Education & Pedagogy

Like other developing countries, Tunisia has allocated increasing levels of resources to education, particularly higher education, over the past few decades, mainly through public funding. From 2005 to 2008, public expenditure on education amounted to around 7.4% of GDP, with 2% allocated to higher education. Recently, however, budgetary constraints have increased, student enrollment is increasing rapidly, and the country needs to improve its higher education so that graduates are more employable. In this context, to enhance access and equity, public policy is required to define orientations and programmes to improve quality and efficiency while reducing costs. This article first assesses public expenditure on higher education in Tunisia, with respect to its adequacy, efficiency, and equity, and then explores the challenges posed to financing by demographic changes, the need for higher quality of education, and private provision. It also examines some strategies for reinforcing financing, and analyzes measures to increase private funding.

Ever since the transnational education trend took off since the 1980s, transnational education has come to bearing political, economic and cultural implications. Different approaches have been formulated to achieve specific policy objectives by both importing and exporting countries. Such approaches demonstrate a four dimensional composition, which includes generating economic revenue, boosting capacity building, developing human resources and promoting international understanding. Transnational education is, to a great extent, economically oriented and has now become dominated by market principles. In addition, it is characterized by its borderless nature and the innovation of delivery models. Alongside the opportunities, transnational education tends to erode national educational sovereignty and threatens cultural security of importing countries, undermines the public nature of education, and challenges the existing institutional arrangements for quality assurance, accreditation and qualification recognition in higher education. With recent global education trends in mind, China urgently needs to adopt adequate measures to ensure a sustainable and healthy development of transnational education.

Vocational education and training (VET) is often considered the enigma of education. For those that work in or research sustainable education within the schools and higher education sections, VET appears somewhat like the mysterious second cousin: often difficult to access and difficult to understand. VET differs quite markedly from the other education sectors. Its industry, skill and competency foci have been established through a distinct range of national and international drivers. Both the limited understanding of how VET operates and its institutional characteristics has bound the integration of sustainable education practices within the sector. This paper provides a brief overview of the VET sector within Australia and provides some insight into how sustainable education practices are being developed in VET. The recognition of elements of common ground between VET and sustainable education are proposed as an entree into the sector that can influence the adoption of sustainable practices by industry. (Contains 22 endnotes.)

The strategic plan for providing college education outside of the traditional classroom environment has rapidly evolved over the past decade via electronic mediums. Advances in technology, along with increasing student enrollment size, have led many higher education institutions to begin offering distance education (web-based) courses. Current literature suggests that fully-blown distance education facilitates and maximizes student learning more effectively than the traditional, face-to-face course format. Many higher education institutions have adopted out-of-the-classroom learning approaches in order to accommodate students working full-time, as well as students with special needs and complex schedules. As modern communication and technological channels improve, distance education outlets are expected to meet this challenge. Although the benefits of distance education are numerous, costs of distance education should also be carefully considered and evaluated. This article evaluates the benefits and costs of distance education from institutional, faculty, and students' perspectives. (Contains 3 tables.)

This narrative account describes and analyzes the story of resistance to aesthetic education in an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program. After carefully listening to the students' resistance to the Lincoln Center Institute's aesthetic education component of their student teacher experience, the author designs a curriculum initiative to address the questions of relevance and application of aesthetic education in pre-service teacher preparation. This article follows the initiation, development, implementation, and evaluation of the aesthetic art initiative. Framed by Young's (1997) understanding of "asymmetrical reciprocity", the author suggests that three layers of asymmetry--instructor asymmetry, departmental asymmetry, and institutional asymmetry--may have influenced the pre-service teachers' engagement with aesthetic education. This autoethnographic account asserts that embracing resistance and asymmetry may be important to the development of aesthetic education with pre-service teachers, and also yields insight into the ways contextual features of higher education may influence educational experiences. (Contains 1 note.)

In this article, the author describes three distinct but interrelated currents in the process of Islamization: the evolution of the "integrated" madrasah, the growth of the Jema'at al Tabligh as a form of nonformal Islamic education for adults, and the effort by the Department of Education in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) to Islamize public education through Project Madrasa Education (PME). He analyzes the conception of Islamic education common to all three developments as a reflection of local needs and aspirations and explore their possible consequences. He argues that, rather than constituting an argument against decentralization, this case offers an argument for greater understanding of and openness to moderate Islamization as a potentially more effective bulwark against radicalizing Islamic education than government-enforced secularization. A historical context of Muslim Mindanao is presented and Islamic education as existential sustenance in Muslim Mindanao is discussed, as well as Islamization of education as democratic educational reform. (Contains 70 footnotes.)

If higher education is a right, and distance education is the avenue for making higher education universally available, then who shall pay? This article asks (1) can state governments in the United States afford to fund this initiative and (2) can public higher education institutions in the U.S. fund this effort through capitalizing on cost-efficiencies of online learning? To answer the first question, data on funding of higher education by states are reviewed and a negative conclusion reached. To answer the second question, research on methods for achieving cost-efficiencies through online learning is reviewed and a cautious positive conclusion is reached, assuming states and institutions are willing to invest in the people and processes, and the time, effort, and will that make achieving efficiencies possible. (Contains 9 tables.)

