Education & Pedagogy

The purpose of this article is to provide leaders of continuing education enterprises with an integrated model for sustaining strategic planning initiatives. Global economic conditions, shifting competitive forces, continuing calls for accountability, and dramatic changes in institutional funding streams contribute to an environment characterized by both opportunity and challenges. These shifts in the landscape of American higher education increasingly elevate strategic planning efforts to high levels of importance, and continuing education leaders can benefit from planning models that integrate mission and vision-based initiatives with practice and continuous assessment. The authors provide a model designed to move beyond the traditional strategic planning processes by aligning strategic planning initiatives with continuing higher education practice, employee performance, and outcomes assessment. This proposed model will assist leaders engaged in strategic planning efforts in attaining identified goals and outcomes. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

Education leaders in Congress are signaling that they're prepared to collaborate with the White House on a long-stalled reauthorization of the main federal law for K-12 education, after President Barack Obama sought to move education back to the top of the national agenda in his State of the Union address last week. Precollegiate policy is widely seen as one of the few areas in which the politically divided Congress can cooperate with the Obama administration. White House backing is considered crucial to building and sustaining momentum for a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which numerous observers have argued is in serious need of revision. Its current version, the No Child Left Behind Act, became law in 2002. Key lawmakers acknowledged last week that enacting legislation to reauthorize the ESEA would be tricky, but said they were ready to get going.

This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning design. The three generations of cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist pedagogy are examined, using the familiar community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) with its focus on social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Although this typology of pedagogies could also be usefully applied to campus-based education, the need for and practice of openness and explicitness in distance education content and process makes the work especially relevant to distance education designers, teachers, and developers. The article concludes that high-quality distance education exploits all three generations as determined by the learning content, context, and learning expectations. (Contains 1 table.)

This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, the author suggests that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible because academia has lowered its own critical faculties and allowed academic institutions to be colonized by social policy objectives to the detriment of knowledge for its own sake. Fundamentally, he wants to explore the effects of today's doctrinaire approach to education, which, as far as he is concerned, has resulted in the degradation of students' expectations, the abrogation of responsibility by those in erstwhile academic authority, and the failure--or refusal--of the academy to defend education in its own terms. (Contains 44 footnotes.)

This paper examines the concept of institutional racism in Irish adult education. The study of institutional racism in education has been an area relatively untouched by Irish academics to date, and so represents a green field for interested academics and adult educators. For the purpose of providing some context for this concept, a brief outline of race and racism in Ireland is included. This paper will not seek to provide definitive answers to a multifaceted problem, instead, it is intended to present the concept from an Irish adult education perspective and explore its implications for Irish adult education providers. This draws on published literature and from the author's teaching experience. Finally, initiatives which cater for cultural diversity in adult education are discussed.

The paper is based on a recent report given to the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education on "Reforming Higher Education Distance Learning in Portugal" (Hasan et. al. 2009). The report was grounded on on-site visits of leading Portuguese Universities, Polytechnics and Business Schools as well as on written statements of the institutions visited. Additional material has been provided by the Ministry of Education. The article tries to give an appraisal of the actual state of the art of university level distance education in Portugal covering issues such as spread of distance learning so far, attitudes towards distance learning, pedagogical models, access, funding and quality issues. On the basis of this analysis some policy recommendations are formulated by the authors. (Contains 2 figures.)

In recent years, positive organizational behavior and scholarship has emerged as a new lens for organizational analysis. The construct of organizational virtuousness, a part of positive organizational scholarship, has been examined in for-profit entities and was found to be positively linked with organizational outcomes. This case study sought to determine if organizational virtuousness was a useful construct for continuing higher education units and also to examine any relationships between organizational culture and organizational virtuousness. A quantitative case study of two university continuing education units indicates that organizational virtuousness is a useful construct for continuing education organizational analysis and is also related to organizational culture. Implications for continuing education leaders are included as well as suggestions for fostering organizational virtuousness in their organizations. (Contains 4 tables.)

