Education

This edited book provides an overview of unstructured and structured play scenarios crucial to developing young children’s awareness, interest, and ability to learn Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in informal and formal education environments. The key elements for developing future STEM capital, enabling children to use their intuitive critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, and promoting active citizenship and a scientifically literate workforce, begins in the early years as children learn through play, employing trial and error, and often investigating on their own.

The book is intended for parents seeking to provide STEM activities for their children at home and in playgroups, citizen scientists seeking guidance to provide children with quality educational activities, daycare practitioners providing educational structures for young children from birth to formal education, primary school teachers and preservice teachers seeking to teach preschool, kindergarten or children typically aged 5–8 years old in grades 1–3, as well as researchers and policy makers working in science didactics with small children.

This volume analyzes cases from emerging economies in relation to the global endeavor to promote the vision of sustainable development in all forms of education. It aims to discuss the significance of hearing local voices and understanding local discourse regarding strategies for action for change, and the role of educational systems as a means to communicate, promote and educate for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In this book, emerging economies are defined as newly industrialized countries that have not yet reached developed status, but have, in a macro-economic sense, outpaced their developing counterparts. In this context, the book highlights how education in emerging economies could extend conventional economic methods to sustainability issues, or depart from money-based calculations and business-dominated values to promotion of real-life considerations and ethical, environmental and humanistic values.

This handbook brings together a range of global perspectives in the field of critical studies in education to illuminate multiple ways of knowing, learning, and teaching for social wellbeing, justice, and sustainability. The handbook covers areas such as critical thought systems of education, critical race (and racialization) theories of education, critical international/global citizenship education, and critical studies in education and literacy studies. In each section, the chapter authors illuminate the current state of the field and probe more inclusive ways to achieve multicentric knowledge and learning possibilities.

With a historical context covering the past 20 years, this book provides in-depth discussions of research, trends, and issues related to learning technologies in K-12 schools, higher education settings, and educational administration in the U.S. Given the remote learning challenges and opportunities that the COVID-19 pandemic has recently brought to our attention, world-wide interest in educational technology-related issues is at its peak. Therefore, this book is specifically directed at the entire educational technology field, educators, educational leaders, researchers, and policymakers alike who are interested in learning technologies in the U.S. educational system.

This edited volume—the first book devoted to the topic of contract cheating—brings together the perspectives of leading scholars presenting novel research. Contract cheating describes the outsourcing of students’ assessments to third parties such that the assignments or exams students submit are not their own work. While research in this area has grown over the past five years, the phenomenon has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Themes addressed in this book include the definition of contract cheating, its prevalence in higher education, and what motivates students to engage in it. Chapter authors also consider various interventions that can be used to address contract cheating’s threat to academic integrity in higher education including: assessment practice, education, detection strategies, policy design, and legal interventions.

This book explores the issue of graduate employability in regional Vietnam. It provides a critical discussion of not only the demands of the labour market but also the practices and challenges in the development of graduate employability and career capacity building at the national, institutional and individual levels. It discusses graduate employability in Vietnam by analysing government and institutional policies and taking into account the perspectives and experiences of three key stakeholders: employers, graduates and universities. The book highlights the development of ‘employability in context’ for graduates in regional Vietnam to be able to adapt to the specific social, cultural and demographic conditions of the region and tackle new employment challenges.

This book brings together new thinking and research on religious education’s complex and evolving role in the multicultural, diverse postmodern era. It facilitates new realism and understanding of the current situation from empirical and reflective accounts relating to a variety of countries and political contexts, as well as providing innovative methodological approaches to the study of education and religion.

In different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical lenses, religious education occupies a contested space. The ongoing, changing nature of the world due to increasing secularization, rapid technological change, mass immigration, globalization processes, conflict and challenging security issues, from inter to intra state levels, and with shifting geopolitical power balances, generates the need to reconceptualize where religious education is positioned. It claims that religious education on its own can be an agent of moral, social and spiritual transformation are disputed. There is significant controversy about whether special religious education, that is in-faith education, still has a role within the post-modern world.

This edited book explores the problems and challenges of negotiating the representation of ethnic minorities within history education. It investigates how states balance the (non-)acknowledgement of the reality of cultural or religious diversity, and the promotion of a point of convergence in history education to foster national identity. Shifting our attention away from the intractable challenges posed by post-conflict countries for reconciliation, the contributors draw attention to the need to explore ways to prevent or pre-empt conflicts and exclusion through history education, which could contribute to developing a more sustainable culture of peace. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and sources, this book asks how history education could contribute to forming critical, historically informed, and committed young citizens. The book will be of interest to students and academics working on themes such as nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, history education, multicultural education, peace studies and area studies, as well as practitioners in the fields of history, social studies, civic or citizenship.

