Education & Pedagogy

This research draws into question the effects that neoliberal policy reforms--with an emphasis on individual and measurable "competencies"--has on new teachers teaching sexuality education in Quebec. While we examine professional competencies that teachers can use to define their mandate for teaching sexuality education as a beginning professional, we also detail the ways in which the competencies constrain pedagogical practice. Our argument is that while there are avenues for teachers to use the professional competencies for sexuality education, neoliberal reforms atomize teachers in a search for accountability. As a result, for fear of generating controversy, potentially contentious issues like sexuality education are not readily addressed. This atomization restricts both teachers and the field--the policy circumscribes sexuality education as personal rather than cultural. As such, we are left impotent to address cultural issues of sexuality education.

Technical education, as enshrined in the Nigerian national policy on education, is concerned with qualitative technological human resources development directed towards a national pool of skilled and self reliant craftsmen, technicians and technologists in technical and vocational education fields. In Nigeria, the training of technical personnel has witnessed many challenges ranging from policies which have no beaming with our problems, curriculum that has little or no relationship with workplace and social needs, embezzlement of fund meant for education development purposes, lack of teacher motivation, inadequate facilities, inadequate funding, brain drain, poor staff training, bribery and corruption. This paper intends to critically examine some of the issues, challenges and way forward of technical, vocational education and training(TVET) in Nigeria and to suggest ways of improving the teaching and learning of technical and vocational education with greater interest and enthusiasm.

The nature of higher education is changing in the world today. Rising tuition fees, reduced budgets, and an increasing need for distance education (New Media Consortium, 2007) are pushing educational institutions to reinvestigate how education is delivered. In line with this shifting context, e-learning is being practiced more and more frequently in higher education, providing modern and stimulating occasions for not only educational institutions but also students (Wagner, Hassanein and Head, 2008). Despite the relative benefits of e-learning in higher education, there are some challenges for disorganized, technology concentrated institutions, when attemping to put distance learning courses into practice. This article, therefore, aims at defining the concept of e-learning, providing an overview of e-learning in relation to higher education, expounding types of e-learning, listing benefits and drawbacks of e-learning, summarizing e-learning practices in North Cyprus universities and making recommendations for successful implementation of e-learning in North Cyprus higher education context.

In recent years, comparative education and comparative music education became important fields of research. Due to globalization, but also to international student assessments, it is most common to compare the outcomes of entire school systems or specific subject areas. The main goal is to identify the most successful systems and their best practices in order to help struggling countries to improve. While the notion of borrowing from successful systems might at first glance seem convincing, it has its clear downsides: it fosters a kind of "cargo culture," where the export and import of educational models and successful practices is undertaken without taking into account critical aspects of this procedure. This paper examines critically borrowing foreign educational practices as a goal of comparative music education, in the context of globalization. It takes an interdisciplinary perspective, using results from comparative education research and utilizing it for music education and music education philosophy.

Accounting and education are both global phenomena, and there is thus an argument that accounting education should be consistent and comparable across the globe. However, accounting, and accounting education are all socially constructed and globally they have been influenced by their historical, social, economic, political and cultural contexts. This has resulted in many fragmented, heterogeneous communities of practice and many diverse audiences or stakeholders with their own interests and legitimation strategies. There is thus a problem for accounting education to be defined, and to coalesce to one world model that fits the needs of all nations. However, global accounting education can adopt similar learning objectives by using constructivist, experiential and situated learning approaches that are embedded in to the learning programme. The International Education Standards (IES) of the IAESB should be revised to embed these three learning approaches, and IFAC and the IAESB should adopt various strategies to gain pragmatic legitimacy for its education standards.

This article contributes a Canadian perspective to a growing body of international research investigating teacher education, specifically as a category of academic work exemplified in employment advertisements. By investigating how Canadian employment advertisements in teacher education are constructed as mediating artefacts in the relationship between potential candidates and their goal of gaining an academic position, we attempt to identify contradictions inherent to systems of human activity, and surface institutional priorities regarding faculty hiring policies and the staffing practices within Canadian teacher education programs. Our study surfaces both similarities and differences with concurrent WoTE (Work of Teacher Education) investigations in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand regarding the teacher education as a form of academic labour, echoing their characterisation of the increasingly "precarious space" occupied by teacher education in post-secondary institutions.

Internationally, STEM has become a slogan for organizing new discourses and practices in science education. In the form of a three-act play, we argue that STEM as social engineering orients and organizes school science education curriculum development in directions of scientific innovation and engineering that reinforce and legitimize a neoliberal hegemony of global competition and capitalist expansionism. The dialogue in the play presents an alternative conversation about the role of school science education amidst the sudden adoption of STEM. This conversation begins by examining the positivist assumption of STEM as societal salvation through the example of STEM in the invention, development, and deployment of new technologies, such as solar panels. The play then closely interrogates STEM as a curriculum orientation, shifting in the final act to possibilities for a different focus for science education curriculum development that includes interrogation and resistance to neoliberalism.

