Education & Pedagogy

In the 30 years since the passage of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act (PL. 94-142) in 1975 (subsequently the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) special education in the USA as an institutionalized practice has become solidified. Over the years, however, the practice of segregating students because of disability has come under increased scrutiny. Beginning in the late 1980s, an increasing number of parents advocated that their children with disabilities be put in mainstream general education classes. Emotionally charged debates over the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms ensued. In this paper we look at the public debates over inclusion and expose some of the paradoxes within special education that serve to hinder the integration of individuals with disabilities into general classes and, by extension, society at large. (Contains 2 notes.)

At a very general ("civilisational") level, compulsory and upper secondary education in Europe is based in the Christian tradition and does not easily tolerate other types of education. Europe is the only continent that has been able to combine modernisation and secularisation, and this has continuously favoured religious schools of the Christian type but disfavoured Muslim initiatives. Also, during the past decade all the education systems have been required to produce competitiveness and social cohesion. The first requirement has made education more focused on intellectual, technical and cognitive features and less on values and morals. The second requirement derives from the cleavages resulting from the drive for competitiveness as well as flows of immigrants and minority demands for their rights. However, none of the pressures, drives and requirements has resulted in any deep-going change in the multicultural direction of European education. (Contains 2 tables and 3 notes.)

In this article, the authors examine educational stratification in Taiwan against the background of an ethnically based political economy. They investigate how educational attainment is related to ethnicity and other background factors, such as parental class and education, and if these relationships changed over time as Taiwan became a more industrial and democratic society. The findings reveal that while children from Mainlander families are overall more likely to achieve higher levels of education and make the crucial transition of graduating from secondary schools, this ethnic effect does not hold when parental class and education are taken into account. Parental class and education do matter, although they have diminished in importance over time. The authors relate these findings to theories of the relationship between industrialization and educational attainment.

Instructional leadership has been studied since the inception of public education in the United States, but few studies have addressed the supervisory practices used to ensure that students who have disabilities receive an appropriate public education. We used grounded theory methods to investigate how instructional leadership for special education occurs in elementary schools. Our analysis produced detailed descriptions of the central processes, influencing factors, and resulting strategies used to support teaching and learning for students who have disabilities. The grounded theory portrays principals as the designated leaders of instruction for all students in their schools. Principals negotiated among competing priorities and contextual factors in attempting to provide instructional leadership for special education. The outcome of this negotiation was the dispersal, rather than the distribution, of responsibility among administrators and teachers in ways that weakened instructional leadership for special education and risked its potential benefits.

Two of this article's authors--an art professor and a biology professor--shared a project for advanced biology, art, nursing, and computer science majors involving scientific research that used digital imaging of the brain of the zebrafish, a newly favored laboratory animal. These contemporary and innovative teaching and learning practices were a success for the participating art and science majors and led to an awardwinning student conference presentation. This article shares the authors' ideas and experiences associated with the project, presenting it as a possible model in modern liberal arts education. This is done in light of renewed recognition that a liberal arts education is a necessity even in preparation for professional studies. (Contains 4 figures and 1 note.)

In this case study, South Carolina's gifted education policy development, changes, and implementation are explored from three perspectives: policymakers, linkers, and adopters. Document review and individual and focus group interviews with policymakers, those who develop statute, regulation, and policy; linkers, district persons who implement policy; and adopters, school-based persons, comprised data sources. Research questions include how did general education reform create change in gifted education between 1984 and 2004? What were the primary influences? Locally, how was meaning made? General education reform produced a nonlinear process of gifted policy implementation, resources to develop gifted programs, and attention to equity and access issues. Primary change influences were leadership and political relationships. Required teacher endorsement created local impact. Need exists for curriculum policy development. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

In the torrents of globalization and social transition in Taiwan, it is particularly important to reinforce a sense of cultural subjectivity and localization, and promote new trends of arts education that emphasize the development of self and spirit. The fundamental principles of these new trends are: (1) that the purpose of arts education is to cultivate students' humanistic literacy, (2) the content of arts education is developed from an interdisciplinary approach, (3) arts curriculum is predominantly constructed on and implemented within the value framework of the nuclear culture, (4) arts education has to place emphasis on an integral process of comprehensive exploration, critical reflection and creative construction, and (5) the instruction methods of arts education need to be artistic and humanistic. This article describes the contents and implications of the new trends of arts education reform in Taiwan.

