High Skills : Globalization, Competitiveness, and Skill Formation


Book Description

Economic globalization has led to intense debates about the competitiveness of nations. Prosperity, social justice, and welfare are now seen to depend on the creation of a 'high skilled' workforce. This international consensus around high skills has led recent American presidents to claim themselves 'education presidents' and in Britain, Tony Blair has announced that 'talent is 21st-century wealth'. This view of knowledge-driven capitalism has led all the developed economies to increase numbers of highly-trained people in preparation for technical, professional, and managerial employment. But it also harbours the view that what we regard as a 'skilled' worker is being transformed. The pace of technological innovation, corporate restructuring, and the changing nature of work require a new configuration of skills described in the language of creativity, teamwork, employability, self-management, and lifelong learning. But is this optimistic account of a future of high-skilled work for all justified? This book draws on the findings of a major international comparative study of national routes to a 'high skills' economy in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States, and includes data from interviews with over 250 key stakeholders. It is the first book to offer a comparative examination of 'high skill' policies -- a topic of major public debate that is destined to become of even greater importance in all the developed economies in the early decades of the twenty-first century.




Byzantium After Byzantium


Book Description

Originally published in French in 1935, the author's formula Byzantium after Byzantium defines several centuries of world history. Iorga points out the great contributions of Byzantine civilization to the Western world, especially during the Renaissance. He demonstrates that Byzantium survived through its people and local autonomies, as well as through its exiles--clerics, scholars, merchants, and political officials. One of the most important expressions of this was found in the Romanian principalities where Greeks from the Phanar district of Istanbul played a major role in Romanian political life, defining an entire period of Romanian history--the Phanariot Period. They continued the Byzantine ideas, aspirations, education, and way of life. All of this allows us to speak of a Byzantium after Byzantium.




Networking of Theories as a Research Practice in Mathematics Education


Book Description

How can we deal with the diversity of theories in mathematics education? This was the main question that led the authors of this book to found the Networking Theories Group. Starting from the shared assumption that the existence of different theories is a resource for mathematics education research, the authors have explored the possibilities of interactions between theories, such as contrasting, coordinating, and locally integrating them. The book explains and illustrates what it means to network theories; it presents networking as a challenging but fruitful research practice and shows how the Group dealt with this challenge considering five theoretical approaches, namely the approach of Action, Production, and Communication (APC), the Theory of Didactical Situations (TDS), the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD), the approach of Abstraction in Context (AiC), and the Theory of Interest-Dense Situations (IDS). A synthetic presentation of each theory and their connections shows how the activity of networking generates questions at the theoretical, methodological and practical levels and how the work on these questions leads to both theoretical and practical progress. The core of the book consists of four new networking case studies which illustrate what exactly can be gained by this approach and what kind of difficulties might arise.




Compendium for Research in Mathematics Education


Book Description

This volume, a comprehensive survey and critical analysis of today's issues in mathematics education, distills research to build knowledge and capacity in the field. The compendium is a valuable new resource that provides the most comprehensive evidence about what is known about research in mathematics education. The 38 chapters present five sections that address research about (1) foundations, (2) methods, (3) mathematical processes and content, (4) students, teachers, and learning environments, and (5) futuristic issues. Each chapter offers a synthesis of research with an eye to the historical development of a research topic and, in particular, historical milestones of the research about the topic.




How Language Began


Book Description

Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech are processed in the same areas of the human brain, and the study of how both have evolved is central to research on the origins of human communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book to explain how speech and gesture evolved together into a system that all humans possess. Nearly all theorizing about the origins of language either ignores gesture, views it as an add-on or supposes that language began in gesture and was later replaced by speech. David McNeill challenges the popular 'gesture-first' theory that language first emerged in a gesture-only form and proposes a groundbreaking theory of the evolution of language which explains how speech and gesture became unified.




When Men Revolt and Why


Book Description

The environment within which humans interact has changed dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. However, their expectations stem from the same hopes and dreams people have had from the beginning of humankind. When Men Revolt and Why encourages readers to look closer and more deeply into the relationships between humans and the institutions that have originated to help them realize their full potential. The contributors not only examine people, but also the need to change institutions that have outworn their usefulness. When institutions inhibit rather than facilitate everyone's desire to live a full life, the result is likely to be violence. This book offers the ideas of many people who have tried to dig deeper into basic causes of violence. Included in this volume are selections by Aristotle, Tocqueville./Marx and Engels, and Brinton. The ideas they espoused still hold vitality. In his new introduction, James Davies talks about the circumstances under which this book was originally published. In Vietnam, a people were fighting for their autonomy. In the United States, many Americans were protesting against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Blacks were marching for their civil rights. Women were fighting for equality. Time has tempered these conflicts. Davies maintains that we remain ignorant of the elemental forces that impel people and nations to resort to violence. We are usually surprised by their anger and shocked by their violence. Davies asserts that we need to learn more about how humans respond to change so as to prepare ourselves for such responses to change. When Men Revolt and Why is as timely as ever as we deal with uncertainty in various areas of the world— the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Ireland, among others. It is especially pertinent for political scientists, historians, and sociologists.




Emerging Perspectives on Gesture and Embodiment in Mathematics


Book Description

The purpose of the book is to establish a common language for, and understanding of, embodiment as it applies to mathematical thinking, and to link mathematics education research to recent work in gesture studies, cognitive linguistics and the theory of embodied cognition. Just as in past decades, mathematics education experienced a "turn to the social" in which socio-cultural factors were explored, in recent years there has been a nascent "turn to the body." An increasing number of researchers and theorists in mathematics education have become interested in the fact that, although mathematics may be socially constructed, this construction is not arbitrary or unconstrained, but rather is rooted in, and shaped by, the body. All those who engage with mathematics, whether at an elementary or advanced level, share the same basic biological and cognitive capabilities, as well as certain common physical experiences that come with being humans living in a material world. In addition, the doing and communicating of mathematics is never a purely intellectual activity: it involves a wide range of bodily actions, from committing inscriptions to paper or whiteboard, to speaking, listening, gesturing and gazing. This volume will present recent research on gesture and mathematics, within a framework that addresses several levels of mathematical development. The chapters will begin with contributions that examine early mathematical and proto-mathematical knowledge, for example, the conservation of volume and counting. The role of gesture in teaching and learning arithmetic procedures will be addressed. Core concepts and tools from secondary level mathematics will be investigated, including algebra, functions and graphing. And finally, research into the embodied understanding of advanced topics in geometry and calculus will be presented. The overall goal for the volume is to acknowledge the multimodal nature of mathematical knowing, and to contribute to the creation of a model of the interactions and mutual influences of bodily motion, spatial thinking, gesture, speech and external inscriptions on mathematical thinking, communication and learning. The intended audience is researchers and theorists in mathematics education as well as graduate students in the field.




A Cross-Polity Survey


Book Description

In this unique adaptation of the "cross-cultural" method to comparative politics, a computer is used to compare all of the 115 independent governments in the world. The result is a body of readable two-way cross-classifications from which the major patterns of political phenomena can be perceived at a glance.