This book foregrounds the provision of education for young people who have been remanded or sentenced into custody. Both international conventions and national legislation and guidelines in many countries point to the right of children and young people to access education while they are incarcerated. Moreover, education is often seen as an important protective and ‘rehabilitative’ factor. However, the conditions associated with incarceration generate particular challenges for enabling participation in education. Bridging the fields of education and youth justice, this book offers a social justice analysis through the lens of ‘participatory parity’, the book brings together rare interviews with staff and young people in youth justice settings in Australia, secondary data from these sites, a suite of pertinent and frank reports, and international scholarship. Drawing on this rich set of material, the book demonstrates not only the challenges but also the possibilities for education as a conduit for social justice in custodial youth justice. The book will be of immediate relevance to governments and youth justice staff for meaningfully meeting their obligation of enabling children and young people in custody to benefit from education; and of interest to scholars and researchers in education, youth work and criminology. 

This open access book offers in depth knowledge on the challenges and opportunities offered by the inclusion of minority teachers in mainstream educational settings from an international perspective. It aims to be a unique and important contribution for scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners considering the complexities brought about by global trends into national/local educational systems and settings. It will also serve to guide future research, policy, and practice in this important field of inquiry.

The work will contribute answers to questions such as: How do immigrant/minority teachers experience their work in mainstream educational settings?; How do mainstream shareholders experience the inclusion of immigrant/minority teachers in mainstream educational settings?; What is the effect of the successful (and/or unsuccessful) integration of minority teachers and teacher educators into mainstream education settings?.

This book thus explores the role of African epistemologies in addressing the myriad challenges posed by the inclusive education system in Africa and other contexts.

This edited collection presents, reviews, and critically analyzes sustainable practices and long-term-oriented decision-making in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Campus closures and the quick transition to hybrid or e-learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic caused HEI stakeholders, including students, faculty, and staff, to swiftly adopt new ways of learning, teaching, and administering that were unfathomable only months before. This radical and challenging shift left many in academia with a sense that there is tremendous potential for HEIs to take the lead – both from an educational and practical standpoint – in fostering on- and off-campus sustainability and combatting climate change. In this book, the editors and their contributors systematically highlight current challenges that are slowing or derailing HEIs’ finance-related initiatives and practices geared toward sustainability. The case studies collected in this book provide a holistic overview of the ways inwhich financial and other long-term decisions can lead to more sustainable practices in higher education. 

This volume addresses the central question facing the future of higher education around the world, whether and why universities need to exist at all. This book accepts the question’s premise: It is not clear that the university is any longer needed as an institution -- that is, unless its defenders recover what had made the university the revolutionary institution that over the past two centuries has not only defined the shape of modern systematic inquiry but also the distinctiveness of the societies that have housed them. In short, what is required is a reanimation of the spirit of Wilhelm von Humboldt for our times; hence the book's title and subtitle. Humboldt was responsible for relaunching the university as the vanguard institution of 'Enlightenment' to which we continue to pay lip service – and sometimes not much more than that. Admittedly, the task of relaunching Humboldt today is made difficult because many of the concrete achievements associated with the Humboldtian university – not least academic disciplines and nation-states – are increasingly seen as problematic if not obsolete. However, the global reach of the Humboldtian vision in its 19th century and 20th century heyday offers hope that it may be recovered in the 21st century. The book focuses on the performative character of the academic vocation, what Humboldt memorably characterized as the 'unity of research and teaching' in the same person, a role model for students and society at large. The book's seven chapters develop this theme in a historically and philosophically nuanced way in terms of the Humboldtian vision of knowledge, sense of free expression and critical judgement, and commitment to translation and publicity.

This edited volume brings together a new materialist approach to understanding the various legacies and controls being exercised through school uniforms. Through examining school uniform policies, the editors and their authors highlight the embodied choices that contribute to a socio-materialist understanding of democracy and social justice. Uniform policy plays a distinct role in setting the culture of compulsory school education and as such it constitutes a set of under-theorised school practices. This work thus brings together critical perspectives from education, sociology, cultural and postcolonial studies within an overarching analysis of how uniform imposes performances that have a formative effect on young people’s identities and economic positionality.