The recruitment and retention of minority students in teacher education programs has received the attention of schools of education. For those minority students who choose to pursue a career in teaching and decide to attend a predominantly white university, their experience must be appreciated for the challenges it presents. This study was undertaken to listen to the voices of African American education majors enrolled in a teacher education program at a predominantly white university in the United States to understand how their experience might affect their perceptions of teaching and behaviors as future teachers. Understanding how their experience has affected their perceptions of this particular educational setting might better inform the faculty who teach them how they can better serve this growing population.

This article focuses on attempts to introduce elements of sustainable development education into the curriculum of one of the largest Russian universities. At St. Petersburg State University, compulsory courses relevant to sustainable development have been introduced or modified in 14 faculties out of 20 during the last decade. Examples of environmentally oriented projects within and outside the university are given. The authors touch upon the state of affairs in higher education in Russia, and write about sustainable development in a wider sense, beyond the environmental context. Sustainable development in education for Russia is one of the most important pre-requisites for sustainable development in society. A model for reforming the system of national higher education is given to illustrate possible ways of achieving sustainability in education.

This study examines an elementary teacher education certification program delivered by a state university to Native American teacher aides on the reservation. Data were collected over two semesters using a Freirean critical theory framework to analyze the data and to explicate the problematic nature of Native American education. Analysis of the data indicated that the program reproduced Euro-American cultural values, was insensitive to Native American history or values, and did little to support individual teachers. Suggestions include the need for the program to acknowledge and address the historical cultural genocide that occurred in the education of Native Americans and the cultural and political hegemony of the teacher education program. More focus needed to be placed on supporting individual participants and their academic and cultural struggles in becoming teachers. (Contains 1 footnote.)

Modernizing special education in Russia requires the use of up-to-date, individually oriented technologies of instruction designed to meet the educational needs of adolescents, for the purpose of providing them with a good-quality, appropriate education without regard to their age or the severity of their impairment. This article describes Education Center No. 1406 for children and adolescents with impaired hearing. The Center is a multiprofile, specialized, all-purpose institution that combines special education and professional education by organizing a unified educational space for hearing-impaired adolescents. The multilevel, integrated system that the Center has developed to train specialists, based on the conception of continuous education, is providing deaf adolescents with conditions that are optimal for effective development and realization of their personal potential, for social adaptation and professional rehabilitation.

In this article, the authors discuss the problems of professional education. They state that, the source of these problems--the violation of the constitutional rights of citizens to obtain an education accessible to all; the commercialization of education; and the worsening of the financial, material, technical, and cadre support of the system of educational institutions--is to be sought in the weakening of the role played by the state in the sphere of education. In addition, the difficult financial and economic condition of educational institutions and the failure to pay wages and salaries for months at a time provoked numerous protest actions by workers in education. The authors also discuss one of the main reasons and some factors why so many high-class specialists are leaving Russia.

This study addresses issues related to international strategies of lifelong education. The case of the United Kingdom is used to explore the degree to which approaches based on human-capital strategies can contribute to resolving inequalities. It is argued that claims made for the role of education as a means of protecting individual and national economic welfare have become almost hegemonic in nature. Yet these claims conceal stark internal contradictions. New work in the future may actually require less skills than at present; massive high-skill and high-income employment is unlikely. This study takes the view that most current forms of education employ a utilitarian discourse that depoliticises learning and individualises achievement. The author contends that a more appropriate way forward in lifelong education lies in developing a critical consciousness--a feature of education for the dispossessed in all contexts.

Sustainability is now a key concept in both government policy and wider global concerns. Issues of climate change and global warming can no longer be ignored in teacher education programs in the post-compulsory education and training sector. Government policy-makers, notably the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), Learning Skills Council (LSC) and the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) are all looking to educators to take the lead. This article proposes that sustainability needs to be embedded in a notion of professionalism that has a professional values framework at its heart. This framework should underpin all teacher education programs and energize professional practice. A college in the south-west of England is used as an example of how post-16 institutions can embed sustainability, not only in teacher education programs but the whole ethos of the college. (Contains 1 figure.)

In Victoria, Australia, school outdoor-education programmes are unusually wide-spread and well established. Is any form of outdoor education essential? I use this question to develop a critical reading of outdoor-education discourse in Victoria. I contend that this discourse has been dominated by universalist and decontextualized understandings of outdoor education which fail to account adequately for the development of particular programmes, ignore important social, cultural, geographical and historical differences, and are flawed as a basis on which to build outdoor-education theory. I show that outdoor education must be understood not only in broad national contexts, but also in local and regional contexts, and that outdoor-education programmes must be understood as particular contributions to existing relationships between particular communities and particular regions. To do so requires a critical reappraisal of how experience is comprehended and geographical location accounted for in curriculum studies. (Contains 2 notes.)