Education & Pedagogy

Many educators view the process of education as transformative. This transformation is important in all classrooms, but it takes on added importance in prison classrooms. The education that inmates receive in prison can mean the difference between the doorway of freedom with a productive future and the revolving door of recidivism. For many prison educators, this transformative and liberating education process takes the form of democratic citizenship education. This article on interviews with five instructors from Ball State University's Department of Extended Education as well as the teaching experiences of the author. While the subjects taught by these individuals range from computer science to English to anthropology, their approaches and views of transformation through democratic citizen education were very similar. By addressing the societal inequality that is reflected in prisons, these educators are themselves acting as engaged citizens. They show the twin ideas of awareness and action that are required of all citizens. These educators promote citizenship education by creating safe democratic spaces in their classrooms, which depend upon power sharing with their students. Finally, they seek to transform their students into active, aware, and engaged citizens by fostering critical thinking skills, encouraging debate, and applying course lessons to the lives of their students.

The educative goal of citizenship education through science education converges to the declared purpose of the SSI research movement. Socioscientific issues formulated in science education research covering topics as biotechnology, environmental issues, sustainable development, energy choices, have been introduced in French Middle Schools. But citizenship is often not clarified and can be multiple. After having clarified who is the citizen targeted by SSI research movement, the concept of citizen in the French curriculum needs to be clarify. What do these citizens have in common with the citizen that a sociology literature review let see oscillating between obedience and critical thinking has also been investigated. The paper also looks at the teachers' views and their contribution to citizenship education through socioscientific topics described in the national curriculum. From the analysis, different teachers' views of citizenship education have been highlighted: a normative citizenship education in connection with civility and rules and an emancipatory citizenship education to develop pupils' skills such as searching and evaluating information, argumentation and critical thinking in order to enable pupils to build their own argued opinion and to participate to public debates. This last emancipatory view of citizenship education is congruent with the aim of social empowerment within the SSI research movement.

The changes precipitated by today's computer-based technologies are perhaps no more keenly felt than in the field of education, where technological innovation signals fundamental transformations in the manner in which educational programs will be delivered to 21st century students. Online learning is providing higher education institutions with an entirely new modality for educating learners free from the constraints of time and location, but the transition these institutions must undergo to adapt to online program delivery involves many complex issues, some with ramifications that are not yet fully understood. Distance education leaders and faculty can play an important role in assisting higher education institutions navigate an institution's transition to online education, but in order to fulfill this role, must maintain an ongoing fluency with the issues, including their ramifications, surrounding current technology innovations and their application to online education. This article presents and briefly discusses some of these key issues, and calls for distance education leaders and faculty to maintain an ongoing fluency in the application of technology to online learning so that they may play a meaningful role in shaping the future of higher education. (Contains 10 notes.)

Widening access to higher education is clearly part of the European policy agenda. Higher education ministers in the Bologna countries, as well as the European Commission, have all expressed a wish to make higher education more representative of national populations. This policy objective has been echoed at national level. One approach to widening participation is to provide "second chance" routes into higher education. This is achieved by removing academic success at the secondary school as the determining factor for access to higher education. This paper compares the approaches to providing these second chance routes in Germany, Norway and Sweden. Each of these countries has organized second chance routes in a different manner, according to different principles and with differing obligations for the higher education institutions receiving the applicants. The paper closes with a review of the impact of second chance routes for widening participation and a discussion on the contribution such measures make to more inclusive higher education. The case studies support an expectation that second chance routes, although increasingly widely used, will remain a contested policy measure in the future.

In this article, the authors provide a summary of the current techniques being used to recruit, retain, and support a diverse range of scholars, including students with disabilities, in a doctoral program. The manuscript provides a summary of the current need for leadership personnel who are scholars with knowledge in special education, general education content, research, and advanced technologies, while staying true to the mission of our field to serve students with disabilities and their families. This article provides the current success of this doctoral program in preparing scholars for higher education, the techniques used to build and support a very diverse population of scholars, and case-based examples. In addition, lessons learned over a decade are provided to inform the field of special education about recruiting, retaining, preparing, and employing doctoral-level scholars in special education who are ready to enter the profession with a balance related to innovation and preparation of highly qualified teachers in our field.