This edited book is a unique comprehensive discussion of 21^st century skills in education in a comparative perspective. It presents investigation on how eight very different countries (China, Canada, England, Finland, Poland, South Korea, the USA and Russia) have attempted to integrate key competences and new literacies into their curricula and balance them with the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge. Bringing together psychological, sociological, pedagogical approaches, the book also explores theoretical underpinnings of 21^st century skills and offers a scalable solution to align multiple competency and literacy frameworks.

The book provides a conceptual framework for curriculum reform and transformation of school practice designed to ensure that every school graduate thrives in our technologically and culturally changing world. By providing eight empirical portraits of competence-driven curriculum reform, this book is greatresource to educational researchers and policy makers.

This manual is an instructional guide to provide healthcare educators with best practices for acknowledging and addressing racial and ethnic health disparities (REHD) in medical education. As a collaborative effort written by both medical students and educators, this manual examines the impact of race, racism, and ethnic biases on medical care and health outcomes. 

This book enables readers to understand and apply key terms encompassing health disparities, bias, and cultural humility as an approach to demystify stereotypes, social assumptions and long-held misperceptions that influence the misuse of race in medical teachings. By examining the construct of race, differences between race-based and race-conscious medicine are distinguished. As such, medical educators will be guided to consider the effects of socioeconomic differences, environmental factors, and institutional racism between population categories with regard to healthcare compliance and outcomes.

Supported by evidence-based recommendations, this manual provides medical educators, curriculum managers, and institutions with strategies and checklists to improve their medical curricula to ensure a well-defined understanding of race and ethnicity in medicine. This book serves as a resource for medical educators and students as they aspire to become more culturally competent, equity-minded, and inclusive healthcare professionals. 

This book investigates current debates shaping Higher Education development as a subsystem and higher education (HE) as a field of study in Africa. It applies meta-analysis, literature review methodologies and the lens of decolonization theories to examine both studies and key reforms characterizing the continent. The book unpacks how these remarkable and unintended transformations of universities that shape Africa can be comprehended by researching national, regional, and continental arrangements of universities and systems in order to see how all these categories either dialogue or intersect.

As they have done historically, innovative institutions enrich the college ecosystem, helping the higher educational industry develop flexible resilience. The chapters in this book showcase perspectives, hard-won lessons, challenges and provocative ideas about how historically innovative institutions can contribute to the current discourse on innovation in higher education. The chapters in this book include case studies of innovative campuses and practices, as well as future-looking directions for innovation. Taken together, they ask, is there a way to consider how future trends can be navigated in effective ways, so that the most important features of higher education––student learning, the liberal arts, the cultivation of critical thinking––can remain central to tomorrow’s institutions?

This book furthers the understanding and conceptualization of the notion of inclusion in education, and explores the challenges experienced during the operationalization and implementation of the process. It extends debates spawned by international and national policy mandates that sought to transcend exclusionary educational practices in order to realize inclusive societies and, by implication, inclusive classrooms.

It offers a comprehensive conceptual framework for inclusive education in the Southern African context while drawing parallels from the regional and international experience. This book can be used as a reference or critical reading for scholars and researchers in the field of inclusive education. It will empower practitioners, administrators, teachers and school leaders, curriculum developers and planners, as well as policy makers with knowledge about theory and practice regarding inclusive education in the Southern African schooling system.

This timely volume explores the current and future state of hybrid and remote work in higher education from national, regional, and global perspectives. Today, colleges and universities worldwide must ensure that they have adequate information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, equipment, and systems to adapt to the “new normal” post-COVID-19. Hybrid and remote work can be a source of boosting productivity and advancing institutional change in higher education. Common within the management and leadership literature, hybrid and remote work is an understudied phenomenon in higher education administration. This book investigates the rapid rise of remote and hybrid work during and after the global pandemic and what it means for the future of higher education in the United States and abroad. By developing a comprehensive, research-based knowledge and framework this book seeks to equip and empower teacher-scholars and practitioners to operate safely, securely, and efficiently in a remote or hybrid environment.

This book traces the full history of the Higher Education Act of 1965 in its entirety, to the present. The fifty-six-year history of this landmark legislation is analyzed as a genealogical phenomenon through multiple methodological and theoretical frameworks. This allows the researcher to study the Act not in a linear or single approach, rather the blend of lenses and methods creates a means to study policy-making as a site of ideological reproduction and results in the exposure of power dynamics that obfuscate the hidden agenda by those in positions of power. 

