Education & Pedagogy

In 2008, Thailand passed legislation on the educational provisions for students with disabilities to mandate the implementation of inclusive education. This article provides a historical overview of special education in Thailand and the emergence of inclusive education as it moves from policy to practice. To further identify the challenges faced in the implementation of inclusive education, this article reports the findings of a qualitative research study on the perspectives of school leaders from "inclusive schools" that reveal a range of issues, including cultural perceptions about disability, current policies, financing of inclusion and other salient concerns.

In recent years, a small but growing strand of research has investigated ways of focusing teachers' professional education on "core" or "high leverage" practices of teaching. These efforts are easily conflated with other initiatives to develop "practice-focused" teacher education, raising questions about what these terms even mean. This article investigates what can be learned by comparing and contrasting teacher education focused on core practices with other approaches that might also be called "practice-based," including those dating back to the 19th century. It focuses on three important periods in the history of teacher education: the heyday of the normal schools in the late 1800s, the period of scientific efficiency in the 1920s and 1930s, and the era of competency-based teacher education in the 1960s and 1970s.

The purpose of this article is to present the new National Science Teachers Association-Standards for Science Teacher Preparation (NSTA-SSTP). The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) is the new national accreditation organization for programs of education. NSTA collaborates with CAEP to establish content specific standards for the evaluation of science education programs. Recently, NSTA has developed new science teacher education standards that reflect the research base associated with what a new science teacher should know. The standards were developed from national guidelines and the research literature on science education. The new NSTA-SSTP reflect the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that a newly certified teacher must know and be able to do. The paper concludes with a description of how to submit a report to CAEP and NSTA for accreditation of a secondary science education program.

This paper begins by reviewing the progress which has been made over the past decade in the aim to reach targets such as Education for All and other Millennium Development Goals, especially as far as adult education and gender equality are concerned. While there have been achievements in some countries, universal primary education is not even likely to be reached by 2015. Giving a few examples of recent studies, this paper considers the measurement of lifelong learning and its effects on a country's economy and its people's health and well-being. While it is of course much easier to collect data about formal education than about non-formal and informal learning, the author stresses that the latter need to be included more in new strategies alongside formal education. The paper concludes by highlighting ten essential components for a lifelong learning target fit for purpose in a climate-changing society.

The government of Ghana has designed various initiatives to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on education and the Education for All goals. Despite these initiatives, student outcomes continue to be poorer than desired. Although access to education has improved, student dropout remains a problem and student scores on achievement tests remain low, along with their rates of progression to higher grades. The authors propose a program of mentoring, peer counseling, and parent involvement for children from first through ninth grade. They believe this program is essential to sustain the government's initiatives on education, and has the potential to achieve the educational outcomes that Ghana and many developing countries require to meet the goals of the EFA agenda.

Professionalization is an important but overlooked dimension in education politics, particularly the politics of accountability. To isolate the importance of professionalization, this article compares accountability movements in K-12 education with similar movements in higher education. I draw on three pairs of reports that have sought to impose accountability between 1983 and 2006, in each case comparing a report on K-12 with a similar report on higher education. I find that calls for accountability in both sectors have intensified over the period under study, but that higher education has been much more protected from accountability pressures by its greater degree of professionalization, its reputation, its greater share in the private sector, and its decentralized professional autonomy. In conclusion, I connect the findings to broader debates about professionalism and the future of accountability in the two sectors.

This article reports on a study of community participation in School "for" Life, a complementary education programme operating in northern Ghana. The researchers investigated three components of community participation: the nature of the mechanisms used to engage community members as participants in the education process; the actors who engage as participants in education; and the factors that enhance or inhibit an individual's involvement. They found that this programme uses five approaches that work together to make it a viable mechanism to engage communities, and that community members are engaged at various levels, depending on each person's previous exposure to education. Moreover, regardless of the level at which members participate, doing so empowers the individual and the community.

