Education & Pedagogy

Through examining the perspectives of students within the Chinese Adult Higher Education sector, this paper investigates their motivation for gaining a degree (that many felt was undervalued) and their perceptions of credentialism in China's post-massification era. Forty semi-structured interviews were undertaken with adult students studying for degrees in early childhood education. The resultant data is interpreted through the lens of credentialism and illustrates that credentialism in China has depreciated the value of certain degrees and disadvantaged many students. As the only way for working adults to pursue a higher education degree, Chinese Adult Higher Education has become both a 'opportunity' for non-degree holders and a 'trap' that holds them back as other higher education students enter the job market. These findings offer a unique insight that is likely to be significant for the further development of credentialism theory.

A central aim of this article is to reflect on the design and implementation of a bi/multilingual Bachelor of Education foundation phase programme offered at the University of Fort Hare from 2018. It reviews three major perspectives on bi/multilingualism: mother tongue-based bi/multilingual education, language and decoloniality, and translanguaging perspectives. It then proceeds to use these perspectives to discuss and illuminate various aspects of implementation, including the genesis of the programme, challenges of implementation, and decisions about curriculum, language use and assessment. It concludes with a brief discussion of lessons learnt for design of bi/multilingual education programmes in higher education.

Administrators face multiple challenges in effectively managing special education programs and services. These challenges include communication failures between stakeholders, inconsistency in implementing policies, difficulty in collaborating with multiple personnel throughout a district, and inefficiencies in implementing special education services (DiPaola & Walther-Thomas, 2003). An analysis of organizational theory concepts highlights the unique challenges of managing both general and special education programs and services under one organizational structure (a professional bureaucracy) and offers an approach for moving toward another organizational structure (an adhocracy) that may be better suited for implementing the jointly collaborative and individualized nature of special education services and supports. A matrix organizational structure is a potential solution to help move special education case management at the school level more toward an adhocracy. This structure may help resolve some of the special education management challenges faced by administrators.

The purpose of this inquiry was to describe the preservice music teacher education perceptions of 10 experienced music teachers who had participated in studies of teacher education 10 and 20 years ago. Data included written responses and two individual interviews. The first four themes show participants' reactions to the past and suggestions for the future in the areas of musicianship, fieldwork, student teaching, and detracking of curricula. Changing expectations of themselves in their teaching over the years included a focus on process, relationships, and well-being. The final theme, thoughts on change in music teacher education, provides combined general perceptions from participants about preservice music teacher education over the past 20 years. A discussion with connection to current preservice music teacher education literature is included after each theme.

Out-of-school science education institutions, such as museums, science centres, zoos and aquaria, have strong potentials to promote sustainability, yet seem to lack an operational definition of sustainability that aligns with their specific characteristics and institutional remit. Here, we use the anthropological theory of didactics to systematically develop such an operational definition, designated as the reference model. We draw on literature from research and practice to account for the features of sustainability science and policy, as well as the different specific strengths of out-of-school science education institutions, to identify unique potentials for sustainability education. These potentials are synthesised and illustrated in a set of institutionally specific guidelines that optimise the organisation of sustainability for each kind of out-of-school science education institution. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for sustainability education.

Over the last twenty years, tertiary education in Australia has radically changed. Major growth in the sector and federal government policy and funding changes have resulted in an increase of providers and a diversification of the quality of education available on the market, particularly in vocational education. Although change presents insecurity and ambiguity for education providers, it also presents an opportunity for proactive and adaptable providers to transform and disrupt the sector by designing an innovative value creation strategy to diversify or target their offering. To understand the current landscape, this paper explores the business models of 50 Australian tertiary education providers and groups these into seven business model typologies. Focusing on public vocational education providers, the paper identifies the ability of their current business model to meet skills-based gaps in the future, including their future customers, and states potential 'white space' opportunities for innovation.

With nationwide concerns about the declines in youth voting turnout across the United States, increased attention has focused on schools to promote "civic education," a broad curricular approach aimed at facilitating students' development of key civic knowledge, skills, and behaviors. However, less is known about how civic education operates in K-12 Christian schools despite offering certain institutional advantages related to promoting strong relational trust and community values that can potentially enhance students' civic education experience. This literature review draws on theoretical and empirical work to provide an enhanced understanding about civic education in the Christian school context so that policymakers and practitioners can embrace the effectiveness of this blended approach to better preparing youth to become active and informed citizens.

This article seeks to understand how adult students perceived education as disseminated by the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). Evidence will be presented from sources not commonly studied, namely WEA student logbooks of tutorial classes. Adult students attending WEA tutorial classes in the 1920s and 1930s recorded their own personal, real-time experiences of education in the logbooks on a weekly basis. The logbooks offer a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the tutorial class, the WEA's gold standard in education. They show how students perceived the topics being taught, related this to their wider lives, and expressed the immediate impacts that this education was having on them. This paper highlights the value of WEA logbooks, intriguing artefacts in themselves, as underused primary sources in the history of adult education. It will suggest ways using the information contained in the logbooks for future histories of education.

