Education (R0)

This open access book presents an account of five teacher educators who, over a two-year period, undertook a research project with five teachers of languages other than English in pre-secondary schools in New Zealand.  Their collaborative aim was to develop students’ intercultural capability in the context of learning a new language. The school participants were typical of many in New Zealand’s pre-secondary sector; the teachers had limited language-teaching experience and limited prior knowledge of how to develop the intercultural dimension in their language classrooms, and the students were largely at the beginning stages of learning a new language.

This book contributes to the understanding of regional and global perspectives on the development and challenges the higher education sector in sub-Saharan Africa faces in the era of globalization. It focuses on the critical aspects of the higher education sector in the Global South, with a particular emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. It brings together empirical, theoretical and philosophical perspectives from researchers in some of the leading universities in sub-Saharan Africa. The book highlights the higher education sector’s stages of growth and development and the contemporary challenges it faces in aligning its goals and capacity globally, and maintaining its image and public identity locally. This book covers neoliberal educational reforms, leadership and governance, pedagogy, technology, the global knowledge economy, and digital advancement. It delves into how the nature and practice of learning, teaching, research, and community engagement as core functions of higher education are re-oriented to contribute to societal transformation in Africa. Further, the book discusses the implications of contemporary issues in higher education: internationalization, employability, leadership and management, and accountability and autonomy in teaching, research, and community engagement.

This book aims to reflect the digital transformation of Chinese education toward smart education comprehensively and accurately. It is the first systematic summary of the progress of smart education in China. The book believes that smart education is a new education form in the digital era and is essentially distinct from education forms in the industrial era. This new education form is innovative in five dimensions.

First is the new core concept. Smart education is not only a concrete action concerning people’s well-being, but also a vital strategy concerning national plans. Through technology empowerment and data drive, it empowers educational reform in all aspects, systematically constructs a new relationship between education and society, provides suitable education for each learner, and makes the aptitude-based teaching that we have been dreaming of for thousands of years a reality. For the first time in history, smart education helps to reach the full alignment between individual development and societal development.

Second is the new system structure. Smart education will break through the boundaries of school education, drive the diversified combination of various education types, resources, and elements, promote the collaboration of school, family, and society in education, and build a high-quality, individualized lifelong learning system that is available for anyone anywhere anytime.

Third is the new teaching paradigm. Smart education will integrate physical, social, and digital spaces to create new learning scenarios and promote human–technology integration, and cultivate cross-grade, cross-class, and cross-discipline learning communities across time and space to organically combine large-scale education with individualized cultivation.

Fourth is the new educational content. Smart education will focus on developing all-round education, establishing digital knowledge graphs based on systematic logics of knowledge points, and innovating content presentation methods to make learning a wonderful experience and help learners develop higher-order thinking skills, comprehensive innovation capability, and lifelong learning ability.

Fifth is the new education governance. With data governance at the core and digital intelligence technology as the driver, smart education will boost the holistic reengineering of education administration and business processes and enhance the modernization of the education governance system and governance capacity.

This book is intended for teachers, education administrators, education policymakers, education researchers, and parents concerned about education innovation and development, as well as people from all walks of life who have aspirations for the education industry. It can also serve as a reference for international organizations and education research institutions of all countriesto promote the joint exploration of the development path of smart education and create a better future for the world’s mutual development through educational reform.

This open access book is dedicated to exploring methods and charting the course for enhancing engineering education in and beyond 2023. It delves into the idea that education, coupled with social connections, is indispensable for a more profound comprehension of the world and the creation of an improved quality of life.

The book serves as a conduit for incorporating complex problem-solving into engineering education across various formats. It offers a structured approach for tackling complex issues, comparing an array of techniques for managing complexity within the realm of engineering education.

Moreover, the book scrutinizes several complex case studies derived from the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, it explores intricate problem-solving and curriculum change case studies specific to engineering education from Harvard University, the University of Technology Sydney, and Aalborg University.

