Education & Pedagogy

Hip-Hop-Based Education (HHBE) has resulted in many positive educational outcomes, ranging from teaching academic skills to teaching critical reflection at secondary levels. Given what HHBE initiatives have accomplished, it is troubling that there is an absence of attention to these methods in education programs for elementary and early childhood educators. For that reason, I intend to use theories of sociocultural learning to examine how young urban children's Hip Hop communities of practice influence their early learning and identities. Through personal narratives, this work theorizes young urban children's Hip Hop identities by utilizing children's situated learning activities. The goal of the work is to begin a dialogue for the application of HHBE in early childhood and elementary education pre-service teacher programs.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the Prouni--University for All policy, which has been implemented in Brazil in an effort to increase access of the underprivileged to postsecondary education. In order to provide a better understanding of the problem, three points of interest are initially addressed: income inequality, illiteracy, and a brief review of the history of higher education in Brazil. The paper then mentions a few policies that were implemented in the 1990s, aiming to increase the number of institutions of higher education, and addresses the implementation of the Prouni program. Next, it presents three competing views on the policy at issue regarding investments in the private sector, quality in education, and student retention. Finally, it concludes by giving a few recommendations for improving access to education in the country.

A new approach is suggested that depends on and measures how spending on higher and basic education is really an investment in the future, not consumption spending. This is a vital distinction because investment in human capital contributes heavily to growth and development, but also to higher state tax revenue and lower Medicaid, child care, welfare, and criminal justice system costs as developed here. These contribute directly to the state's fiscal health and legislator's more immediate concerns. But just as with the needs to fund higher education costs and "adequacy" in K-12 funding, this criterion alone is partial. The paper develops the total return to education relative to full costs as the basic education financing criterion for whether there is under or over-investment in education for efficient family and statewide development.

Education Studies as an academic discipline within HE in the UK is a contested area. One thing most Education Studies programmes might agree on is that they are "critical". But what is a genuinely critical Education Studies degree? And, how could such a programme survive within the hostile neoliberal environment of the contemporary UK? This chapter argues from a materialist perspective that Education Studies which are critical entail the responsibility on the part of students and staff to put theory to work in their lives, and to provide the conditions for students to work on the production of their own capacity to labour. This represents a setting on its feet of the Hegelian model of Education Studies proposed by Tubbs and Grimes (2001). In order for Education Studies to remain critical, it is argued that something of its learning and teaching must remain covert, to operate within the interstices of bourgeois social structures.

This article provides a comparative analysis of citizenship education in the Philippines and Singapore. Through an analysis of historical contexts, citizenship education policy and curriculum, it examines "Makabayan" in the Philippines and "National Education" in Singapore. It identifies particular policy and curriculum trajectories as responses to national and global imperatives to demonstrate how countries are redefining the kinds of knowledge, skills and values deemed necessary for national citizenship in global contexts. This comparative case study illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions facing citizenship education in new global contexts and highlights the different ways countries try to manage these tensions through citizenship education policies and curricula. Findings point to different factors that shape and constrain the implementation of citizenship education programmes in both countries.

Collaboration between K-12 and higher education sectors has not been as productive as participants and policy leaders would like--especially in an era of emphasis on college readiness and completion, which requires such collaboration. Various mechanisms have been used to foster collaboration including state P-20 (early learning through higher education) councils, however these have not always produced the results participants desire and research on why this is so is limited. This study utilizes state education governance and inter-organizational relations literatures to hypothesize that structural barriers to collaboration prevent P-20 councils from reaching their potential. This comparative case study of three state P-20 councils finds that state education governance structures may erect barriers to collaboration. However, this research also shows that P- 20 councils, if thoughtfully structured, can help ameliorate these barriers.

Entrepreneurship education plays an important role in developing entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship knowledge and skills have vital contribution to economic growth. This study aims to investigate the practice of entrepreneurship education in University Malaysia Perlis and perception of students on entrepreneurship education. Primary data are collected to reveal students' perceptions toward entrepreneurship education, for example the teaching method and their desired entrepreneurship skills. The results show that the performance of entrepreneurship education in University Malaysia Perlis was favorable and recognized by students. The results also include the preferred teaching method and assessment methods of students. The findings of this study will contribute to the further research in the area of entrepreneurship education and provide useful information for higher learning institutions in Malaysia to improve their entrepreneurship education curricula and practices.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, thanks to the foresight and generosity of the Al Saud ruling family, has always devoted great efforts to the development of education. Investments in higher education, in particular, have increased exponentially in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to introduce some facts and figures about the new developments of the Saudi higher education system and to explain how past, present and future policies on education in Saudi Arabia embody the idea of education as a matter of public concern and interest. The paper suggests that a Saudi Arabian knowledge society is in the making, at its own pace, and the country is preparing to play a very important role in the international competition for excellence in education.