This book presents a unique framework for the inclusion of ecomedia in the English language classroom to help learners cultivate global citizenship. Foregrounding learner agency in a world at risk, the author proposes a framework that hinges on human rights and critical eco-cosmopolitanism to help learners position themselves in discourses on climate change and act for transformation. The book discusses eco-documentaries as multimodal, factional texts against the background of cutting-edge research, refuting a definition based on the binary of fiction and non-fiction. Translating the insights gained from this discussion to the language education context, learners are conceptualised as active designers of meaning making when engaged with eco-documentaries. Based on this discussion, the book puts forth an innovative, multiliteracies-informed concept which is embedded in a sustainability-oriented pedagogy of hope, which encourages learners to learn and practice languages of hope and advocacy. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of ecopedagogy, sustainability education, global citizenship education and cultural learning, film pedagogy and language education, as well as language educators.

This is an open access book.

This book spotlights new pathways for academic career progression beyond the traditional teaching-and-research model.  It sets out key parameters for constructive conversations about alignment to these new pathways, which are examined from the point of view of individuals at different stages in their careers, as well as at an institutional level.  The authors offer guidance on how to implement new pathways and how to realign professional development for academics so that the new pathways fully achieve their purpose to support universities’ contribution to society.  The volume will appeal to academics in higher education, as well as those involved in the redesign and implementation of academic career frameworks from a variety of positions in a university.

Public Education in Turbulent Times communicates a bold vision for the future of education, addressing the evolving purpose of American public education and the structural innovations schools are using to meet the needs of a rapidly transforming world. Highlighting key challenges that emerged during the immense economic and social disruptions of recent years, the book leverages case studies of four unique school districts where school communities overcame concerns high in the public consciousness – trauma, danger, economic inequality, and racial injustice. These obstacles have hampered efforts to reclaim lost learning opportunities that could define the educational experiences of a generation of students. If educators revert to business as usual, they risk dismissing essential lessons from resilient schools that thrived in the chaos of a global pandemic and its fallout. This book provides rich insights to refocus readers’ attention on achieving a more equitable and safe education system for the future.

This book chronicles the school envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933 to serve Arthurdale, the New Deal government-created community in north-central West Virginia. Arthurdale was founded to house unemployed miners and their families and provide them with opportunities to receive healthcare and obtain gainful employment. Roosevelt had a particular interest in the education of children, feeling that education and social life were profoundly intertwined within a community. With that in mind, in 1934, she hired Elsie Ripley Clapp—an educator and leader in the Progressive Education movement—to design and implement the school, as well as oversee the social life of Arthurdale as a whole. In addition to covering the Arthurdale School's birth, life, and dissolution, Rosenberg discusses how the lessons of the school might serve the culture of education today, especially as an element of a comprehensive approach to community revitalization.

This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This book argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented.

The volume provides grounded and contemporary insight into multilingual education from diverse perspectives – stemming from the authors' epistemic, cultural and geographic positioning around the world in different educational milieu – and will give both academic and practitioner audiences an up-to-date picture of multilingual education in the early 2020s. Multilingual education policies are continually implemented, re-evaluated and debated around the world, from primary to tertiary education. Fundamentally, however, educational policies manifest in classroom practice; the language envisaged in policy becomes the languaging of practice as teachers, learners and stakeholders negotiate educational curricula together. Internal and external forces – from resourcing to the Internet, to broader events such as pandemics and changes in government – shape the landscapes in which policies are enacted. The volume is extending the themes of the Multilingual Education Yearbook series in line with current developments in theory, research and practice. As such, this book provides a wealth of information to practitioners (teachers and teacher educators), researchers in applied linguistics and language education, postgraduate students in the field of applied linguistics, and policymakers.

The book presents a conceptual framework for understanding leadership for effective educator learning in early childhood settings. The book describes how leaders can move centre practices from crisis to stabilization. It argues that a core component of leaders' work in early childhood settings is to construct and enact epistemological accounts of practice change. The book includes case examples that bring to life the contexts early childhood services and services leaders who participated in the research. The book also describes the application of cultural-historical activity theory to the development of practice in early childhood education. It describes how background theory, literature, and data can be synthesized to create new focal theory in education. 

Readers will benefit from the theory that is presented, establishing a sound basis for testing in future research in schools as well as in early childhood education.

