Education & Pedagogy

A complication of teacher education policy in Japan is rooted in a gap between an image of teachers, which is held by society as a whole, and includes various character traits and the reality of Japanese university education. On the other hand, the expansion of an "open system" and lack of nationwide standard are making individual universities that provide teacher education programs in Japan to "narrow down." The enforcement of the current approval system is deficient as a quality assurance measure, and therefore has many harmful effects. Accordingly, it is desirable to recognize the realities of teacher education and respect the independence of individual universities when considering teacher education reform in the future. [This article was translated by Ai Omori.]

This paper reports on an aspect of a broader study that investigated teacher educators' uptake of learner-centred pedagogy in post-apartheid Namibia. The paper shares part of the study that illuminated the path traversed by Namibian teacher education policy from 1990 to 2010, two decades into the country's post-apartheid self-rule. It argues that, far from being smooth sailing, teacher education reform in post-apartheid Namibia has been characterised by severe turbulence with divergent forces wrestling over the philosophical and epistemological orientations of the new teacher education. The paper concludes that these forces, voices of divergence, criticisms, resistance or contestations were a significant feature that helped define and shape post-1990 teacher education for basic education to its present-day state.

The need to address the substantial inequities that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in higher education is widely recognised. Those factors that affect the performance of Indigenous students in tertiary education have been reasonably well documented across different institutions, disciplines, and programme levels but there has, to date, been less consideration of the processes by which Indigenous students either persist or desist in higher education. This paper aims to present a conceptual understanding of academic persistence that can inform the delivery of tailored academic support interventions to Indigenous students who are at high risk of leaving higher education.

Biodiversity conservation has increasingly gained recognition in national and international agendas. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has positioned biodiversity as a key asset to be protected to ensure our well-being and that of future generations. Nearly 20 years after its inception, results are not as expected, as shown in the latest revision of the 2010 CBD target. Various factors may affect the implementation of the CBD, including lack of public education and awareness on biodiversity-related issues. This paper explores how biodiversity education has been carried out and documents successes and failures in the field. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we identified four main challenges: the need to define an approach for biodiversity education, biodiversity as an ill-defined concept, appropriate communication, and the disconnection between people and nature. These represent obstacles to the achievement

Daisaku Ikeda's humanism (1928-) has made profound global impacts on education and human lives. However, there is little research on analyzing his philosophical dialogues with global scholars. To explore what roles educators play and what value educators can create based on Ikeda's philosophical dialogues on education with scholars across disciplines, the author uses a theme-based approach to code educational issues derived from the dialogues. The majority of the themes highlight the importance of humanity in education. By knowing the roles that educators can fulfill and the values that they can create, the themes identified in Ikeda's philosophical dialogues provide groundwork for the development of humanistic education and can serve as concrete ways to help educators enhance their educational practices in K-12 schools as well as in higher education.

In this study, it was aimed to predict elementary education teacher candidates' achievements in "Science and Technology Education I and II" courses by using artificial neural networks. It was also aimed to show the independent variables importance in the prediction. In the data set used in this study, variables of gender, type of education, field of study in high school and transcript information of 14 courses including end-of-term letter grades were collected. The fact that the artificial neural network performance in this study was R=0.84 for the Science and Technology Education I course, and R=0.84 for the Science and Technology Education II course shows that the network performance overlaps with the findings obtained from the related studies.

The present-day rate of development of the society and technologies in any sphere requires from the employee constant raising of qualification and gaining new knowledge and skills--continuous professional development. Life-long learning, continuing education is equally important compared with initial degree education. This leads to the necessity of ensuring continuing education in especially significant areas for the country in which the country's leading universities have to be actively involved. Provision of continuing education for local self-government public servants in recent years in the context of the self-government reform gained special actuality in Georgia. The aim of the article is to underline the significant role of universities of Georgia in developing and providing continuing education courses to public servants of local self-government and identifying those measures which will promote active involvement of universities in this process.

Students with disabilities are at risk of being bullied in school settings. Special education teachers should be prepared to address this complex behavioral issue and support students with disabilities. This study surveyed 30 novice special education teachers to investigate the amount of bullying prevention and intervention training they experienced in their teacher education training programs, school sites, and school districts. The impact of a bullying prevention and intervention workshop on the participants' perceptions were also examined. The results demonstrated that the participants improved their confidence and readiness for bullying prevention and intervention strategies. The paper provides suggestions for teacher preparation. A call for systemic and collaborative bullying prevention and intervention training across special teacher education programs and beyond is substantiated.

