Education & Pedagogy

The proportion of individuals with intellectual disabilities in Myanmar has risen significantly over the past decade, highlighting the growing need for inclusive education and support systems. However, the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities in general education settings remains slow. The current study examines the challenges and strategies associated with inclusive education for students with intellectual disabilities in Myanmar. The study employed a qualitative design with thematic analysis involving the purposive sampling of 18 parents, 10 general education teachers, and 10 special education teachers. The findings identified five challenges and four strategies categorized at the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem levels. These findings have implications that are central to shaping practical and actionable pathways to enhance educational experiences for students with intellectual disabilities in Myanmar.

This article considers the barriers to, and facilitators of, inclusive education within prison contexts in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing on England and Wales. Our review of the existing research revealed that there is a gap in the prison education literature which we have attempted to address in this paper. Although existing studies highlight issues relating to the quality of education in prisons and the inconsistency of educational provision, studies which privilege the voices of prison educators on the topic of inclusive prison education were less evident. Drawing on the perspectives of a prison educator (Amanda, co-author), we highlight the factors which make educational inclusion more challenging within the context of prisons. Factors include lack of suitable training, lack of resources and lack of time. After reflecting on these challenges, we suggest several enablers of inclusion within the context of prison education.

African music educators have been on a journey of indigenization, closing the gap between community arts experiences and school arts. However, although African music educators have advocated for indigenizing the musical arts curriculum, entanglements in western colonial art education models hinder designing a thoughtful indigenous curriculum and silence postcolonial voices in African schooling. My purpose is to analyze Ghana's political moments that have informed the increased interest in African arts expressions in schools. Using Kwasi Wiredu's "conceptual decolonization" notion, I outline how western music education models depart from African worldviews, notions of being, values, and knowledge. I advance three claims to support my argument that indigenizing the Ghanaian musical arts curriculum encourages music educators to embrace the complexity and breadth of African soundscapes, approaches to music-making, and the importance of African voices in arts education.

The new California's Bilingual Teacher Performance Expectations (BTPE), adopted in 2021, are set to be implemented during the 2023-2024 academic year. Since the approval of the Bilingual Education Act in the 1960s, bilingual education in California has navigated its -- sometimes dramatically -- swaying state policies. Being one of the most influential states due to its size and scope, the implementation of these new standards will shape the teacher education programs in the next decades. By extension, the instructional quality that millions of emerging bilingual students will receive is at stake, as well as the ramifications in the bilingual education field as a whole. This article analyzes the opportunities and challenges of this new framework and its implications for the preparation of bilingual teachers in California and beyond.

This article argues that China's education system is facing unprecedented pressures to provide appropriately skilled individuals to meet the demands of the rapidly growing economy. In China this is a uniquely complex situation owing to the coexistence of a diminishing command and control economy and a growing market economy. Within this context we find that there are at least three sets of employers placing different demands on the education system. These demands come from three groups of organisations operating under different forms of ownership who prioritise skills differently based on different ideological and historical approaches to organisation, management and learning. Consequently they relate differently to the education system, placing varying demands on the system and using the education and training system to serve rather different functions in their skill supply strategies.

The present paper describes an educational experiment dealing with teaching the theory of formal languages and automata as well as their application concepts. It presents a practical application of an educational experiment and initial results based on comparative instruction of two samples of students (n = 56). The application concept should improve the efficiency of the teacher's activity and professional education at the tertiary level. It could be used in disciplines having a strong logical structure and formalization. The concept is aimed at higher educational objectives such as understanding, application, analysis and synthesis. The students are presented with practical examples from their professional life--algorithmization, compilers etc. This educational method is especially recommended for teachers (in-service education) and practically oriented professionals (distance education). The results and conclusions are included in the teaching process at the Department of Computer Science University of Ostrava.

This study examines the racial and ethnic distribution of the costs and benefits of higher education in California. This exploratory work documents the racial and ethnic distribution of these benefits, in the form of enrollments in different sectors and different types of institutions, as well as on the costs, in the form of the share borne by families versus the state. The study builds on the work of Hansen and Weisbrod, who examined the distribution of costs and benefits for higher education in California for students from different income groups. This study utilizes data from a variety of sources, including the California Postsecondary Education Commission, the California Student Aid Commission, EdFund of California, the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other agencies and departments in California.