Notwithstanding the recent signing and ratification by Cyprus of another International Convention on the rights of students designated as having special educational needs and/or disabilities to attend mainstream schools on an equal basis with their peers, local policy and practice promote an "exclusionary inclusion" that draws a discernible line between general and special education. This paper concentrates on exploring the role of special education teachers in Cyprus in the light of policy concerns about providing the "least restrictive" learning environment for this group of students and enabling them "to reach their full potential". It is suggested that the role of special education teachers embodies and reflects reductionist forms of inclusion informed by deficit-oriented and assimilationist special education perspectives, while there is also evidence of a lack of professionalism and accountability. The paper draws on head teachers' and special education teachers' interviews in order to portray the ways in which they view and experience the role of special education teachers in mainstream schools in Cyprus. New objectives and future directions are identified and discussed.

The case of education in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa, Israel, demonstrates the dialectical role of education in conflict-affected societies. As scholars of transformative education and critical pedagogy have noted, education tends to serve as an instrument of the dominant ideology of social and political elites, yet it is also a significant arena of civil society, where diverse and often subversive identities and values can be asserted. This duality is particularly evident in conflict-affected societies, where, as Gallagher points out, education can either contribute to conflict or challenge it, through structure of schools, contents of the curriculum and the routes and opportunities available to young people. The education system in Jaffa demonstrates the ways in which schooling separation, lack of multiculturalism in the curriculum and discrimination in education enforce elite domination. At the same time, it demonstrates how community members and civil society organisations may use the education system as an arena for challenging the status quo of inter-community relations in conflict-affected societies, through initiatives that may occur due to necessity, response to negative change or ideological challenges to domination.

"A strong K-12 physical education program is usually backed up by a strong leader" (Franck, 2007, p. 7). Strong and persistent leadership is especially important in today's reality of undervalued physical education. Despite the obesity epidemic and the many health problems facing youth, physical education is viewed as a low-status subject in schools. The governmental legislation known as the No Child Left Behind Act places so much emphasis on academics that physical education often gets overlooked because it is not identified as a core subject (James, 2011). As a result of physical education's lack of importance in schools, physical educators face a number of challenges. One way to help physical educators with these challenges is to provide them with a physical education specialist (PES). A PES is a person who is highly trained and certified in the content of K-12 physical education and is responsible for directing quality physical education programs. A PES can help teachers to become and stay highly qualified by assisting them with program planning, lesson plans, and curriculum design. This article describes the role of a physical education specialist and provides suggested steps to hiring a PES.

We need homeschooling to save education in a liberal democracy from taking a religious form--what I call Democratic Education. Democratic Education emerges when the democratic identity and narrative become elevated to the highest priority when thinking about educating human beings. This elevation becomes particularly dangerous when other nonpolitical ends and aspects of our humanity are ignored, downplayed, or, worse, delegitimized. This article argues that three signs of this danger currently exist in educational theory and practice. First, Democratic Educators are offering a reductive view of human persons in which undue focus is placed upon those skills or educational justifications that relate to students' political identity and capacities. Second, the liberal tradition of education that seeks to show justice to the diversity of narratives or comprehensive reasonable worldviews that exist in America is being undermined. Third, educational alternatives outside the public system are attacked by Democratic Educators and even considered politically problematic. If we want to recover more human forms of education, we need to reinvigorate more pluralistic forms of humanistic education, such as homeschooling, that nurture philosophies and practices of education that allow for a wider focus upon human flourishing. Ultimately, this is why liberal democracies need homeschooling.

This article interacts with a recent article by Denise Cush and Catherine Robinson in which they call for a new dialogue between religious studies in universities and religious education, and identify a number of developments in religious studies that have implications for the practice of religious education in schools. Cush and Robinson are representative of an influential body of opinion among religious educators that looks to religious studies for inspiration. It is argued that they, along with others, fail to appreciate the difference between the aims of religious studies and those of religious education and that this unrecognised difference leads them both to engage uncritically and superficially with the history of post-confessional religious education and to fail to recognise that the roots of some of the weaknesses in contemporary religious education can be traced to the influence of religious studies over it. Showing that religious education has (and is required to have) a different set of aims from religious studies (though some aims may be held in common) alerts us to its distinctive nature, and this in turn facilitates a clearer understanding of its role in schools, which can serve both to direct and to evaluate educational outcomes.