“Joce Nuttall and team are congratulated for their ground-breaking scholarly endeavour in designing, implementing, validating findings, and then writing a book that unambiguously connects theory-policy-practice in enacting leadership in early childhood settings. This book is ambitious, eloquent, and inspirational.  The research was driven by a bold vision to build a new theorisation of early childhood leadership. The writing style of the book makes the complex clear and easy to digest, and thereby strengthening its readability and understanding.  The comparative lens adopted in the study, underscores the neoliberal control of the working lives of early childhood leaders in both Australia and England. The use of case study narratives to explain various aspects including the study design and methodology, was refreshingly engaging. Notes of encouragement addressed to novice researchers such as those embarking on higher degree studies, also provide apt guidance about the messiness of conducting qualitative research. The book is infused with lots of examples demonstrating the transformative power of learning – especially when expertly scaffolded by the research team, and thereby increasing practitioner agency and quality improvement across the early childhood setting. If professional autonomy is the driver of reform and change, then we must find ways to nurture strong educational leaders who can think outside the box. Overall, Nuttall and team succeed in arousing learning-rich possibilities for reimagining early childhood leadership in theory and in practice, and thereby making a magnificent contribution to the scholarship of educational leadership.” Professor Manjula Waniganayake  PhD, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This book explores the formation and development of the cross-national patterns of adult learning systems between 1989 and 2019 in four Central European countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. Drawing on the approach of the political economy of adult education and historical institutionalism, the book closely examines (1) how the institutional settings in these countries have formed, evolved and contributed to overall participation in adult education and training, (2) how they have shaped patterns of participation and unequal chances to be involved in this social activity, as well as (3) perceived barriers to access organized learning and related governmental policies.

This book offers a contemporary overview of key findings regarding adult learning systems. It delves into the factors that influence participation in adult education and training. Through the utilization of the novel framework, GALS (Global Adult Learning Space), the book not only highlights a crucial distinction among adult learning systems within the region but also presents in-depth case studies of these systems in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia spanning a 30-year period. Despite these countries sharing similar institutional backgrounds and societal challenges, the book reveals that their adult learning systems have undergone divergent trajectories over the past three decades. This book will be useful to researchers and scholars in the fields of adult education, comparative education, welfare policy, sociology of education, and European studies.

This book provides an analysis of how inspection teams evaluate schools – especially how they decide on assigning scores. It shows how the governance of schools through evaluation is enacted pragmatically. With its focus on the practice of evaluation by a group of external experts, it contributes to the expanding interdisciplinary field devoted to studying phenomena of the ‘evaluation society’ spanning from assessment research to programme evaluation, from the psychology of decision-making to the sociology of valuation and evaluation.

Additionally, it argues that official inspection systems frame the inspection process, but cannot fully determine scoring practice. The implementation of official scoring guidelines is characterized by irreducible uncertainty requiring professional discretion for its resolution. Inspection teams thus must employ a flexible and pragmatic approach to finalize their scoring task. By drawing on empirical data from six observed inspection teams from two German states, it provides profound insights into how real evaluation decisions were made. This book is valuable to anyone seeking to understand evaluation in education – in particular scholars, policy-makers and educators in the field of school evaluation and accountability.

This edited book captures Asian American grassroot organizing in Georgia through counterstorytelling. Rooted in Critical Race Theory and traditions of narrative inquiry, counterstorytelling in educational research seeks to challenge dominant narratives by centering marginalized communities’ experiences and perspectives as sources of valuable knowledge. By employing AsianCrit, global citizenship education, human rights, and liberatory postcolonial education as theoretical lenses, the editors of this book interrupt essentialized portrayals of Asian Americans by featuring stories of Asian American students, parents, and educators who are fighting for Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies in K-12 schools in Georgia. Their stories capture common as well as divergent experiences of being Asian American in the South and illuminate possibilities, challenges, and complexity of grassroots organizing for Asian American studies and ethnic studies in the South.

This book covers the construction of international education research community in the 1950s-1990s, and the growth of its ‘disembedded’ laboratory i.e. networks, spaces, materiality, travelling, translations. The book follows a sociology of science theoretical framework in order to examine the research-archive of the Swedish internationally renowned educational scholar Torsten Husén (1916-2009). The archive reveals the shifting and heterogenous transnational networks that contribute to the development of social science research beyond fixed time and space dimensions, and that extends social science beyond individual ideas, researchers, environments, institutions and universities. These are practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in innovations, knowledge creation and various social activities. In other words, the archive represents the socio-material manifestation not only of the intellectual trajectory of a key education actor but the growing organisation of a whole scientific field at the time. 

This book explores the distinctive narrative and representational gestures used to portray the personal and professional lives of teachers in comics. While serving as a reference for conceptualizing teachers in literary and popular culture, this book also turns to comics as a means to better understand and interpret lived, emotional experiences of teaching. Lewkowich discusses the cultural history of teachers in North American comics, and provides a series of thematic studies on the split and secret identities of teachers, teacher’s deaths by murder, and the teacher’s relationship to the thought bubble. He also outlines the psychic and social consequences of reading and making comics with preservice teachers.