This paper explores economic competition in higher education in both the national and global dimensions, up to and including the likely effects of the Nelson reforms, reflecting on the implications for the equality of opportunity project. The history and application of the principle of equality of opportunity in tertiary education in Australia are reviewed, and the privatization and deregulation trends of the 1980s are examined, as are neoliberal policies which contributed to the marketization of higher education. The five market segments of higher education in Australia are desccribed, including the "Sandstones," the "Gumtrees," the "Unitechs," the "New Universities," and the private universities. Elite higher education and tuition in the U.S. and Australia are compared. It is concluded that global education is produced and consumed in terms of a worldwide university hierarchy in which not only is global equality of opportunity absent, global educational inequality is necessary to the commercial market in international education. (Contains 6 tables.)

The preparation of special educators has changed dramatically since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was implemented. Special education teachers must deal with changes in the political contexts in which they work as well as changes in the children, youth, and families with whom they work. As a consequence of those changes, how we prepare teachers has become much more complex. Teacher education programs are being asked to demonstrate how their candidates impact children's achievement in ways that we have never had to before. Although the need for research-based approaches is as critical as it was 20 years ago, the quality of research on teacher education has improved. The stakes are much higher: Unless we incorporate research-based practices into our programs and use that research to improve our preparation programs, alternative pathways to licensure and certification may become the norm.

Undergraduate education has not kept pace with knowledge about the role of culture in shaping human and social behavior. The deficiencies can and should be repaired, but some real innovations are essential to the process. Despite the challenge, there is a real opportunity to parlay research advances emerging out of the recent "cultural turn" in a variety of disciplines into some exciting gains in important outcomes of liberal education. The opportunity to encourage students to think critically about basic beliefs about how people and social institutions operate, which is central to cultural analysis, goes to the heart of liberal education. A general education program that includes work in cultural analysis but also work in biology and/or psychology should provide opportunity for juxtaposition and debate, not just over principles but around specific topics. Imaginative projects designed to develop curricula and course models are overdue but essential in keeping education at pace with research.

An important touchstone of distance education has been to contribute to the development of individual learners whatever their life circumstances. The first half of the article provides an overview of this contribution and of the understanding and awareness that has been developed about distance learners in their individual learning contexts. The overview is based around five themes: access to education, adjustment to new learning environments, individual development, knowledge and awareness of learners in context, and the importance of understanding the learner's perspective of distance education. In the latter part of the article it is argued that the way ahead for distance education requires attention to more than technological approaches to learning, and that the field is well placed to provide an informed critique of current trends and developments, to focus on the student experience, and to contribute to learner development and practitioner development.

Reading literacy and reading interest was examined in four primary schools in Papua New Guinea: in an international, suburban, settlement and village school. In this paper we present a summary of findings located within a local context and examine the implications as viewed through two lenses. From an 'educational for equality' perspective, the findings suggest a critical need to re-evaluate the use of national testing to select children for further education and address the serious shortage of reading books in school libraries. From an 'education for life' perspective, the findings indicate a continuing need for community-based actions together with innovative teacher education programs aimed at developing ways of strengthening the connections between home and school.

This paper explores what constitutes "enterprise education" in four European countries. It proposes a conceptual schema for capturing the various objectives of enterprise education programmes and initiatives. This conceptual schema is then used to categorise the objectives of 50 enterprise programmes from Austria, Finland, Ireland, and the UK. The paper reviews the teaching/learning methods used in these programmes. It discusses what factors are associated with "effective" enterprise education, illustrating the discussion with "best practice" from the programmes studied. The paper argues that in order to operate effective enterprise education programmes, policy makers and educators need a thorough understanding of the diverse and alternative aims and objectives of enterprise education interventions, of the alternative forms such interventions can take, and of the need to "train the trainers."

This paper advocates the development of high-level research capability in some students in their undergraduate Bachelor of Education course. The rationale for this viewpoint is presented in relation to three questions: "What is educational research?" "Why should universities develop high-level research capability in some pre-service teacher education graduates?" and "What type of curriculum can support the development of high-level research capability in some pre-service teacher education graduates?" The first two questions are addressed broadly. The latter question is addressed with reference to an existing Research Pathway within a Bachelor of Education course. The paper concludes with the identification of a priority issue for subsequent iterations of the Pathway and a reflection on the shift in my role as a teacher in this Pathway from "teacher researcher" to "scholarly teacher".

I argue that there is potential for collaborative work between science educators and citizenship educators. However, following comments about that potential, I raise a number of challenges. Those challenges relate to the public perception of science, narrow academic perspectives of some science educators, and problematic attempts to develop a form of science education that, at times, some have claimed is relevant to--or, even, a form of--citizenship education. The latter point is considered with reference to some science educators' perceptions concerning the nature of citizenship and citizenship education. I argue that the perceptions of some science educators seem to suggest significant differences in understanding from at least some of those who would regard themselves as citizenship education specialists. In the final main section of the article, I suggest, briefly, some ways in which further work to develop collaboration between science educators and citizenship educators could be considered.