The Challenges of Education in Central Asia


Book Description

A look at the challenges facing education in Central Asia. In this study, the author contests that understanding the challenges throughout the 15 former republics of the former Soviet Union is helpful in understanding the progress and setback in the Central Asian Republics.




Economic Challenges in Higher Education


Book Description

The last two decades have been a turbulent period for American higher education, with profound demographic shifts, gyrating salaries, and marked changes in the economy. While enrollments rose about 50% in that period, sharp increases in tuition and fees at colleges and universities provoke accusations of inefficiency, even outright institutional greed and irresponsibility. As the 1990s progress, surpluses in the academic labor supply may give way to shortages in many fields, but will there be enough new Ph.D.'s to go around? Drawing on the authors' experience as economists and educators, this book offers an accessible analysis of three crucial economic issues: the growth and composition of undergraduate enrollments, the supply of faculty in the academic labor market, and the cost of operating colleges and universities. The study provides valuable insights for administrators and scholars of education.




Vocational Education and Training in Times of Economic Crisis


Book Description

This book brings together a broad range of approaches and methodologies relevant to international comparative vocational education and training (VET). Revealing how youth in transition is affected by economic crises, it provides essential insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the various systems and prospects of VET in contexts ranging from North America to Europe, (e.g. Spain, Germany or the UK) to Asia (such as China, Thailand and India). Though each country examined in this volume is affected by the economic crisis in a different way, the effects are especially apparent for the young generation. In many countries the youth unemployment rate is still very high and the job perspectives for young people are often limited at best. The contributions in this volume demonstrate that VET alone cannot solve these problems, but can be used to support a smooth transition from school to work. If the quality of VET is high and the status and job expectations are good, VET can help to fill the skills gap, especially at the intermediate skill level. Furthermore, VET can also offer a realistic alternative to the university track for young people in many countries.




Contemporary Challenges in Teaching Young Children


Book Description

Contemporary Challenges in Teaching Young Children provides both veteran and aspiring early childhood educators with the information and tools they need to build on their understanding of developmentally appropriate practice. Teachers face many challenges, including family configuration, social and political stressors related to accountability requirements, funding shortages, and the resulting need to teach with fewer resources. This innovative book focuses exclusively on problem-solving at the classroom level and fosters creative methods of ensuring best practices are in place for all children, including those with limited experience in formal social settings and a lack of self-regulatory behaviors. Drawing on current research and their own wealth of experience, expert contributors cover topics from the critical importance of social-emotional learning to culturally responsive teaching to using technology to empower teachers and learners. Written in accessible, non-technical language, this book addresses complex factors affecting child development, guiding readers through the best strategies for tackling real problems in their practice.




Lawn Boy


Book Description

Winner of the Alex Award “Mike Muñoz Is a Holden Caulfield for a New Millennium--a '10th-generation peasant with a Mexican last name, raised by a single mom on an Indian reservation' . . . Evison, as in his previous four novels, has a light touch and humorously guides the reader, this time through the minefield that is working-class America.” --The New York Times Book Review For Mike Muñoz, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew--he’s smart enough to know that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how? He’s not qualified for much of anything. He has no particular talents, although he is stellar at handling a lawn mower and wielding clipping shears. But now that career seems to be behind him. So what’s next for Mike Muñoz? In this funny, biting, touching, and ultimately inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man determined to achieve the American dream of happiness and prosperity--who just so happens to find himself along the way.




Challenges for Public Education


Book Description

An accelerating pattern in Australia and internationally is the dismantling of public education systems as part of a long-standing trend towards the modernisation, marketisation and privatisation of educational provision. Responsibility for direct delivery of education services has been shifted to contracting and monitoring under the clarion call of school and leadership autonomy and parental choice. Part of this pattern is an increasing blurring of boundaries between the state and private sector, a move from government to new forms of ‘strategic’ governance, and from hierarchy to heterarchy. Challenges for Public Education examines the educational leadership, policy and social justice implications of these trends in Australia and internationally. It maps this movement through early shifts to school-based management in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and recent moves such as the academies programme in England and charter schools in the United States. It draws on recent studies of a distinct new phase in Australian school reform – the creation of ‘independent public schools’ (IPS) in Western Australia and Queensland – and global policy moves in public education in order to provide a truly international dialogue and debate on these matters. This book moves beyond critique. It innovatively brings together Australian and international perspectives and a rich range of diverse theoretical lenses: practice philosophy, feminism, gender, relational, and postmodernism. As such, it provides a crucial forum for illuminating alternate ways to conceptualise educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope.




Policy and Practice Challenges for Equality in Education


Book Description

Well-educated populations are important aspects of any contemporary society, as education increases national and global development and the positive expansion of communities to participate actively in civil matters also increases. Educational equality is based on the principles of administrative competence and fairness of access and distribution of resources, opportunities, and treatment, which ensures success for every person. Ensuring equal access to quality education requires addressing a wide range of persistent inequalities in society and includes a stronger focus on how different forms of inequalities intersect to produce unequal opportunities or outcomes that affect marginalized and vulnerable groups. Policy and Practice Challenges for Equality in Education takes a multifaceted look at issues of equality and inequality in education as related to policy, practice, resource access, and distribution. As such, this book explores the potential practices in education that serve to mitigate and transform unproductive practices which have left societies scarred by social and educational inequalities. The chapters provide a critical analysis of the manifestations of inequalities in various educational contexts and discerns how broader social inequalities are informed by education-related matters. This book is ideal for sociologists, administrators, instructors, policymakers, data scientists, community leaders, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in educational equality and the unique challenges being faced worldwide.




Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention


Book Description

Opportunities and Challenges in Teacher Recruitment and Retention serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding teachers’ careers across the professional lifespan. Grounded in the notion that teachers’ voices are essential for understanding teachers’ lives, this edited volume contains chapters that privilege the voices of teachers above all. Book sections look closely at the particular issues that arise when recruiting an effective, committed, and diverse workforce, as well as the challenges that arise once teachers are immersed in the classroom setting. Promising directions are also included for particularly high-need areas such as early childhood teachers, Black male teachers, STEM teachers, and urban teachers. The book concludes with a call for self-care in teachers’ lives. Chapter contributions come from a variety of contexts across the United States and around the world. However, regardless of context or methodology, these chapters point to the importance of valuing and respecting teachers’ lives and work. Moreover, they demonstrate that teacher recruitment and retention is a complex and multifaceted issue that cannot be addressed through simplistic policy changes. Rather, attending to and appreciating the web of influences on teachers lives and careers is the only way to support their work and the impact they have on our next generation of students.




Challenges in Global Learning


Book Description

This volume offers a wide range of approaches for framing and addressing issues which currently shape global education. The discussions here are constructed around four research themes which reflect current strategic research priorities in Australian education. Together, they form a more rounded framework for approaching and evaluating educational changes and developments. The collection is made up of collaborative research that emerged between researchers and Masters coursework students in the Department of Education at Charles Darwin University, Australia. The original approach this collaboration of research adopted was developed in response to the challenges currently being experienced by higher education institutions both in Australia and around the world, which are now redesigning research and coursework programmes to address the quality of the services that they provide. This book will appeal to educators, researchers and postgraduate students.