This book fully explores the question(s) of time in educational research and achieves the acceleration and merging of inquiry with action to understand change and implement these findings through practice. It deals with the philosophy of education, higher education, schooling (the curriculum), time displacement, technology, the environment and policy. This book focuses on time revolution(s). It explores new ways of thinking about time, that question a linear/arrow in time, and sets into motion an educational research agenda to extract revolutions of time. Furthermore, this book figures the dimension of time in teaching and learning by extending and deepening the engagement with time in education. For example, it analyzes the climate crisis in terms of education and how the realization that the climate is changing sits parallel and adjacent to pedagogy. The climate crisis and how to do anything about it through education is an example of how considering the dimension of time opens up education beyond quick or narrow fixes and introduces a profound synthesis for the future.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the development of smart education in China. It defines smart education as a higher level of digital education that can be divided into four stages, including resource sharing, data-driven, integration with AI, and ecology reshaping. It proposes five practical paths for the development of smart education in China, such as cultivating innovation literacy as its goal and data empowerment as its core, and it develops an evaluation framework consisting of four dimensions, including extensive connectivity, innovative application, mechanism guarantee, and literacy improvement. Finally, it also identifies five trends in the global development of digital education.

This book serves as a valuable resource for teachers, education administrators, education researchers, and other readers who are interested in educational innovation and development in China.

This book presents advances in the research of educational robotics and showcases how they can be used to facilitate learning. It summarizes popular and relevant terms and theories in educational robotics via analyzing one hundred influential journal articles in this field, to provide readers background knowledge on the subject matter. This book also guides readers in understanding how different types of robotics are utilized to promote learning among different types of students, in different contexts, and in different disciplines of study.

This open access book presents insights on the resiliency strategies of at-risk vocational education and training (VET) students in the field of learning, employment and social integration, in the Baltic countries and Norway. It investigates the ways in which vocational education and training (VET) can enhance the social inclusion of young people at-risk, both in terms of combating school dropout rates, and promoting transitions between various (social) learning contexts, such as school-work transition. Book presents the findings of the analysis of available statistical data disclosing the capacities and potential of the VET systems and providers to empower vulnerable learners in the project partner countries. In the context of VET, this book examines the situations of at-risk young people as they experience, and understand themselves, in it, and explores innovative solutions to address their challenges in collaboration between themselves, their teachers, and other community actors and stakeholders. Finally, it analyses and discusses the innovative pedagogical interventions used in empowering at-risk VET students as implemented in the research project 'EmpowerVET', on the basis of the Educational Learning Lab model developed by researchers from the University of Tallinn School of Educational Sciences.

The edited volume discusses the long period of post-colonial developments in higher education in India. It examines the legitimacy of the policies pursued post-pandemic with a focus on the role of teachers and the students' voices. It addresses the essential question of how the technological ascendance in higher education addresses social justice. What is the role of teachers in a new landscape of higher education? It offers insights into the efficiency-centric proposition of the state-market-technology triad, the current paradigm of higher education worldwide. It presents evidence to understand how efficiency has a tradeoff with various aspects of social justice. The authors deal with questions, such as the challenges of privatization and how the commodification of higher education runs counter to the idea of inclusive higher education. The authors critically look at the online form of higher education and how it has led to the shrinkage of democratic spaces in higher education. It discusses the transformative role of teachers with increasing managerialism of higher education. The book highlights a deep understanding of the increasing role of the market and technology and their influence in negating an inclusive and democratic public space in higher education. It appeals to teachers and students by enabling them to understand the market's and technology's impacts on higher education. It has the potential to be a reference book in colleges and universities. It will help the large community of practitioners and policymakers guard against the dangers of overt marketization. The book benefits policymakers, university administrators and teachers, and researchers of higher education interested in governance, technology, teaching, and research in higher education.

This book studies and resolves the challenge of bridging the gap between higher education and the labor market arising from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It unfolds and elucidates the understudied and previously unknown social nature of Industry 4.0, characterized by workers’ dashed expectations regarding automation. Consequently, the book proposes a scientific-practical approach to social adaptation to Industry 4.0 through higher education.

The novelty of this approach lies in the fact that, instead of passively waiting, workers engage in flexible adaptation to evolving labor market conditions, while universities demonstrate increased flexibility in managing and modernizing educational programs. The book presents a comprehensive set of prospective solutions to bridge the gap between higher education and the labor market, leveraging the unique technological possibilities of Industry 4.0.