Business education programme seems to have been faced with inadequate qualitative research in tertiary institution in Nigeria. The study therefore, assessed the strategies for enhancing Business Education research. Two research questions and six hypotheses guided the study. A 66 item questionnaire was administered to 164 colleges of education and 109 lecturers of universities in South South Nigeria making a total of 273 lecturers. The research questions were answered using mean and while z-test was used to test the null hypotheses. The findings revealed that the inability of students to source current literature, poor knowledge of research procedures by supervisors, poor knowledge of research procedures by students are some of the constraints affecting business education research. The findings also revealed that students' ability to source current literature, knowledge of research procedures by supervisors and knowledge of research procedure by students can enhance business education research. It was recommended that regular workshops and seminars should be organized for lecturers and students on how to supervise and write projects respectively; researchers should ensure that quality information is generated from the study being investigated.

Higher education has proved to be a significant medium for the socio- economic, political, and technological development of any nation. It is absolutely necessary for equipping individuals with new knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Globally higher education, especially university education is faced with a lot of challenges and difficulties relating to access, funding, staff development, quality of teaching and research, and the challenge of new technologies. A critical issue facing Nigeria is how to increase access to university education to cater for the increasing number of students completing secondary education, diploma holders, and others who desire university education. In order to provide access to all citizens, the Federal Government established the National Open University by an Act of 1983. After being suspended for sixteen years it was re-opened under a new name as the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in 2002. This paper examines open and distance learning at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), and the role it plays in enhancing access to univesity education for personal, community and national development. It analyzes the challenges facing NOUN and proffers suggestions for addressing the challenges.

This article explored the contribution of Asia Pacific Education Review (APER) to expanding the scope of research on comparative and international education in Asia. We developed a rubric based on extensive studies (Rust et al. in "Comp Educ Rev," 43(1):86-109, 1999; Foster et al. in "Int J Educ Dev" 32:711-732, 2012) of research in the field to compare three highly ranked journals in the field of comparative and international education ("Comparative Education," "Comparative Education Review," and "International Journal of Educational Development") with the fledgling APER on the content of the articles they published between 2006 and 2010. Results were also compared with sources included in the 2011, 2012, and 2013 bibliographies prepared for the "Comparative Education Review." The study highlights publication patterns of these journals, focusing on methodology, education level, region, and topics. Findings suggest that these journals, while sharing some things in common, also show distinct patterns, suggesting questions about the extent to which distinctively Asian topics and approaches are fully represented.

Educational reforms are crucial in a country if the reforms benefit the intended target group. One of the educational reforms in Kenya was the introduction of Free Primary Education. This was informed by the need to improve access and equity in provision of education. Informed by the need to eradicate ignorance, poverty and disease, the independent Kenya government took to finance education soon after independence with Free Primary Education being fully realized in 1978. Later following the introduction of structural adjustment programme in 1990s and the World Bank recommendations, cost sharing in education was instituted. This saw a big number of children drop out of school due to poverty and other pressures from the education managers who were charging school levies. The national rainbow coalition government which came to power in 2003 instituted Free Primary Education to actualize one of the campaign pledges. This article critically discusses the Free Primary Education policy in Kenya articulating the benefits and the challenges thereof within the policy formulation framework. Suggestions are made on the best way to develop and implement policies to tackle challenges which emanate from implementing policies in haste.

This study aimed to investigate the role of Irbid Directorate of Education in supporting of citizenship and loyalty values among students according to employers of the Directorate of Education in the Irbid governorate. The sample of the study consisted of the (134) employers who works in the Directorate of Education in Irbid governorate of Jordan. In order to investigate the purposes of the study, the researcher were developed a questionnaire that was distributed to the study sample. The results showed that there was a statistically significant role of the Directorate of Education in Irbid governorate in supporting of citizenship among students in opinion of its employees, there was a statistically significant role of the Directorate of Education in Irbid governorate in supporting of loyalty values among students in opinion of its employees, and there were no statistically significant differences in the role of the Directorate of Education in Irbid governorate in supporting of citizenship loyalty values among students in opinion of its employees due to (Gender, Age, Education, Work experience).