Education & Pedagogy

This article deals with the role of Irish Higher Education (HE) in the context of the promotion of citizenship. It examines the circumstances in which Irish Higher Education currently operates in terms of access and participation with particular reference to the recent OECD Report (2004), "Review of Higher Education in Ireland". The article will also highlight the efforts of the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) to promote access to Higher Education and the benefits which accrue to mature students from engaging with such a process in terms of their self-confidence, consciousness-raising and sense of citizenship.

The purpose of the current study is to determine the interconnection between parental level of education, psychological well-being, academic achievement and reasons for pursuing higher education in adolescents. Participants included 439 college freshmen from a mid-size state university in the northeastern USA. A survey, including indices of parental level of education, life-satisfaction, academic achievement and reasons for pursuing higher education, was administered in class. Overall results indicated a positive correlation between parental level of education and adolescents' reasons for pursuing higher education for societal expectations. Furthermore, paternal education independently predicted societal expectations as a reason for college attendance. (Contains 3 tables.)

In this essay Kelvin Beckett argues that Richard Peters's major work on education, "Ethics and Education," belongs on a short list of important texts we can all share. He argues this not because of the place it has in the history of philosophy of education, as important as that is, but because of the contribution it can still make to the future of the discipline. The limitations of Peters's analysis of the concept of education in his chapter on "Criteria of Education" are well known. In the chapter on "Education as Initiation," however, Peters offered a synthetic sketch of education that, Beckett argues, points us toward a more comprehensive definition of education, one which, he maintains, can be accepted by all philosophers, regardless of the tradition they work in.

This paper presents the findings of a small-scale research project about student teachers' perceptions and experiences of environmental education. The context of this study is a pre-service teacher education faculty in rural New South Wales, Australia. A combined methods approach was applied, with a survey designed from rich data elicited through focus group interviews. The focus of this paper is on the findings of the survey, revealing that prospective teachers' preparedness in environmental education is diluted by their teacher education experience and that such experiences are not providing a stimulus for novice teachers to practice environmental education. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures and 3 endnotes.)

While countries with predominantly academic school-based upper secondary education have been "discovering" vocational education and training (VET) for some time, countries with "vocationalised" education systems such as Austria, Germany or Switzerland are critically reviewing their own situations. This paper takes up the case of Switzerland, which can be considered, in several respects, as a sort of life-size VET laboratory. This contribution aims at critically highlighting particularities, recent developments, advantages and shortcomings of a post-compulsory education system geared as heavily to "vocationalisation" as Switzerland's. (Contains 2 figures, 3 footnotes, and a bibliography.)

This article investigates benefits and challenges of forest education in view of 257 Swiss elementary school teachers (1st-3rd grade), by means of a written questionnaire and 15 in-depth interviews. Two thirds of the teachers carried out forest education during normal lesson hours (mean visits = eight per year). Forests were clearly considered as an educational setting, and especially suitable for the enhancement of personal and social skills. Setting rules was seen as indispensable for successful forest education and a must to communicate to "novice" teachers. Moreover, the didactic of forest education should be implemented in teacher education curricula. (Contains 2 figures, 4 tables, and 2 notes.)

The authors present a brief commentary and analysis of two problems related to 30 years of IDEA implementation: an increasing schism between general education and special education, and the unequal treatment of an entire class of students. Over the years, special education has become its own microcosm of programs and practices, making it difficult to realize an interdisciplinary approach to the education of all students. The authors analyze the possible sociopsychological implications of the categorization of students. They end with their vision of the unification of general education and special education into one education system for all students.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for conducting research on teacher education programmes that practise collaboration between special and general education faculty to advance inclusion. Such a framework can establish a common language for collaborative teacher education and provide a structure for conducting research on individual programmes as well as cross-site comparisons. It is based on the assumption that collaboration represents a robust, "systematic" integration of special and general education across all aspects of the preservice curriculum. The proposed framework includes three collaborative program models and five programme dimensions. (Contains 1 figure.)

Social partnership in the sphere of education is characterized by a set of relations among educational institutions, associations of employers, trade unions, and structures of authority on the basis of agreements and contracts for the purpose of further developing the system of education, improving the country's cadre potential, shaping the socially active, educated individual, and enhancing the economic and spiritual progress of society. In this article, the authors discuss the entities and institutions of social partnership within the system of education, as well as those between the system of professional education and the sphere of labor. They also discuss the implementation of projects aimed at improving and developing social partnership in the sphere of education.

Engineering education is getting global. This article assesses the present scenario in engineering education, which is undergoing a paradigm shift because of the Internet, innovation, and internationalization. The influence of information technology, industrial development, national politics, and economic policies on internationalization of engineering education has been discussed. Quality control and accreditation practices in some countries have been reviewed, and a link between technology advancement and engineering curricula has been drawn. A stable political and economic system is necessary to retain the highly qualified African engineers who are the drivers of the engineering education toward achieving this goal.

Home education is a well established phenomenon in Australia but little is known about the movement of students between home schooling and formal education and how students view and handle the transitions. A sociocultural theoretical framework has been used to explore student perceptions of their transition experiences between formal education and home schooling through three case studies. Students described positive and negative views, and experiences of both systems of education. The results of the study uncover areas for further research into the role of education professionals on student experiences, the place of home education in relation to formal education and assessment of collaborative educational programmes which combine aspects of formal education with home education.

A small state faces several challenges with regard to adult continuing education and training. The paper discusses some of these challenges with specific reference to the Mediterranean small island state of Malta. It starts with a general discussion of some of the issues affecting adult education in a small state such as Malta that paves the way for the more focused analyses in the second and third sections. These sections focus on a selection of just two topics from among the many that affect adult education in Malta, namely those of adult education and work and adult education for sustainable development. These analyses are tackled from the perspective of the small state condition. (Contains 11 notes.)

Upon numerous requests to provide ranking of world universities by broad subject fields/schools/colleges and by subject fields/programs/departments, the authors present the ranking methodologies and problems that arose from the research by the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University on the Academic Ranking of World Universities by Broad Subject Fields (ARWU-FIELD) in 2006. Using objective indicators and internationally comparable data, the authors ranked five broad subject fields: natural sciences and mathematics (SCI); engineering/technology and computer sciences (ENG); life and agriculture sciences (LIFE); clinical medicine and pharmacy (MED); and social sciences (SOC). (Contains 5 tables.)

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) is an advocate for having highly qualified physical education teachers deliver developmentally appropriate, standards-based instruction in schools. However, a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a highly qualified physical education teacher did not exist until recently. This article describes the attributes and characteristics that highly qualified physical education teachers should have and display, from their undergraduate preparation to when they become experienced, master teachers. This article expounds on the principles embodied in NASPE's 2007 position paper, "What Constitutes a Highly Qualified Physical Education Teacher."

In this article we examine preservice teachers' ideas about the role of multicultural citizenship education in social studies classrooms. We use qualitative techniques to explore data collected from observations and interviews with preservice teachers enrolled in a secondary social studies methods course. The findings suggest that even when teacher education programs are designed around goals of promoting multicultural citizenship education, preservice teachers' pre-existing and emerging ideas about social studies content and classrooms can limit their thinking and practice with transformative social studies pedagogy. (Contains 3 notes.)