This book explains the essence and technological opportunities for overcoming the gap between higher education and the labor market in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It also delves into and extensively discusses international experiences (including the Kyrgyz Republic, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Peru, the Republic of South Africa, Arabian Peninsula Countries, and Russia) and prospects for overcoming the gap between higher education and labor market in the conditions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with particular attention to Central Asian countries.

This book showcases the transformative impact of Aboriginal community-based educators teaching local histories and cultures to preservice teachers. It details the ‘Learning from Country in the City’ teaching and research project, which follows preservice teachers who participated in immersive ‘Learning from Country’ experiences in undergraduate Aboriginal education electives through to their first few years of teaching. Through storying Aboriginal community-based educator, preservice and early career teacher, and lecturer experiences, this book demonstrates the educational and emotional impact of Aboriginal truth telling processes and the significance of connecting with and learning from Country for all teachers and students.

A visual representation of the pedagogical framework articulates this work which is designed to capture localised place-based learning processes and apply these principles to diverse contexts. The book presents photographs and maps of the places at the centre of this learning so educators, community members and readers can visualise how they might apply this methodology to their context. Importantly, this book positions Indigenous Knowledges, Aboriginal voices and ways of knowing, being and doing front and centre - asserting that this is essential foundational work needed to prepare young people for living in an ever-changing world. 

This book is motivated by questions of how arts and cultural education—like all other fields—are affected by and—together with other fields—can contribute to glocal developments, challenges, and shifts. However difficult the times, arts, and culture in educational contexts have the ambition to make a positive contribution and foster creativity, empathy, and inclusion to encourage critical change, innovation, and peace. But if arts and cultural education remains traditional, unchallenged, and exclusive, those ambitions for critical change towards more inclusive practices that dare to act and make a change in the world, run the risk of remaining utopian rhetoric. It is time for a critical self-examination and willingness to change powers and privileges also within arts and cultural education.

Against this background, this book presents brave research on arts and cultural education that offers insight into the conditions, contexts, effects of, and critical changes needed within arts and cultural education. It addresses our time’s great changes, challenges, and possibilities for innovation.

This edited volume explores the changing dynamics of systemic and internal governance in higher education institutions in India. It discusses governance practices for institutions facing extreme challenges in meeting the growing accountability requirements. The book examines governance from a macro standpoint looking at the crisis of the universities and issues in reforming university governance. It uses a microlens to explore flexible learning pathways, academic freedom and institutional governance. It elaborates on topics such as institutional autonomy in higher education, accountability in higher education institutions, the influence of diversity in university functioning, equilibrium in governance, quality in the Indian agricultural university system, leadership in higher education and the effect of financing on institutional governance. By discussing experiences from various international contexts and empirical research, this edited volume brings together the recent policy discourses that greatly influence the higher education systems. This book is of interest to academics, researchers and practitioners working in the governance of higher education.

This book is the proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Smart Learning Environments (ICSLE 2024). It focuses on the interplay of pedagogy, technology, and the collaborative intelligence (human intelligence and artificial intelligence) towards the development of human-centered learning. This book covers various components of this interplay, including:

1) Next generation learning environments, such as AI powered learning environments, personalized learning environments, (multimodal) learning analytics, personalized and interoperable learning environment, and inclusive learning environments;

2) Human machine collaboration and synergy in education, namely the policies, applications, case studies and best practices of domain-specific/subject-specific smart learning, such as human-(ro) bot collaboration, human-AI collaboration, Avatars, digital twins and metaverse;

3) Pedagogy, learning approaches and instructional design, including collaborative intelligence (human intelligence and artificial intelligence), collaborative and group learning, and game-based learning and gamification;

4) Digital transformation for catalyzing online, and immersive and open learning spaces, including e-learning, blended/hybrid learning, and MOOCs;

5) Digital, machine and AI ethics in education, including ethical frameworks and policies in education, (Generative) AI ethics, teaching ethics, and responsible and human-centered AI in education.

This book serves as a useful reference for stakeholders in the field of education who are interested in the interplay of pedagogy, technology, and the collaborative intelligence towards the development of human-centered learning, such as researchers, postgraduate students, undergraduate students, as well as policymakers.