A world policy agenda for gender equality in education now exists, realising the idea of earlier reformers such as Kartini. This agenda, however, makes assumptions that are strongly contested by research and policy debates in national forums. This essay urges shifting the framework of gender analysis to global scale. It outlines what is involved in thinking about gender as a worldwide structure, and reconstructing gender theory to include the intellectual work of the global periphery. It explores problems in theorising education on a world scale, as a process deeply linked with gender, and related dilemmas in policy thinking. Finally, it offers suggestions about the role of researchers on gender and education, and the importance of building an educational case for gender justice. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper explores the philosophical background of one of the most widespread Web based sources used in contemporary education--Wikipedia. Theoretical part consists of the basic notions of anarchist philosophy of education such as human nature, work and society. Through Chomsky's prism of visions and goals, it provides the frame for further analysis. The practical part shows that Wikipedia creates a virtual anarchist society: open, ludic engagement in this society is fully interwoven with the specific kind of education of all its members. Offering an insight into the often neglected area of social and political ideas underlying the use of technology in education, this paper offers a conceptual bridge between contemporary Digital Immigrant educators and their predominantly Digital Native patrons, thus contributing to the better understanding of education in and for the third millennium. (Contains 1 figure.)

An inductive grounded theory approach was used to investigate the role of teacher education on the career paths of 38 Noyce scholarship recipients ("scholars"), most of whom were teaching in high-need schools. The emergent research design was guided by the initial research question: "What are Noyce scholars' reasons for the decisions made on the career paths of becoming and remaining teachers in high-need schools?" In-depth interviews were conducted and analyzed, resulting in a theoretical model of their career paths that revealed that some components of teacher education played a role in the scholars' career paths. Specifically, the role of teacher education programs in providing ongoing support and specific preparation for high-need settings was influential on the scholars' career paths. (Contains 7 tables and 2 figures.)

Community college systems were established across North America from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. The new systems had two principal models: in one model, the college combined lower-division, university-level general education with technical education programs; in the other, most or all of the colleges were intended to concentrate on technical education. Ontario was the largest of the provinces and states in North America that opted for the second model. Many of the issues that planners confronted when designing these college systems have either persisted or re-emerged in recent years. This article re-examines the debate on the design of Ontario's colleges that took place when they were founded and considers its implications for the present. (Contains 3 notes.)

School is the major vehicle for humanism, which is, in essence, respect on human nature. Human Rights Education is important for the existence of human society in the modern globalising era. Education can function as a unifying factor and produce informed and active citizens of an interdependent world. It can provide the tools for advocacy and resolution of conflict that are necessary for the maintenance of peace between nations and people. United Nations initiated in human rights and peace pedagogy. Social and individual amelioration may start from elementary school, taking advantage of children's pro-social behaviour as the agent of change. John Dewey introduced the concept of "intelligent sympathy" in a democratic classroom aiming at personal growth, for considering new ways of thought, and creating a peaceful society.

There has been an increasing interest in how environmental education contributes to sustainability dating from the 1977 UNESCO conference in Tbilisi to the current Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, which in 2009, reached mid term. There is also a growing interest and concern in the complexity, uncertainty and changing nature of social-ecological systems and how sustainability is understood. Learning and resilience figure dominantly in both these trends. This contribution to the collection provides a conceptual overview of environmental learning, resilience in ecology and resilience in human development. The manners in which these conceptual areas are beginning to coalesce are discussed and their intersection in environmental education is illustrated in the context of formal schooling, organisations and society. Key research questions for environmental education emerge about its critical role in enhancing adaptive capacity and contributing to the resilience of social-ecological systems.

Advocates for boys' education have forwarded numerous "fixes" for boys' supposed educational woes, including both academic and non-academic programs and strategies. This article focuses on the lesser-discussed non-academic, extra-curricular means suggested, specifically outdoor education. Using qualitative analysis of an Australian school's outdoor education program, I demonstrate that outdoor and other non-academic sites and strategies for addressing boys' education have particular gendered dangers alongside progressive possibilities. The dangers include reproducing dominant masculinist gender regimes through social interaction, requirements for gendered self-disclosure, and philosophies of the "uses" of nature. Progressive possibilities, conversely, include re-imagining outdoor education as a space for explicit resistance to gender or reimagining the uses of nature to eschew gender altogether.

As medical education research advances, it is important that education researchers employ rigorous methods for conducting and reporting their investigations. In this article we discuss several important yet oft neglected issues in designing experimental research in education. First, randomization controls for only a subset of possible confounders. Second, the posttest-only design is inherently stronger than the pretest-posttest design, provided the study is randomized and the sample is sufficiently large. Third, demonstrating the superiority of an educational intervention in comparison to no intervention does little to advance the art and science of education. Fourth, comparisons involving multifactorial interventions are hopelessly confounded, have limited application to new settings, and do little to advance our understanding of education. Fifth, single-group pretest-posttest studies are susceptible to numerous validity threats. Finally, educational interventions (including the comparison group) must be described in detail sufficient to allow replication.