Education & Pedagogy

Identifies current problems in teacher education, recognizing larger social dilemmas and the need for change; discussing the need to acknowledge one's perpetuation of social problems; and examining how to transform schooling through a major shift in critical reflection on social issues, noting teachers' role in achieving educational and social reform by integrating critical multiculturalism, critical feminism, and ethics. (SM)

This commentary discusses some of the challenges teacher education programs face in preparing teachers for working with students with disabilities. Trends toward making teacher education more authentic, increasing opportunities for practicum experiences, and focusing on the abilities of teacher candidates to achieve student learning are highlighted. (Contains four references.) (CR)

Contrary to critics' claims, the United States could not boast the world's finest higher-education system while maintaining a deficient public-school system. Unregulated, profit-oriented market models are inappropriate for public schools responsible for serving the social good. Privatization and techno-efficiency pressures are equally counterproductive. (Contains 57 references.) (MLH)

Examined efforts to promote bilingualism in a course for prospective teachers, Education of Bilingual Children: Theory and Practice, focusing on how student teachers grappled with the complex relationship between research, policy, and practice within bilingual education. Analysis of five types of literacy events indicated that students experienced a process of transformation in developing more positive attitudes toward bilingualism. (SM)

Case studies of Estonia, Bulgaria, and the United Kingdom illustrate how the access and equity agenda in each country reflect national social concerns and priorities and how individual institutions reinterpret national agendas in light of institutional missions and objectives. Sees a role for the Society for Research into Higher Education in fostering the cross-fertilization of approaches. (DB)

A study involving 54 preservice teachers examined the outcomes of an alternative basic certification program in special education offered by the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Results found the program was effective, attracted more mature, diverse, life-experienced individuals than traditional education programs, and included more minority students and males. (CR)

Describes an online distance learning component within an Australian Master's-level science education course which included a weekly online forum and in-person sessions, analyzing students' contributions to the forum, course evaluation forms, and post-course group interviews. Students valued the online component, but many were unskilled in technology and had to learn as they went, which was time consuming. (SM)

Modeled on Hampton Institute (Virginia) and Tuskegee Institute (Alabama), Achimota College in colonial Gold Coast (later Ghana) provided Black students with "adapted education" in agriculture and industrial arts, suitable for a life of manual labor. This case of international educational transfer is analyzed from the perspective of the politics of "borrowing" as a means to legitimize contested educational reforms. (SV)

The Peruvian national indigenous federation established a bilingual, intercultural teachers' training program to counter stereotypes of indigenous people portrayed in the authoritarian, monolingual Spanish national curriculum, and to enhance language preservation, ethnic mobilization, and cultural survival. A complementary transitional bilingual education program enables indigenous people in Peru's Amazon basin to complete their primary and secondary schooling locally. (TD)

This article proposes a reconceptualization of multicultural teacher education and summarizes basic principles of cultural-historical theory. It also considers how cultural-historical theory can inform research design and offers examples from a preservice teacher education course of how constructs from cultural-historical theory can be used to assess teacher learning about multicultural issues. (Contains extensive references.) (DB)

Describes one teacher education program designed to broaden students' thinking about the influences of culture in society, and teaching and learning about literacy. Offers an "unromanticized glimpse" into the lives of teacher education students as they struggle to come to terms with their transformation as literacy educators preparing to teach literacy in multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual classrooms of the 21st century. (NH)

Relates the process used to develop the guiding principles, practices, and results of the collective thinking about effective teaching and learning environments that were compiled for "An Emerging Set of Guiding Principles and Practices for the Design and Development of Distance Education." This manual was developed during the Innovations in Distance Education project launched in 1995 at Penn State, Lincoln, and Cheyney universities. (VWC)

Argues that the present crisis of basic education for young people in Africa reveals problems that are more fundamental than enrollments, inputs, and costs. Maintains that non-conventional approaches to learning, associated with non-formal and distance education, have important but distinct contributions to make to the reform of mainstream schooling and could help to open up the formal system from within. (Contains 31 references.) (VWC)

Examines science education in Egypt and the Arab states, focusing on the status of science and technology at the pre-university level and higher education, the science and technology structural component in the higher education system, student enrollment at the B.S. level, distribution of B.S degrees by sex, science and technology graduates, M.S. and PhD. enrollment, and the science community in Egypt. (Author/VWL)

A discussion of dental education focuses on what constitutes competency-based education and how such a curriculum is designed. Topics addressed include desirable learning events at various stages in the learning continuum; program components; definition and assessment of outcomes; interdisciplinarity; focus on the entry-level practitioner's needs vs. specialized curricula; and focus on instruction vs. assessment. (MSE)