral to re-shaping its future. This article describes the different types of education that existed during different periods as well as the historical, political, religious, and cultural factors that impede its proper functioning such that the education system continues to lag behind those of most of the rest of the world.

The proliferation of non-state policy actors in public education systems globally has actuated a turn to new governance analysis within education scholarship. As part of this 'governance turn', education policy theorists have sought to clarify the interface between governance by non-state actors and public systems of policy formation and enactment. The phenomenon of 'enterprise education' has typically been neglected in examinations of this type, despite comprising a major point of intersection between new networks and public education governance. This article draws on governance theory and methods of social network analysis to posit that enterprise education constitutes a shift in curriculum governance. It shows that, in resemblance to related components of recent neoliberal education reform, enterprise education networks supplant public actors in their traditional prerogatives for curriculum development and delivery. The cooperation of public institutions in this process serves to enact a reconstitution and dilution of public responsibility, as these actors become enmeshed in polycentric networks that are neither exclusively private nor public.

This study examines practicing primary school teacher's perceptions of the teaching of physical education in their schools. There has been some criticism of primary school physical education but until now this criticism has been largely based on a number of small studies involving limited numbers of teachers and schools. This study involved surveys of 487 teachers and in-depth individual interviews with 33 teachers located across six major regions of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The findings are presented in four themes: what does physical education look like; who teaches physical education; planning, assessment and reflection; and influences on the teaching of physical education. The study identified that what occurs in the physical education space in primary schools is often inconsistent and variable. The findings are discussed in relation to the requirements of the New Zealand Curriculum, the 2014 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement report and previous research on primary school physical education. The article concludes by discussing future directions for the teaching physical education in light of these findings.

Many teacher candidates, cooperating teachers, school administrators, and physical education teacher education (PETE) programs have increased responsibilities and needs related to teacher performance assessments (TPA). One TPA in particular is increasing in usage across all content subject areas in the United States: the Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). This performance-based measure from the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity is an authentic and sometimes high-stakes test of a teacher candidate's pedagogical skills in planning, instruction and assessment. This article presents three combined PETE programs' experiences over a period of three years. As both instructors in higher education and national edTPA scorers, the authors provide suggestions and strategies for success that may help three levels of stakeholders related to the edTPA. The purpose for presenting these perspectives is to help teacher candidates, school personnel, and PETE faculty to successfully implement, appreciate and embrace this approach to teacher performance assessment.

As governments shift costs from the public to students, a higher education has become synonymous with educational debt. Liberal egalitarians have justified educational debt on the grounds that it facilitates socioeconomic equality. On this view, the public should only fund access for those students who are so poorly off that educational debt would be too risky. In this article, I offer a "fair play" analysis of higher education funding in order to show that socioeconomic equality is a necessary, but insufficient, criterion for assessing the fair contribution of public funding to higher education. In particular, I argue that higher education is instrumental to the free pursuit of a good life. I then argue that educational debt is unjust when it constrains borrower's freedom to pursue a good life relative to those who do not have to borrow. In such cases, public funding should cover the attendance of students who would otherwise have no choice but to borrow in order to access a higher education.

This study investigated how student and school-level socioeconomic status (SES) measures predict students' odds of being identified for special education, particularly high-incidence disabilities. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten cohort, hierarchical models were used to determine the relations of student and school SES to special education identification. Results indicated neither student-level SES variables for parent education, prestige, and income, nor school-level aggregates of SES measures, predicted overall special education placement, but higher parent education attainment was negatively related to high-incidence disability identification (adjusted odds ratio = 0.73). These findings suggest that racial disproportionality is not attributable to racial differences in income and indicate a need for further investigation of the mechanisms by which the longstanding racial disparities in special education emerge and are maintained. In particular, we discuss the implications of this study for further research into the relations of indicators of parent's status on educational decisions within special education.

Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that in Germany educational success still strongly depends on the social origin of individuals. Using the National Educational Panel Study, we analyse the effects of fathers' and mothers' education levels on their sons' and daughters' educational attainments across three successive birth cohorts in West Germany. We calculate the predicted probabilities of reaching low, medium or high education levels on the basis of the level of education of the mothers and the fathers. Our results show: a persistence of the status maintenance model, with very few exceptions; a growth in the educational level of women via medium-level education connected to segregation in the labour market; and finally that the first transition of girls to medium-level education has been completed, leaving space for daughters to attempt to outnumber sons in tertiary education, mainly due to the pressure of mothers.

This paper approaches the issue of higher entrepreneurship education in motivating young people to start their own business as a viable alternative to the successful integration of university graduates on the labour market. The fundamental question of this research is if, currently, entrepreneurship education influences students' entrepreneurial intentions and to what extent. The research results, based on the statistical analysis of data collected through a questionnaire distributed to Romanian business and engineering bachelor students in the final year, highlight that business students assessed the effectiveness of higher entrepreneurship education and its positive influence on entrepreneurial intentions to a greater extent than the engineering students. Furthermore, entrepreneurial intentions of engineering students are influenced positively much more by entrepreneurial family background than by entrepreneurship education. The findings provide important highlights for future research, in order to identify the most effective ways of approaching, modernising and expanding entrepreneurship education, aiming to increase entrepreneurial intentions among students, regardless of the graduated field of study.

During the last five years one of the main goals of Educational Departments in Greece has been to prepare teachers who, amongst other tasks, must be able to apply New Technologies to their everyday teaching and use Information and Communication Technologies to retrieve information about many classroom activities. This study refers to the courses taught on New Technologies and Information and Communication Technologies, at a postgraduate level, in a continuing education programme, at the Department of Pre-school Education at the University of Ioannina, Greece. It also discusses the use of New Technologies by in-service pre-school teachers as well as their expectations of the application of New Technologies to kindergartens. Their suggestions for better training in the use of New Technologies during their undergraduate studies, and the problems of applying them in the classroom, are also presented.

Equal access to higher education has for long been a political ambition, however, despite the expansion of the number of students now entering higher education it has not yet been achieved. The present special issue offers insights into the encounter between students from non-traditional backgrounds and higher education. Five individual studies from four countries offer a unique contribution to understand non-traditional students' risk of dropping out of higher education as more than a question of academic preparation and hence individual deficits. Together the five papers display a variety of analyses of a key issue for the European Higher Education Area: attracting and retaining a wider group of students. The results show how non-traditional students across countries are made up of a complex mosaic of voices. Hence, the special issue makes a call to move away from the stereotypical images of non-traditional students, and to continue analysing the variety, the complexity and diversity of non-traditional students and their encounter with higher education.

This comparative analysis investigates the influence of neo-liberal and inclusive discourses in "special" education policy-making in New South Wales, Scotland, Finland and Malaysia. The centrality of competition, selectivity and accountability in the discourses used in New South Wales and Malaysia suggests a system preference for neo-liberal solutions to education policy problems. The focus on excellence with equity, together with proactive approaches to student support in Scotland and Finland, however, is representative of a more interventionist government approach grounded in social democracy. It is argued that an inclusive approach is conducive to the achievement of both excellence and equity in students' learning outcomes, whereas countries that have pursued market-driven models involving competition for places in selective institutions tend to have poorer educational outcomes and wider levels of inequality.

This article uses the example of Germany to elaborate on the historical development, the current practice, and recent debates on employability. Employability as an outspoken aim of higher education was only established in recent decades due to the introduction of Polytechnics, the expansion of higher education, and the Bologna-Process. Despite the diversity of the higher education sector (e.g., universities; universities of applied science), the assumption of equality means that degrees from any institution are of equal value according to the level of study. As in other countries, German higher education institutions have established measures to improve employability such as changes in the curricula or the establishment of career services. However, challenges remain to measure the employability and the employability outcome of HE. The article concludes that the identification of specific subject-related and transferable skills and competences and their transferability to the labour market remains an ongoing task to increase the employability of graduates in Germany.