Emerging alongside the open educational resources movement of the past decade, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been widely heralded as advancing cause of providing increased access to higher education. The article explores the implications of the recommendation by the American Council on Education (ACE) to offer college credit for a select group of MOOC offerings, with regard to benchmarks of access and affordability, in light of recent developments in credentialing. In particular, the article examines the innovative partnership between Arizona State University's Global Freshman Academy (GFA) and MOOC provider edX, with regard to its potential to both disrupt and transform higher education by contributing to the development of accessible, affordable, alternative credentialing pathways.

This study examined the utilisation of multicultural music education by Malaysian music teachers, with an emphasis on the relationship between music teachers' attitudes and their subsequent degree of effort in developing and implementing multicultural music education in their music classes. Respondents for the study were 456 music teachers; responses were collected via an adapted version of the original "Music Specialist's Multicultural Music Education Survey" instrument. Results indicate that there is limited implementation of multicultural music education in music classrooms due to inadequate preparation and limited resources and insufficient knowledge of multicultural music. As such, music teacher training programmes are needed in order to address both the theoretical and practical aspects of multicultural music education throughout the curriculum in a comprehensive and long-term manner.

Despite the significant proportions of rural Americans, schools, and public school students situated in the geographic peripheries of an increasingly urbanizing country, rural education in the United States has consistently occupied both scholarly and policy peripheries. This is to the detriment of rural America, especially to the extent that public policy and educational practice may work at cross-purposes with the vitality and well-being of rural communities. This paper examines these issues and, more specifically, considers the relationship between rural education and rural community development. I argue that rethinking the purposes of education, particularly within rural contexts, may help not only to more clearly articulate a sensible rural education policy, but, in the process, more clearly articulate broader rural development policy.

In this study, "Needs for the Distance Education", which is the first unit of the "Foundations of the Distance Education" course in Computer and Teaching Technologies Departments, has been prepared in written and this unit has been scripted for a web-based asynchrony presentation. In the preparation of the script a special attention was paid to the related articles of the regulations concerning Higher Education Based on the Inter-universities Web, to the lessons within the content of Higher Distance Education, to the principles of the lessons, programme design and organization, as well as to the peculiarities and approaches related to interactive distance education courses.

Higher education faces the challenges of bridging education and authentic work. In addition, it needs to respond to the highly multimodal and participatory communication and content creation practices, preferences, and cultures of present and future students. The aim of our article is to discuss how the use of video triggers and video production in PBL can help to respond to these challenges. Based on a literature review, we present and discuss the uses and outcomes of video triggers and video production within PBL contexts and related higher education and continuing education contexts. The research evidence reviewed in this article clearly illustrates the advantages of video triggers and video production in PBL settings while at the same time pointing out several conditions of their effective use.

A recent report by the joint Informatics Europe & ACM Europe Working Group on Informatics Education emphasizes that: (1) computational thinking is an important ability that all people should possess; (2) informatics-based concepts, abilities and skills are teachable, and must be included in the primary and particularly in the secondary school curriculum. Accordingly, the "2013 Best Practices in Education Award" (organized by Informatics Europe) was devoted to initiatives promoting Informatics Education in Primary and Secondary Schools. In this paper we present one of the winning projects: "Multi-Sensory Informatics Education". We have developed effective multi-sensory methods and software-tools to improve the teaching-learning process of elementary, sorting and recursive algorithms. The technologically and artistically enhanced learning environment we present has also the potential to promote intercultural computer science education and the algorithmic thinking of both science- and humanities-oriented learners.

Following Gellner, citizenship education has often been framed in terms of nationalism. This framing is supported by methodological nationalism that legitimizes nationalism as either functional (civic nationalism) or natural (ethnic nationalism). Based on a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data, this study of the dynamics in the classes of a Dutch faculty of social professions highlights the disruptive impact of nationalism on citizenship education, spilling over to other courses as well. Ethno-nationalist discourses in Dutch media and politics as well as in multiculturalism approaches used in citizenship education fuel conflicts between non-migrant students and students with a migration background that disrupt education. It is argued that in globalized settings like these classes, a more viable approach to citizenship education would take an institutional instead of communitarian perspective.