Education & Pedagogy

With their work at the interface between the education system and labour market, VET teachers contribute to the efficacy and quality of the future workforce. This article compares the structures of teacher education in the framework of vocational education and training (VET) in the United States and in Switzerland and aims to contribute to the international understanding of VET teacher training. The insight into two different ways of preparing VET teachers leads to a display of particular aspects of the two systems as well as of similarities. The comparison focuses on characteristics such as VET institutions as workplaces, teacher/trainer- profiles that are needed in these institutions, required qualification to work in the institutions, training institutions for teachers and contents of teacher training programmes.

This article analyzes education activists' resilience in emergencies, building on life story interviews with Syrians who engaged in civil society initiatives for schooling in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising. It investigates the meaning that education acquires under extreme adversity and how it inspires individuals to act. Finding that these activists think of education as a means to resist authoritarianism and transform society, the article brings the change agendas of local education actors to the fore. It concludes that resilience can be the extension of political purpose. The article conceptualizes education as a vehicle of resistance, foregrounding how temporal projections enable individuals to maintain belief in their capability to enact changes. The activists make connections between their own experiences in school, thoughts about the future, and the reasons they mobilize for education. Working with time is a potent enabler when, objectively, the situation is deteriorating.

ANEER, the National Initiative for Early Childhood Education in Rural Areas, is an innovative and impactful project bringing preschools to remote Moroccan villages. Launched by Zakoura Foundation in 2015, in partnership with the Moroccan Ministry of Education and UNICEF, the free ANEER program aims to create the most favorable conditions for a successful education through the implementation of projects for parents, youth, local associations/NGOs/champions, and teachers. The ANEER model is based on a holistic approach that engages all stakeholders in a community, whether direct or indirect, to achieve a better and higher commitment to early childhood education (ECE). It also reflects international best practices based on learning through play, raising awareness among parents and the broader community, and ensuring on-time registration in primary school.

While limited research on inclusive education in sub-Saharan Africa and Tanzania focuses on the perspectives of preservice and practicing teachers, this case study features those of governmental and non-governmental national policy actors. To analyse these influential voices shaping inclusive education, key education sector policy actors working in the national government and non-governmental organisations were interviewed about their perspectives on inclusive education progress. Beyond documenting the presence of barriers to Tanzania's inclusive education policy process, this study generates nuances in relation to multifaceted contextual influences by applying a policy environment systems theoretical model. Improved understanding of policy actor perspectives and the nuanced role of context is invaluable to inform future policy directions.

This paper explores the challenges and prospects of inclusive education for learners with disabilities in the integrated education system in Kenyan primary schools. Data were collected in five and nine public schools in Nairobi and Marsabit respectively, by means of questionnaires administered to 126 teachers, semi-structured interviews with 14 head teachers or their deputies, and one focus group discussion. County education officials were also interviewed. The findings reveal that although the integrated education system is dominant in Kenya, local schools that accommodate learners with disabilities put much effort into creating an inclusive setting. This paper appreciates the challenges and potential associated with inclusive education and thus recommends deeper reflection on the operationalisation of inclusive policies in the context of Kenya.

The Rohingya is a stateless minority group in Myanmar, suffering from ethnic and religious armed conflicts, state persecution, and displacement. Since the escalation of violent conflicts in the early 2010s, they have fled the country and sought refuge in neighbouring countries, and in the biggest numbers, in Bangladesh. Living in densely populated refugee camps, Rohingya children receive very limited access to education and are exceptionally vulnerable to illnesses, violence and trafficking. This discussion paper describes the conditions and contexts under which education is offered, and identifies the serious problems and gaps in provision for Rohingya children in Bangladeshi refugee camps.

This paper explores the construction and practice of the purposes of teacher education in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) and Taiwan. The paper begins with a brief overview of contemporary issues underlying the education system in both countries. It then investigates the underlying assumption of student achievement before moving on to reconceptualise the purposes of education, and consequently, teacher education with the aims of remedying existing social and cultural gaps in both societies, as well as laying the path for a more diverse society for all. Underpinned within a social constructivist paradigm, the qualitative study explores how teacher education can, and needs to be, more equitable and responsive to the learning outcomes of students -- in terms of diversity and difference -- in Aotearoa NZ and Taiwan.

