Education & Pedagogy

The reality of students' cyber lives has thrust upon educators a new approach: creating character education programs tuned to digital youth that are both proactive and aggressive. Taking this approach will help integrate students' digital activities within the context of the communities in which they live, both local and digital. The digital age beckons educators to usher in a new era of character education, aimed directly at addressing the opportunities and challenges of living a digital lifestyle. The author talks about character education for the digital age. He discusses the role of an "ideal school board" who is ready to take on the task of creating academic and character education programs tailored for raising an intelligent, caring generation of students who understand the responsibilities and opportunities associated with living a digital lifestyle. This ideal school board engages in a number of processes to harmonize its mission and programs with the digital frontier.

Diversity is defined as differences in groups of people and individuals based on ethnicity, race, language, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, exceptionalities, and religion. Each of these aspects of diversity is a "culture" in and of itself. The goal of physical education teachers is to become "culturally responsive teachers" and to ensure that each student gets an equal opportunity for a sound education. At times, the perception of various cultural groups regarding physical activity can contribute to the marginalization of physical education. This article explores how attitudes about physical activity and exercise differ among cultures and how those attitudes influence the importance that diverse students and their families attribute to physical education. The article also provides numerous practical strategies for teachers working with culturally diverse students.

The growing size of the older population challenges not only researchers but also higher education in gerontology. On the basis of an online survey the authors describe the situation of Nordic higher education in gerontology in 2008 and 2009 and also give some good examples of Nordic- and European-level collaboration. The survey results showed that gerontological education was given in every Nordic country, in 31 universities and 60 other higher education institutions. Although separate aging-related courses and modules were relatively numerous, programs for majors were relatively few. Networking in the Nordic region offers a good example on how to further develop higher education in gerontology. Emphasis should be put on strengthening networking on the European and trans-Atlantic levels. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

The practice of distance education in the United States is traced back to its early roots. In the 20th century, distance education remained at the periphery in corporate training, K-12 schools, and most universities, but it gradually developed its practice by using broadcast media, and later the Internet. Since the turn of the current century, distance education has seen an unprecedented growth in the US. Antecedent to this growth is the emergence of a post-industrial economy as well as expanded theory building and research in the discipline. The future of distance education depends on how successfully established institutions can adapt themselves to the post-industrial environment by adopting key theoretical concepts and implementing research findings, and how institutions are able to reduce the cost of education while increasing access.

Early childhood teacher education courses must prepare students for the types of challenges they will face in communities and classrooms after graduation. By adopting a scenario-based approach, teacher educators and others designing online environments can help prepare students for these challenges. Solving complex problems inherent in a scenario-based approach affords students the opportunity to tackle ill-formed problems, integrate multiple perspectives, and use higher order thinking. These outcomes were among the goals of a redesign of online courses in an early childhood education degree program. After presenting an overview of scenario-based instruction and the principles guiding the redesign, the authors describe how a scenario-based approach can be applied to an online graduate course and outline a course development process for other instructors. (Contains 4 figures.)

Teacher education programs have adopted preparing science teachers that teach science through inquiry as an important pedagogic agenda. However, their efforts have not met with much success. While traditional explanations for this failure focus largely on preservice science teachers' knowledge, beliefs and conceptions regarding science and science teaching, this conceptual paper seeks to direct attention toward discursive practices surrounding inquiry science teaching in teacher education programs for understanding why most science teachers do not teach science through inquiry. The paper offers a theoretical framework centered on critical notions of "subjection" and "performativity" as a much needed perspective on making/becoming of science teachers through participation in discursive practices of science teacher education programs. It argues that research based on such perspectives have much potential to offer a deeper understanding of the difficult challenges teacher education programs face in preparing inquiry practicing science teachers.

This case study investigated equity in teacher education admissions. Through document analysis and structured interviews with ten past or current members of the admissions committee in a large initial teacher education program in Ontario, we developed an understanding of equity in teacher education admissions as encompassing two foci: equity in admissions--that is, equity of access for applicants to the program--and equity through admissions--that is, equity of educational opportunity and outcomes for the children in the schools where the teachers trained by the programs will eventually teach. Our analysis illustrates the importance of recognizing both foci and the tensions between them.

This research investigates state finance policies for public education using survey methodology. The purpose is to update previous work and the existing knowledge base in the field as well as to provide a compendium of finance and policy options that are used across the states to finance public elementary and secondary schools. Chief state school officers or their designee were queried; data were provided for all 50 states and posted on the web for verification. This article presents the findings together with crosscutting themes including major state apportionment policies for K-12, special student populations, capital outlay provisions and transportation funding. (Contains 8 tables and 8 footnotes.)