This edited book analyses the implementation of green transformation policies and the UN Sustainable Development Goals across the European Union, in the context of lifelong learning and educational practices. The contributions examine how green skills became mainstreamed in member states’ education policies, as well as the social, economic and political circumstances contributing to this process. A focus on lifelong learning (from an early age to adulthood) is maintained throughout the volume, and the book will appeal to researchers, students, policy- and decision-makers in education, environmental and social studies.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive examination of the intersection between internationalization of higher education and digital transformation, with a focus on insights from Morocco. Through a series of chapters authored by experts in the field, the book covers a wide range of topics, including critical thinking in intercultural education, the transformative impact of internationalization on educators and students, technological integration, challenges, opportunities, policy perspectives, and future directions.

The scientific, cultural and diplomatic relations between Europe and its partners in North America are very strong. From a scientific point of view, this long-standing cooperation has taken place across a wide range of areas. They include the field of sustainability, where North America and Europe are working hand in hand, seeking solutions to the many regional and global problems currently faced. Against this backdrop and in order to facilitate a broad discussion on the contribution of higher education institutions from both sides of the Atlantic towards a more sustainable future, this book is being produced.

The book gathers inputs from universities and research organizations on the one hand, but also from companies and enterprises on the other, from Europe and North America, working on matters related to sustainable development in a higher education context. It also provides a platform for the dissemination of information on the latest initiatives, paving the way for technology transfer and networking. Furthermore, the book intends to provide a fertile basis upon which European and North American organizations may cooperate more closely in this key area. Last but not least, a further aim of the book is to present methodological approaches and experiences deriving from case studies and projects, which aim to show how sustainability in North America and in Europe may be enhanced in practice.

This book analyses major discourses of human rights for democracy and social justice. The chapters contained in the book examine critically major issues confronting human rights for democracy and social justice both locally and globally. The chapters analyze the challenges that different societies are confronted with, as they attempt to implement, protect and defend democracy, cultural diversity and human rights in an ever-changing world, and culturally diverse environment. Topics covered include dimensional concerns for social justice and human rights and what to do about them, human rights for democracy and social justice, and celebrating cultural diversity in sport.

The book will help readers to explore their own views and consider more broadly what may be in the best interests of a fair and just society, as envisioned in human rights treaties, human rights education in schools, and cultural diversity.

This book showcases current science education research in Canada, from Grade 8 to university. It provides a rich portrait of science teaching and learning at the secondary and tertiary levels across content areas and research methodologies. Research contexts include chemistry, oceanography, physics, and STEM; research approaches include action research, case study, mixed methods, and document analysis. Chapters build upon themes that emerged from our previous Springer book Science Education in Canada (2019) including environmental education (e.g., ocean literacy, place-conscious pedagogy), Indigenous perspectives (e.g., water stewardship), and assessment (e.g., formative assessment practices), and represent a cross section of the current mosaic of science education research in Canada in high school settings (and beyond). This book, when taken in conjunction with its companion volume Exploring Elementary Science Teaching and Learning in Canada (2023), enables readers to develop an in-depth understanding of current science education research across the country. Although this book reflects a Canadian perspective, its themes are of interest to both domestic and international audiences.

This book comprehensively explores the educational experiences of refugee students in primary schools, specifically addressing literacy, mathematics, and science skills through innovative teaching methods, including artificial intelligence, coding, and drama-based etc. approaches. Embracing a skill-based learning, the book is enriched with practical applications designed to enhance essential skills among refugee learners effectively. Drawing upon the extensive expertise of contributing authors, each chapter provides in-depth analyses of various dimensions of refugee education, offering valuable insights into targeted pedagogical strategies. Chapters conclude with illustrative activities specifically designed for refugee students, accompanied by detailed evaluations of their outcomes. These activities are not merely theoretical; they are purposefully structured to ensure applicability and adaptability within diverse global educational contexts. This book serves as an essential resource for teacher candidates, educators, researchers, and academics specializing in refugee education and general pedagogy, combining rigorous theoretical perspectives with actionable, real-world strategies.

This first volume presents narratives from science education researchers of African ancestry, reflecting on the significance of a professional home. Through personal and scholarly perspectives, Black researchers share experiences of seeking, establishing, or finding belonging in science education across diverse settings. Authors from various institutions offer insights into traditionally White universities and a distinct home in Africa. By showcasing counter-narratives and strategies, this book supports the next generation of science education researchers and teacher educators. Drawing from interdisciplinary traditions—historical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological—it provides a nuanced understanding of research, identity, and community within the field.