The presence of research regarding specific student populations demonstrates their importance to the field given the importance of research and knowledge creation in shaping higher education. A growing number of higher education scholar-practitioners have engaged in work addressing college sport but an overwhelming dearth of college sport and athlete-focused higher education research in higher education journals is cause for concern. The purpose of this study is to investigate the presence of college sport research within high impact, general higher education journals between 2010-2019. Using content analysis, the authors examined seven highly regarded higher education journals. Findings support the hypothesis that an absence of sport-related research exists in such journals. Suggestions to address this gap are provided.

Socially Accountable Medical Education is a global educational movement transforming the development and delivery of medical schools in higher education. It is described as an upstream policy approach that seeks to align medical education and local community healthcare needs. To better understand social accountability as a policy initiative, we conducted a narrative review to identify key themes in the literature around frameworks of implementation. Our findings illustrate that social accountability has been mostly defined to date in terms of outcomes and related-actions and that there is a lack of focus on critical social constructs, such as power and place, that can reorient processes and inequities within health systems and educational institutions. We conclude that while socially accountable medical education is a promising paradigm shift in higher education, we call for a more complexified, contextualized, and nuanced approach.

This article revisits the thoughts of Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere on decolonizing higher education in Africa. Their critique of colonial higher education centers on the notion that it was designed to promote the economic aspirations of the colonial metropolis, making it socially unjust, culturally irrelevant, and developmentally inapt. For redemption, African universities should align with the aspirations of their societies and promote African cultural consciousness. Their value-laden thoughts are classified into themes, discussed and consequently recommended as ideas for policy considerations because they are yet to firmly influence Ghana's higher education policy framework despite their relevance. The themes are: liberating the African mind; nurturing African character; owning the African narrative; and the essence of knowledge.

Instructional leadership demands educational leaders to become intensely involved in improving teaching and learning. While extensive research found this approach to be beneficial in school settings, it was insufficiently explored in higher education. Therefore, the current study explored how Israeli higher education leaders perceive their leadership role in relation to teaching and learning. Participants were 22 heads of departments in higher education institutions in Israel. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, and analysed in a four-stage process--condensing, coding, categorising and theorising. Findings indicated that higher education leaders in Israel demonstrated very little instructional leadership, based on three perceptions: regarding the autonomy of faculty members, the low priority of teaching quality in higher education, and the style of teaching required in academia. To enable the borrowing of instructional leadership from the school system context to the higher education context, a customised version of instructional leadership is needed.

In an effort to de-silo the Business and Management Education (BME) field, this paper employs text mining and analysis techniques to derive information about the location of the intellectual focus of interest in economic education scholarship. We examine the abstracts of articles published in the leading economic education journal using digital humanities tools, finding evidence of a sustained volume of scholarship devoted to "Instruction" but also substantial change in the volume of "Research," "Content," and "Features" scholarship over time. Finally, we document frequency and patterns of keywords, and identify scholarly gaps offering potential opportunities for cross-collaboration within the BME field.

The current discourse on higher education internationalisation is mainly Western, and there is a need to examine non-Western perspectives on internationalisation informed by different contexts, traditions and goals. Reported in this paper is a study that aims to glean the Chinese conception of internationalisation in higher education among 37 Chinese professionals, all working in the international education portfolio from 37 different institutions in mainland China. Based on the thematic analysis of a written interview with open-ended questions, the study ventures to provide a Chinese definition of higher education internationalisation based on Chinese institutional goals, approaches and challenges in internationalisation. The study provides insights on how a country in non-Western context learns, selects and adapts Western practices in a flexible and creative manner to meet national needs.

This article attempts to bridge a divide between the empirical use of Bourdieu's concepts and the theoretical discussion of field theory with regard to education. I ask how a school can be 'international' where education is predominantly embedded in nation-states. First, I introduce field theory and its applications to globalization and education. Second, I analyze the International Baccalaureate Organization, a large non-profit provider of accreditation for schools, as a case for conceptualizing a global field of 'international education.' My ethnographic and historical findings provide the background for the global field argument. Second, drawing on IBO's student data, I construct a geometric space of IB schools and analyze it as a relatively autonomous subfield. Finally, I show how combining field analysis and geometric modeling yields a new perspective on 'international education.'

Using Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, this study examines the practices of Swedish students when entering higher education. Logistic regression is used to examine relationships between the educational resources and geographical origins of students born 1973-1982 (N=382,198) and 1) their probability of migration when entering higher education and 2) the type of institution they entered. The results indicate that students' practices differ by geographical origin, suggesting that students use migration in different ways to access higher education. For example, the students with the highest probability of migration are students originating from rural areas with high upper-secondary grades and students from large urban areas with low grades. Implications for expanding access to higher education while also creating sustainable communities are discussed.