The revitalisation of African higher education has been a policy imperative on the agenda of many international and African organisations in the last decade, as well as a focus for research and debate. Revitalisation is a theme which is itself framed by a larger set of current discourses about the powerful role of knowledge in society and in the economy, and about the possibilities and conditions for knowledge-based development. Central to the success of both the revitalisation and knowledge-based development agenda is a systematic and sustained approach to a package of issues relating to access, equity and quality in African higher education. This article examines trends and developments relating to these three issues in higher education in sub-Saharan Africa and reflects on their implications for a successful revitalisation strategy, as well as for knowledge-based development. (Contains 23 notes.)

This paper addresses the question: is self-assessment in religious education unique? It first presents an overview of some challenges for assessment from subject differences, and then reviews the generic literature on self-assessment. It builds on earlier empirical research on self-assessment in religious education, carried out in an English state secondary school; this was used to propose a variant of self-assessment which is tailored to the demands of religious education--"reflexive" self-assessment. Its implications for more general understandings of the relationship between subject pedagogy and self-assessment are discussed, especially the recognition of values not only in religious education but in other subjects too, reinforcing the need to develop subject-specific variants of self-assessment that reflect the breadth of learning outcomes. (Contains 1 note.)

Under the Canadian constitution, authority over all levels of education, including higher education, rests with each of the individual provinces and territories. Although Canada has one of the highest levels of per capita educational attainment in the world, student access continues to be one of the most dominant policy areas in Canadian higher education. In recent years, a number of significant access policy reforms have been put in place by governments at the national and provincial levels. These initiatives are demonstrative of the continued and growing influence of marketization in Canada's quasi-market system. This analysis provides some insight into these recent reforms and the influence that market principles have come to have in Canadian policies on both the supply-side and the demand-side of the country's higher education sector.

This paper investigates the effect of the timing of tracking on completion of higher education by exploiting unique variation from the Dutch education system. At the age of 12 Dutch students can enrol in tracked schools or in comprehensive schools. The comprehensive schools postpone enrolment into tracked classes by one or two years. OLS- and IV-estimates, using regional variation in the supply of schools as instruments, show that early tracking has a detrimental effect on completion of higher education for students at the margin of the Dutch high and low tracks. The negative effects of early tracking are larger for students with relatively high ability or students with a higher socioeconomic background. In addition, we find no negative effects of comprehensive classes on higher ability students. These results suggest that increasing participation in comprehensive classes would increase graduation from higher education. (Contains 10 tables and 1 figure.)

The range of rationales that underpin conceptions of flexible education, and the re-making over time of the official meaning of flexibility in national education policy, have led to the point where flexibility might be found, or be required, in nearly every aspect of Australian higher education. This paper seeks to identify those rationales and the development of public policy rhetoric that have framed the development of the meaning of flexible education over time in an Australian context. By considering the intersection of theoretical and policy perspectives on flexible education with the realities of teaching and learning practice in the discipline context of engineering, this paper proposes the essential importance of individual context and agency in the making of real meaning from, and creating practical boundaries around, the otherwise tenuous definitions of flexibility often offered by institutional policy.

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study on the "Bang' jomariek," a women's group in West Reru in Western Kenya who engage in the production of indigenous arts and crafts (pots, baskets, and architecture) to generate income and explore politics, medicine, and other matters that affect them and their community. The women shared their motivations for engaging in the production of these art forms and the characteristics of these educational processes and their environment. I highlight the transformative experience on their lives as a result of the arts and crafts-based adult education work. This article is significant to feminist and anti-colonial adult education as it stresses the importance of processes, potential, and goals of an African indigenous creative education amongst rural women.

Higher education institutions must be resilient as they face vastly increased expectations for sustainable environments, global focus, and technological support. Speed of response to these expectations ultimately depends on shared vision, shared agreement, and shared accountability. In this article, the authors challenge all those engaged with planning in higher education to foster shared leadership throughout all levels of the organization as a means to meet the challenges and opportunities in this Green, Global, and Google (GGG) world and, in so doing, reinvent higher education. Here, "green" represents the need for ongoing attention to sustainability, "global" highlights the expanding global market for higher education and the evolution of approaches to global education, and "Google" denotes the increasing use of Internet (or "above-campus") resources in place of local computing resources. Each "G" force represents a complex issue in demand of shared leadership. (Contains 5 figures.)