The purposes of higher education in general and of university education in particular have long been subject to controversy. Whereas for some, the main role of universities is to provide professional and vocational education and training and their benefits are to be measured in terms of social or economic utility, their value for others is to be seen more in terms of the liberal development and promotion of certain intrinsically worthwhile qualities of mind and intellect. In this context, indeed, much recent literature on university education has been concerned to reaffirm what are usually taken to have been the liberal purposes of bygone university education over the more instrumental or vocational agendas of much contemporary university and higher education. While recognising, along with other treatments of this issue, that it is to some extent implicated in a false dichotomy between the liberal and the vocational, this paper seeks a clearer rationale for the liberal dimensions and aspirations of university education.

In many countries, neo-liberal education policy has embraced the concept of a regulated education market. In Australia, for example, the federal government is seeking to create one education market by pursuing policies that blur the distinction between public and private education. There is a growing body of research examining the operation and effects of education markets, using a range of perspectives and approaches. However, historical perspectives have rarely been used in relation to this research programme. This is surprising given that the education market is not just a contemporary phenomenon: it has a past. This paper explores the insights that can be gained from an historical perspective by undertaking an historical sociology of a period of South Australian education history (1852-1875) when there was a regulated education market in operation. The paper focuses on one aspect of the effects of regulated markets, that of teachers' work.

This study investigates education students' perceptions of computers and the factors affecting their perceptions among education students in the United States and Taiwan. Sample subjects were 360 students from six colleges of education in the two places. The results reveal that there were significant differences. Education students in the United States demonstrated greater computer liking, comfort, and value than education students in Taiwan. Education students in Taiwan, however, indicated higher concerns about gender- and ability-related differences in students' computer use. Education students in the United States also rated greater effectiveness in improving student learning of computer resources in elementary, middle, and high schools than did their counterparts in Taiwan. Furthermore, gender, age, and length of computer use had various effects on different dimensions of computer perceptions of the two student groups. Plausible explanations and educational implications of these differences are discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

In this article the impact of technology education, as a new learning area (subject) in the curriculum, on in-service teacher education in South Africa is described in order to ascertain the extent of the impact. The research on which this article is based draws on a variety of experiences and observations in the field at grassroots level (in particular an outreach project in rural communities). The envisaged impact of technology education on South African schools, communities, teacher educators and teachers, the range of in-service teacher education that is required, and the impacts in urban and rural areas are discussed. Finally a number of concluding remarks are made about the extent of the impact of the inclusion of technology education in the new National Curriculum Statement and whether the situation has changed since the implementation of a pilot technology education project in 1998.

Supplementary education is on the rise globally, taking many different forms, from private tutors to small schools and large corporations. These providers exist outside conventional public and private school systems, offering remedial education and tutoring, parallel instruction to conventional schools, and accelerated or more advanced instruction. Despite their global growth, very little is known about what is being taught in supplementary education institutions, how students and parents select them, or what role they play in education systems. With support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council, the author sets out to examine Japanese supplementary education. He has visited 25 supplementary education institutions ("juku") in Japan, where he held long discussions with the schools' operators and observed classes. In this article, the author discusses supplementary education and what role such education plays in Canada and--perhaps more importantly--whether it might gain prevalence in the future, following the Japanese path. (Contains 7 notes.)

If, as some have argued, private higher education is now the most dynamic segment of higher education, it is also the case that its growth, partly in response to the increasing mismatch between spiralling demand and limited state capacity, is often ad hoc. The article examines the contours of this trend in Indonesia, where the balance of public and private higher education has shifted sharply over the last two decades. While the private sector has been responsible for much of the expansion in higher education, its role in relation to quality is more questionable. Indonesia's economic burdens, sharply exacerbated by the effects of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, make it likely that the trend towards privatisation, including of its public institutions, will continue. Together with the current rise of trans-national higher education, however, this is only likely to sharpen existing difficulties around longstanding issues of quality, equality, and regulatory capacity.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the university and industry in the scope of engineering education depending on the views of supervisors of the Engineering Faculty as well as the heads of the practical training committees of the departments. In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were used to gather the views of supervisors and heads of the practical training committees. The poor legal substructure of industrial education, the insufficient of communication between the university and industry, problems resulting from the diversity of enterprises, inefficient control of industrial education, the insufficient of preparation for industrial education, and limited time-period of industrial education were some of the problems stated by participants. In line with the higher education strategies, what types of structuring required to increase the effectiveness of education structures between the university and industry were extensively discussed. (Contains 2 tables.)

For the first time in many years, Massachusetts has an "Education Governor." Swept into the corner office on the strength of an historic grassroots movement and a mission of civic renewal, Governor Deval Patrick has put education at the top of his list of priorities--and it is little wonder why. Like so many who have experienced success in the Commonwealth, and so many more who anxiously await their chance to do great things, Patrick understands the awesome transformative power of education. However, an extraordinary task lies ahead. Massachusetts has little connectivity and sporadic coordination between the three principal segments of the education pipeline. In this article, the author discusses the need for a new kind of conversation with the entire education community and the people of Massachusetts in order to build a coordinated education pipeline and develop policies that will address important educational issues.