Generally, educational studies do not problematize the definition of urban education or examine the positionality of sites along a spectrum of urban districts and schools. This study addresses the definitional gap by (a) examining the conceptualization of urban education through an integrative review of prior definitional research and (b) exploring how an urban district may be defined in empirical terms. Our findings indicate six categories are typically used to define urban education: (a) population/location/geography, (b) enrollment, (c) demographic composition of students, (d) resources in schools, (e) disparities and educational inequality, and (f) social and economic context. The results indicate that deficit-oriented language permeates prevailing definitions of urban education and that large-city-centered conceptualizations of urban education may overlook a substantial number of smaller districts with similar levels of educational inequality and diversity.

This study aims to frame democratic proceduralism in education reform by deconstructing elements of democracy and civil society along aspects of legitimacy, representation, the discourse of liberty and naturalization, voting, and transactional discourse. This deconstruction is accomplished by providing a literary review of these factors and organizing aspects that are particularly relevant to education reform. Democracy in education reform is then explored through the relevance of market influence and the uptake of two recent education reforms, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Using the theoretical background constructed to frame legitimate democratic proceduralism, the uptake of this reform is then explored and critiqued. Overall this study explores the issue of democratic proceduralism in education reform, generates a necessary and robust theoretical background to frame legitimate democratic proceduralism, and finally evaluates how these procedures are utilized in the uptake of education reform.

This study examines the impact made by music education on a sample of Catalan citizens who studied this subject during their compulsory schooling. A biographical narrative methodology was used to investigate a broad spectrum of the participants' school musical experiences and to analyze the impact that music education has had on different aspects of their lives. Their perceptions and experiences, collected and expressed through life stories, show a correlation between the theoretical approach to learning music adopted by teachers and its little impact on the participants' lives. Their stories also bring to light the difficulties involved in identifying and distinguishing the existing impact between both in-school and extracurricular music education but identify emotional impact as the most relevant one overall. Based on the evidence provided, this article aims to contribute to the debate on the role of music education on the school curriculum.

Arguments for social justice teacher education and arguments for practice-based teacher education are often seen as incongruous. Drawing on sociocultural theory and theories of justice, our study interrogates this underresearched assumption. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers' K-6 classroom instruction, together with novices' written reflections on videos. Data were collected during a university-based, accelerated teacher credentialing program. Analyses of videos of teacher education coursework revealed that while teacher educators frequently represented, decomposed, and approximated teaching practice, they rarely did so when discussing social justice issues. In a mirror-image finding, analyses of videos of (and reflections on) novices' subsequent K-6 teaching revealed that novices rarely identified instructional decisions during which they attended to social justice issues.

Caste, and awareness of it, have been a persistent, though changing, feature of South Asian communities' experience in the UK. In twenty-first century Britain the issue of caste has come to the fore and has been hotly contested, in relation to equality legislation. In this wider context, the present article maps some of caste's historical intersections with education in the UK. The focus is, variously, on: caste as it has intersected with post-18 education; caste as a factor in families' attitudes to education; school children's awareness of caste as an aspect of their own identity and as a way of differentiating their peers; the incidence of caste-based bullying in schools; and the inclusion of caste as a topic in religious education and a matter for ongoing consideration by religious educationists.

This paper deals with the regional input-output analysis and its application to evaluation of the macroeconomic impact of expenditures on higher education. Regional input-output tables represent newly developed tool which can be used for the assessment of the regional economic impact of the particular industry and its institutions. The regional input-output tables were experimentally constructed by the Department of Economic Statistics at the University of Economics for all 14 Czech regions. Employing them, we can demonstrate the impact of expenditures on higher education on the macro-economic indicators and employment. This paper deals with 1 billion Czech crowns expenditures on higher education sent by the Ministry to the hypothetical higher education institution. Finally, the impact of higher education expenditures is compared with the impact of expenditures to another industries (ICT, R&D and tourism).

Drawing from the existing body of data and research on the community education concept, effective schools, and standards-based reforms, this essay examines educational achievement in the United States corresponding to and resulting from reform movements and political actions. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is reviewed in light of its contributions to educational equity and the key changes to that law are discussed as federal political levers for the eventual adoption of the Common Core National Standards by most of the nation. Definitive statistical proof is provided that refutes the theory that setting higher, more rigorous, standards increases student achievement. Based on the National Science Resource Center Theory of Action, the effective community education process is assessed for its value in replacing standards-based education as the cornerstone of U.S. education reform.