Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects

This book records the history of Japan’s international cooperation in education from the 1950s to 2020. It provides a crucial overview of the nearly 70 years since Japan began engaging in international cooperation in education in order to record and document these efforts that range from basic to higher education to technical and vocational education and training, and the large numbers of people involved in their respective areas of activity and specialization. The book provides useful indicators for exploring new forms of education cooperation in this age of global governance and beyond. The authors include not only researchers but also field practitioners, such as personnel from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and NGOs.

This book discusses the strategies that the Singapore Education System has embarked to encourage school change and innovations. It documents the change journey of Specialized Schools and Future Schools in Singapore with a view to understand the key tenets that enable school wide change and reform. The intents for change and reform are to anchor the education system to the basic foundations and principles of education and yet enable the system as a whole to be malleable to change and globalization. It shows how Singapore enables diversity within a structured environment through innovations in Specialized and Future Schools, and highlights the systemic rationale behind various efforts in Specialized and Future Schools and the kinds of adaptations schools have made to leverage structures and make adjustments for their contexts.  

This book presents a sociocultural account of logic, or a pedagogy, that governs Cambodian education, from policy-making to classroom practices. In so doing, it seeks to not only provide an introduction to Cambodian education, but also to help readers understand the complexities involved in reforming educational practices by drawing on an ethnographic multi-level case study of an ongoing pedagogical reform policy. The book reveals what is actually taking place in today’s Cambodian classrooms and how actors view their own practices in response to the new pedagogy. Importantly, the book situates Cambodian pedagogical reform efforts amid the global wave of student-centered pedagogies and sheds new light on the political economy of educational policy-making and policy implementation along a global-local axis.

This book focuses on English as a Medium of Instruction practices in higher education in Vietnam, addressing institutional, practitioner and student perspectives. It presents theoretical standpoints and empirical experiences of how institutional policies are enacted in the offering of English as a Medium of Instruction programs in universities in Vietnam, and how the disciplinary content is taught and learned through English. The book showcases the enactment of curricular and pedagogical practices in the classroom, drawing on a range of different disciplines central to university education. It also explores the roles of mother tongues in the construction of disciplinary knowledge in English as a Medium of Instruction programs and courses. This book provides guidance and practical information for university English as a Medium of Instruction policy makers, lecturers and student support teams in English for academic purposes across disciplines, as well as to the theoretical framing of the English as a Medium of Instruction field itself.