This contribution explores how multinational companies (MNCs) have managed to develop their own policy that sets international standards for education, in particular in the sphere of corporate education. It criticises education policy studies for leaving the study of corporate education mainly to management and human resource studies. As a consequence, education researchers tend to ignore an important policy area that has emerged out of the public limelight. This contribution is informed by a retroductive methodology and explores the 'extrastatecraft' of companies by combining empirical research with a theoretical discussion of transnational private authority. Any speculation about the return of the nation state that does not account for the privatisation of policy making and the influence of multinational companies as the new global shadow sovereigns risks failing to see that the nation state as we know it no longer exists.

Education, which is as old as humanity, has existed in various personal forms in non-western societies, where an osmotic exchange of wisdom, values and life skills within families, tribes and communities was instrumental in the formation and continuation of diverse wisdom traditions all over the world. A personal system of education, called Gurukula (Sanskrit guru, teacher; kula, family) education, thrived in pre-colonial South Asia for centuries before it was replaced by colonial education. This article discusses the philosophy and science behind Gurukula education, where education was a personal process involving an osmotic exchange of essences between teacher and taught, giving wide scope for the celebration of the natural diversity and variability of human behaviour and personality leading to an education that provides equal opportunity in the real sense--as an equal fit between individuals and their environment(s), giving rise to a practical democracy.

Self-determination theory (SDT) suggests that people strive to fulfill three basic needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. In teacher education research, fulfilling those needs is connected to positive skill development and increased wellbeing of preservice teachers and their students. Teacher education programs for special education preservice teachers (SEPT) include a professional experience in various school settings with neurodiverse students. This professional experience gives rise to specific needs for these SEPT. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 SEPT, studying at various stages of two teacher education programs. The findings were analyzed qualitatively. Results revealed developing and changing needs throughout the educational program, reflecting different settings and phases of the professional experience. SDT was found to be useful framework to interpret the findings. Implications for designing teacher education programs are discussed.

Higher education is seeing renewed calls for strengthening ethics education, yet there remains a dearth of research on the state of ethics education across undergraduate curricula. Research about ethics in higher education tends to be localized and often isolated to fields of graduate study. In contribution to a contemporary, landscape understanding of ethics education, we collected data on the placement and prevalence of ethics instruction within the general education curricula at 507 major U.S. colleges and universities. Our findings suggest that 1) most schools in our study's population do not explicitly require ethics as a part of their general education curricula; and 2) a school's religiosity and research status are positively associated with explicitly requiring ethics instruction for its undergraduate student body.

As state political leaders look toward a postpandemic era, they are being presented with complex economic and workforce development challenges that will require intensive, intentional collaboration between business, higher education, and state government. Workforce participation rates remain far below prepandemic levels, businesses continue to struggle with a worker shortage, and supply chain disruptions have contributed to the highest inflation levels in 40 years. Coalitions of business and higher education leaders can help build a state agenda and a broad base of support for higher education. They use data to make the case for higher education, build support among the public, and engage directly with lawmakers. Research on business-higher education coalitions in Michigan and Virginia show that policy participants find the coalitions to be effective advocates because of their credibility, access to policy makers, highly regarded staff, and reform-based agenda.

As public education faces multiple issues, including the surfacing of children's struggles in society and the formation of capabilities suited to the times, free schools are tasked with expectations for their role as a supplement to public education, leading to a change in the onetime structure of opposition. However, attention must be paid to the risk of forcing free schools into the position of troubleshooters for the issues in public education, given that their position in regard to school education remains unbalanced. Will the Act on Securing Educational Opportunities be able to bring about a "cultural/symbolic revolution" in public education? [This article was originally published, in Japanese, in "Kyoikugaku Kenkyu" ("The Japanese Journal of Educational Research") v85 n2 2018. It was translated by Nadezhda Murray.]

Aesthoecology can be described as an 'onto-epistemology' which fuses a theory of being with a theory of knowledge and deals with the affective, connected and temporal aspects of education. Where the aesthetic aspect of aesthoecology -- appearance and feelings/sensation -- concerns the affective domain, the ecological aspect -- spaces, places and relationships -- concerns connectedness. In our title, 'foundations' refers both to the foundations of aesthoecology and the foundations of art and design education. We highlight the implications of aesthoecology for the art and design education of young children, as elsewhere we consider its implications for higher education. Below, we explain aesthoecology in detail; identify some of aesthoecology's implications for art and design education; and apply these to an examination of current English early years education policy. There is much room for improvement here, thus, in the spirit of Rancière, we invite aesthoecologically informed dissensus.