This open access book addresses relevant issues related to higher education and sustainable development goals (SDGs). The book has a high degree of originality and brings innovation to the contemporary solution for 21st century higher education, innovative contextualisation and conceptualisation of ICT-enabled critical thinking. It facilitates the achievement of the UN-defined SDGs and introduces a framework for SDG development that addresses both the national and international needs of current and future higher education. 

Addressing all 17 SDGs from different perspectives, the book provides a systemic view that enables students to increase their ability for transformative learning by developing a deeper self-awareness and a more open perspective, which may lead to a profound change in their worldview. Transformative learning combined with systems thinking are key to successfully educating future generations in innovation, resilience, leadership and sustainability. The activities proposed in the book embrace and strengthen active (non-traditional) pedagogy.

This volume reviews the theory and research on teacher agency to critique and substantiate the common claims in literature that teachers can and do act as change agents. Focusing on the interplay between teacher agency and its structural conditions, the book considers wider social and institutional contexts that shape educators’ practice. Its chapters consider the developmental aspects of teacher agency such as a sense of purpose and competence in inclusive practice, and their embeddedness in the policy and social contexts that create conditions for agency and reflection. Current research evidence is synthesized to highlight the critical factors such as relationships and community-building, as well as practical applications that support educators in cultivating these capacities. In doing so, the volume both affirms and scrutinizes prevailing assumptions about teacher agency. It offers empirically grounded insights, tools, and resources relevant to researchers, teacher educators, practitioners, and policy makers committed to empowering teachers as transformative professionals.

This book explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping higher education through practical, real-world strategies and grounded research. It begins with accessible introductions to key concepts—such as generative AI, machine learning, and natural language processing—before progressing to theoretical frameworks and empirical studies of how students, faculty, and institutions are responding to these technologies. Topics include ethics, AI literacy, digital equity, technology integration in teaching and learning, and student-led efforts like the AI Café. Drawing from participatory research, institutional case studies, and global AI policy analysis, the book provides actionable insights for faculty, instructional designers, academic leaders, and researchers. Emphasizing inclusive and culturally responsive approaches, this book is an essential resource for advancing faculty development, enhancing student engagement, and navigating the evolving role of AI in academic life.

This book addresses issues related to ethics and the scholarship of teaching and learning, and pays special attention to ethical concerns and experiences that have arisen from engaging in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) work. The book draws on a range of research projects, theoretical frameworks and narrative experiences to provide multiple perspectives of how meaning is made of research ethics in SoTL, academic community and REB partnerships, experiences of Students as Partners in SoTL, and ethically-minded approaches to teaching, learning and inquiry. Specifically, this edited book includes ethical practices that have become increasingly expansive in an ever-evolving academic environment such as navigating pandemic pedagogy and data ownership due to increased online content. In addition, contributions pertaining to academic community partnerships between REBs and faculty detail realistic narratives and lessons learned about how higher education can become more equitable, diverse and inclusive. Subsequently, decolonial ethics for teaching and learning in higher education, as well as participatory parity, exemplify the need for SoTL practitioners to be responsive to the social and cultural realities of a global context in ways that address social inequities and social responsibility. Relational ethics by way of student perspectives on vulnerability and classroom-based SoTL research underscore the need for students to be taught about their own agency as a means of providing student voice within SoTL work. Lastly, this book celebrates how ethically-minded approaches to teaching, learning and inquiry uncover strategies and pedagogy that encourage concepts such as ethical imagination and systems and design thinking practices.

This volume problematizes the intentions of early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) from two new perspectives – the context of small island states and the bi-directional, intergenerational learning about the environment and sustainability that takes place in a variety of contexts, including the family home and school. It questions how belonging to a small island and the children’s home influence learning in the early years of life. In doing so, this book offers new insights and new theoretical perspectives into intergenerational environmental learning in the school, family and beyond. Informed by consideration of the most recent literature in early childhood education and sustainability, this volume also looks at how these informal learning spaces provide young children with the opportunities to enhance further learning in the field, thus portraying the fluidity of intergenerational learning from different theoretical standpoints. 

It provides a deep insight into ECEfS and intergenerational learning about the environment and environmental issues in early childhood education from a perspective of a small island state by adopting a children’s rights perspective. It additionally explores the relationship between early childhood theories, children’s rights and postcolonial theory.