The curriculum is a critical element in the transformation of higher education, and as a result, I argue for the inclusion of what I refer to as an African epistemic in higher education curricula in South Africa. In so doing, attention is directed at the decolonisation of the curriculum in higher education in South Africa, which aims to give indigenous African knowledge systems their rightful place as equally valid ways of knowing among the array of knowledge systems in the world. In developing my argument, I maintain that a critical questioning of the knowledge included in higher education curricula in South Africa should be taken up in what I call transformative education discourses that examine the sources of the knowledge that inform what is imposed on or prescribed for curricula in higher education in South Africa, and how these higher educational curricula are implicated in the universalisation of Western and European experiences.

With a new emphasis on the inclusion of engineering content and practices in technology education, attention has focused on what engineering content should be taught and assessed in technology education. The National Academy of Engineering (2010) proposed three general principles for K-12 engineering education in "Standards for K-12 Engineering Education"?: (1) Emphasize engineering design; (2) Incorporate important and developmentally appropriate mathematics, science, and technology knowledge and skills; and (3) Promote engineering habits of mind. Principle 3, engineering habits of mind, was proposed as an essential skill to separate how engineers think and act from ways that academic content teachers think and act. Based on this construct, this article examines what engineering habits of mind are, explores linkages to national standards, and proposes how these habits of mind can be taught in technology education classrooms at the secondary and preservice teacher education levels.

Australia regularly suffers floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones, which are predicted to increase and/or intensify in the future due to climate change. While school-aged children are among the most vulnerable to natural disasters, they can be empowered through education to prepare for and respond to disasters. School disaster education is essential to raise awareness among students and their communities and to encourage preparedness action. However, evaluation of Australian school-based disaster education programs has been limited. This article presents the results of a critical literature review of peer-reviewed publications on disaster education programs in Australian schools conducted through Scopus, A Plus, PsycINFO and the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) databases. Results highlight a significant dearth of studies examining disaster education programs in Australian schools. Recommendations for future research are proposed to bridge knowledge gaps and establish disaster preparedness resources that support children's knowledge and preparedness for disasters.

This paper investigates how conceptions of "diversity" and "equity" in U.S. education have become amenable to global neoliberal economic educational discourses that rest on competitive global market demands. The argument outlined in this paper suggests that the approach and knowledge about and for democracy and social justice education, particularly in prominent multicultural education scholarship and practice, is increasingly commodified and risks being embedded in market rationalities. Further, this paper tries to point out the possible dangers of surrendering the goal and scope of multicultural education to neoliberal educational principals, which increasingly mirror a human capital model of society and individual subjectivity. The paper seeks to illustrate how the discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism dictates a commercial and competitive sense of social justice which also further facilitates the repression of political difference--particularly for populations that do not identify with neoliberal educational reforms--while administering mechanisms of social control through neoliberal processes of subjectification.

Europe's Bologna Process has been identified as a pioneering approach in regional cooperation with respect to the area of higher education. To address the challenges of African higher education, policymakers are recommending regional cooperation that uses the Bologna Process as a model. Based on these recommendations, the African Union Commission (AUC) in 2007 developed a strategic document on higher education harmonization. As higher education reforms are context-specific, the question arises as to how the policy of harmonization of higher education systems in Africa can be implemented in a way that fosters greater regional integration, taking into consideration the context of African higher education systems. This research, which is based mainly on a review of European and African official documents, focuses on the reform issues proposed by the AUC in the harmonization process and compares them with those of the Bologna Process.

Recent policy changes in the Pacific Islands have seen a strong emphasis on implementing inclusive education. Preparing teachers for this change in education will be essential if they are to have the knowledge, skills and understandings so that they can become inclusive practitioners. Pre-service teacher education will play a critical role in supporting this process. This paper considers the perceptions of preservice teachers undertaking the first year of the Diploma of Teaching in the one university in the Solomon Islands. This is the only university that prepares teachers to work across the entire archipelago. Data are collected pre and post participation in a course on inclusive education to identify its impact on pre-service teachers' intentions, attitudes, concerns and teaching efficacy to teach in inclusive classrooms. Data are used to inform the proposed revision of the existing teacher education program to address education reform towards inclusive education.

Within a tradition of a dual regular and special education system in Japan, the Government is promoting education reform that encourages an inclusive approach to education. This research investigates whether teachers are being trained for successful inclusion in Japan by reviewing the perceptions of all pre-service teachers in one university regarding their readiness for becoming inclusive practitioners. A move towards an inclusive approach to education in Japan is being promoted through collaboration and support between teachers trained in regular and special education. Thus, different perceptions of pre-service teachers preparing to work either in elementary schools or in special schools are a particular focus of this research. Discussion considers the need for better teacher preparation due to the very low understandings of inclusion and Japanese pre-service teachers' perceived lack of skills, knowledge, experience, or training for an inclusive approach.

In this essay Gert Biesta asks what the humanities can contribute to the field of teacher education. In addressing this question he turns to the idea of education as a "Geisteswissenschaft" as it was developed in the German-speaking context in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this conception, education is configured as an interested academic discipline that engages with normative questions concerning the "telos" of education and does so with a focus on meaningful human action rather than human behavior. Viewing education this way highlights the role of value judgments in teaching. The values that are at stake in such judgments, Biesta argues, are not to be understood as moral values but as educational values, a view that raises some important questions about the specific nature of educational normativity. In a final step Biesta discusses how the idea of education as a "Geisteswissenschaft" makes a difference for the field of teacher education.