Limited-resource adults' dietary intakes and nutrition behaviors improve as a result of Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP)/Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) participation; however, physical activity education is needed for improved health. The experimental study reported here assessed if spending time doing physical activity education affected dietary impact results and activity among participants. Standard dietary assessments showed no significant differences between groups, and interviews showed greater physical activity improvements/intentions by the experimental group, which suggests that nutrition education can be shortened 15-20 minutes for physical activity demonstrations to improve activity behaviors without adversely affecting nutrition-related behavioral improvements outcomes.

The purpose of this project was to investigate stakeholders' perspectives on coursework and the role of mentors within a unique teacher education program for prospective teachers of mathematics in an alternative-route-to-licensure program. The alternative route reflects a partnership between an institution of higher education, a state office of education, and multiple school districts. Findings addressed some of the problems and solutions associated with imbalanced approaches to teacher education that situate math content as the cornerstone of alternative licensure programs. Data further revealed that program effectiveness may be enhanced through intentional mentor training programs that offer structure to the roles of mentors in ways that communicate important nuances of program goals.

This document aims to help education ethnographers to think about, describe and complete their scientific research: based on a personal research curricula and ongoing scientific discussions in social sciences and psychology, I develop an anthropology synthesis of three epistemic distances. (1) Cultural distance from fieldwork: How far is the education ethnographer from educational actors he/she is studying through a participatory observation? (2) Distance from scientific community: Once fully integrated within education fieldwork and into research action, how far is the education ethnographer from the scientific community of "armchair anthropologists"? (3) Distance from oneself: how can an education ethnographer overcome the two previous contradictory identities and the tensions that they imply in his own personality? I am proposing a topographic model combining these three distances in order to locate education ethnography studies and education ethnographers' careers.

This article describes factors that influence the success of collaborations involving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and Education faculty at research-focused universities who work toward postsecondary STEM education improvement. We provide insight into how interdisciplinary faculty may successfully collaborate given their different disciplinary backgrounds. We explore the importance of education research brokers, individuals credited with helping STEM faculty understand, respond to, and recognize the importance of education research and theory. In addition, we discuss the advantages of appointments of brokers within STEM versus Education Departments. We identify key characteristics that help build and sustain interdisciplinary collaboration and establish the critical roles of brokers at institutions that strive to improve education.

In April 2013, "NEJHE" launched its "New Directions for Higher Education" series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. In this installment, DiSalvio interviews Matthew Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a Boston-based labor market analytics firm. Among the topics discussed were: job prospects in New England for recent college graduates; how students with liberal arts degrees can increase their job prospects; how higher education leaders can take full advantage of labor market information to help improve the employment prospects of individuals and the economic prospects of the region; and how higher education will evolve and adapt to changing needs.

This article analyses Portugal's adult education policy between 1999 and 2010. Our empirical material consists of Portuguese as well as supranational policy documents. We use a theoretical framework which distinguishes three models of public policy, with different views on the roles of public policy and of education: (1) participative policy/emancipatory education, (2) centralised policy/education for social conformity and (3) minimum policy/training for competitiveness. Our results show that European lifelong learning guidelines have been reinterpreted in the Portuguese context, leading to a rapid expansion of adult education provision in an attempt to catch up with European numbers. Although Portuguese policy is a hybrid of the three policy models, latest developments show a dominance of minimum public policies for adult education and training for competitiveness. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)

In an environment of tight resources, tough academic challenges, and increasingly stiff competition from new education providers, smart leadership may matter more than ever for the success of America's school districts. Against this backdrop, "Education Week" introduces the first of what will be an annual "Leaders To Learn From" report--a way to recognize forward-thinking education leaders and share their ideas. This 2013 report profiles 16 district-level leaders--superintendents, assistant superintendents, and others, including a union president--who seized on creative but practical approaches and put them to work in their school districts.

By 2008-2009 educational year, distance education e-MBA Program have been added to Graduate School of Social Sciences of Istanbul Aydin University. The distance education components that were used included asynchronous education, synchronous education, exams, the learning management system-web site and a remote live-support desk. At the end of the first academic year of operation, we conducted a survey to measure and analyze the effectiveness of components and the relations between age and attitudes of distance education components. Analyses of the survey showed that even though it was the first time such a program had been implemented, the total effectiveness of the distance education components were considered to be above average. (Contains 2 tables.)