This edited volume brings together innovative research in the field of Science Education, fostering scientific citizenship in an uncertain world. The nineteen chapters presented in this book address diverse topics, and research approaches carried out in various contexts and settings worldwide, contributing to improving and updating knowledge on science education. The book consists of selected high-quality studies presented at the 14^th European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) Conference, held online (due to the Covid-19 pandemic) by the University of Minho, Portugal, between August 30th and September 3^rd, 2021. Being of great relevance in contemporary science education, this book stimulates reflection on different approaches to enhance a deeper understanding of how better prepare the coming generations, which is of great interest to science education researchers and science teachers.

This book showcases the quality work that Latin American researchers have done on transition to school in Latin American countries by offering the English-speaking world, first-hand access to some Latin American transitions research, practices, and policies. This book shows the work carried out in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico with regards to the way in which the transition to primary school is experienced from different stakeholders' perspectives, and how Latin American educational policies and cultural practices shape such an important process for stakeholders. This book was importantly framed by the COVID-19 pandemic which placed the world in a global health emergency, and it is our hope that this book will trigger future international collaborations between researchers, policy makers, and practitioners interested in transitions which could help produce a wealth of empirical evidence to inform educational policies and transitions practices across the world. Building networks where diverse experiences are valued and respected, as well as analysed, can help provide a platform that supports educators and researchers as they continue their work and branch out in new and challenging directions.

This open access book provides a critical, thought-provoking, and stimulating overview of theories applied worldwide to conceptualise collaborations between early childhood education and children's families. The book starts with a critical reflection on the colonial undertones of parental involvement (PI) and acknowledges a strong political will to improve this aspect of early childhood education and care. The chapters in the book describe and discuss various theories, including the cultural historical wholeness approach, Bronfenbrenner's ecology of human development, the theory of social capital, the theory of collaboration, family-school partnership models proposed by Epstein and Hornby, Bourdieu's social theory, the theory of practice architectures, the discourse/narrative theory, and posthumanism. By proposing the concept of more-than-parents, the authors aim to embrace both the diversity of intergenerational family configurations and the agency of materiality, artifacts, and the involvement of more-than-human actors.

This volume provides both practicing and aspiring Language Program Administrators with knowledge about the research and theory that underpin key topics in educational leadership, as well as practical guidance for the day-to-day management of language programs, including budgets, personnel, decision making, strategic planning, advocacy, and digital technologies. The volume brings together 46 authors and contributors with a vast array of experiences as administrators of English language teaching programs all over the world—in Asia; Australia; Europe; the Middle East; New Zealand; North, Central, and South America; South Africa; Turkey; and the United Kingdom.

This volume provides an overview of the state of the art of research on the politics of higher education policy in Canada, the US, and Western Europe. Each thematic chapter combines an extensive literature review with original empirical work that further advances our understanding of policymaking dynamics in higher education.

The book covers five key aspects of policymaking, namely the politics of governance as well as funding reforms, the role of interest groups, policy diffusion, and policy framing. These aspects are explored using a unique comparative design that combines comparisons within as well as between regions, and among the five key aspects of policymaking. The conceptual framework is anchored in approaches from institutional theory, namely sociological and historical institutionalism.

“This rare book coherently focuses on the same critical challenges that higher education faces in a changing global and national environment. These include vital governance and finance issues and how these are framed and contested by different organizations and interest groups as well as state actors. Within a broad institutionalist framework that reflects the tensions between historical university and national legacies on the one hand and regional and global influences on the other, the authors focus on policymaking in Western Europe, Canada, and the US. This is an engaging and creative endeavor, a must-read for scholars and policymakers alike.”

Francisco O. Ramirez, Graduate School of Education Stanford University

“This is a real achievement that will contribute to the development of research in politics of higher education policy, finance, and economic development. It is timely in an era when higher learning is increasingly salient to national policy, interest groups, and supranational bodies such as the EU. The focus on Canada, the US, and Europe frames a comparative approach to a competitive higher educational policy arena thathas not received systematic study."

Sheila Slaughter, Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia

Marius R. Busemeyer, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz

The perception of a permanent enrollment crisis in US postsecondary foreign language education has shaped our profession’s image for an entire generation of educators. Over the past 30 years, this crisis rarely invited self-examination or inspired creativity. Instead, it was routinely attributed to external factors: shrinking budgets, unsympathetic administrators, disengaged students. This volume is refreshingly optimistic: After providing a nuanced picture of the complex enrollment situation and focusing on perceptions of language education among undergraduate students, the volume features an inspiring panorama of successful models that revitalized language programs at a wide range of institutions. The diversity of approaches to post-secondary language education in the United States featured in this volume highlights that there are no simple “one size fits all” solutions. To be transformational, initiatives need to be intimately calibrated to the evolving needs and desires of our institutions’ most important stakeholder: the student. Per Urlaub, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA