Society and the Teacher's Role (RLE Edu N)


Book Description

This study describes research into teachers’ role conceptions and uncertainties in different types of school and neighbourhood. The authors examine in particular pupils’ and parents’ conceptions of the teacher’s role, and the conflicts which teachers experience when they are exposed to different expectations and demands in a rapidly changing educational and social scene.




Teacher Education in Plural Societies (RLE Edu N)


Book Description

The educational implications of cultural pluralism attracted a good deal of attention in Western societies in the 1970s and 1980s, on the grounds of equality and human rights, maximising national talent, and maintaining social cohesion. Maurice Craft and the international contributors to this book highlight the potential of teacher education, and in this wide-ranging analytical review for its key role in providing for ethnic minority children, in respect of access and achievements, and also for all children to acquire informed and tolerant attitudes. This book makes an important contribution to a small but growing literature, concentrating on initial rather than in-service teacher education, and it brings together papers from experienced specialists from eleven countries worldwide: Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Malaysia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and the USA. The papers are concerned with the needs both of diverse classrooms and diverse societies, and also consider general principles and comparative perspectives. Of interest to the specialist and non-specialist alike, Teacher Education in Plural Societies: An International Review deals with an important and timely issue – how best to prepare teachers to meet the needs of both minority – and majority – culture pupils who are growing up in plural societies.




Dilemmas of Schooling (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

This study illuminates how the everyday activity of teachers raises profound economic, cultural, ethical, political and research issues, and provides a new and fruitful way of examining the practice of teaching. The first part of the book offers a detailed description of sensitively recorded school situations, arising from work carried out in a number of British primary schools. From the analysis of their research the authors constructed a theoretical perspective for looking at schooling in the form of sixteen ‘dilemmas’; the second half of the book is concerned with this perspective, and shows how the dilemmas constitute a language for looking at everyday schooling and relating it to more general political, social and cultural issues. The book thus spans the gap in educational thinking between work with a firm empirical base and specifically theoretical studies.




Role Conflict and the Teacher


Book Description

Gerald Grace here explores the concept of role conflict and the current theorizing about the problems of the teacher's role. He investigates four potential problem areas - role diffuseness, role vulnerability, role commitment versus career orientation, and value conflict - in a sample of one hundred and fifty secondary school teachers in a Midland town. The analysis shows how a teacher's commitment to a particular set of values exposes him or her to conflict in an achievement-oriented and pluralistic society. These conflicts, present in all schools, are seen in their clearest form among secondary modern school teachers. The author suggests that colleges of education, in emphasizing commitment and in assuming value consensus, predispose their students to conflict experiences. He indicates that internal career possibilities in schools and the influence of graduate or certified status are also important factors in conflict exposure. While accepting that certain role conflicts are important in the genesis of change, the author proposes that levels of dysfunctional conflict can be reduced by the action of head teachers, by structural change in the schools and innovations in teaching education.




Teaching English Through ELA, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies


Book Description

Accessible and hands-on, this textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to teaching language through content, an approach known as Content-Based Language Teaching (CBLT). A content-based, language-focused approach to teaching in the disciplines is essential to serving the language and disciplinary needs of English learners (ELs) in the classroom. Guided by learning standards and informed by research, this book demonstrates how content materials in the English Language Arts (ELA), Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies can be harnessed to develop the English language proficiency of ELs as well as advance their disciplinary knowledge and skills. Using content materials in ELA, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies as a starting point, this textbook illustrates how to teach English as an additional language effectively by integrating language instruction with disciplinary teaching. It showcases numerous learning and instructional activities, complete with targeted language exemplified in sentential and discourse contexts, direct instruction, teacher modeling, guided and individual practices, and assessments, which are further backed up by detailed discussions of their goals, rationales, and implementation. This textbook also features a discussion of differentiation to address the varied needs of students. To further assist readers in determining how to incorporate language instruction, Peng identifies extensive possibilities for language teaching that are based on the same content materials and beyond those targeted by sample learning activities. Each chapter ends with three types of exercises—multiple-choice questions, open-ended discussion questions, and problems of application—to bolster understanding, promote reflection, and encourage application. Complementing the book are additional online resources, including ready-to-use PowerPoints, which are available on the book’s webpage at Routledge.com/9780367521134. Covering key issues such as characteristics of effective language instruction, differentiation, and the challenges associated with CBLT, this is an essential text in TESOL methods and content-area language teaching, as well as an invaluable resource for pre-service and in-service ESL/EFL teachers and content-area teachers who are interested in furthering their students’ language and literacy development.




Agility and Function, Or Rule-Ridden Management and Structural Slavery


Book Description

Despite its ubiquity few outside the corridors of power are concerned with policy, its meaning and purpose. It is not uncommon that policies are in various ways dysfunctional and characterised by magical thinking rather than fact and reason. If they do function what signifies good policy? If they do not, why are they still increasing in numbers? Departing from well-known facts of human social evolution this book explains why flawed policy tends to generate a host of problems and how this is tied to political inertia and ultimately also to the UN’s Sustainability Agenda. This is in jeopardy because of politicians’ somewhat magical policy making. Given that some of the challenges the World is facing can be resolved by well-designed policies, a proposal is made how policy makers must think when creating policy in line with human nature.




Rule By Incarnation


Book Description

The 1959 Chinese military takeover of Tibet brought an end to a unique way of life in which Buddhism provided legitimacy to political and social authority in Tibet and served as value system, cultural bond, philosophy of life, and framework for a complex political and social order. The religious-political system of Tibet now exists only in the memories of those who experienced it. This book documents the human heritage and cultural traditions of Tibet's singular society as they developed and existed during a period of several hundred years. Using Max Weber's framework of the interrelationship between religious ideologies and the emergence of social, economic, and political systems, Franz Michael and his colleagues analyze the concepts that are central to Tibetan Buddhism and apply them to the Tibetan people, their social and political order, and their way of life. Much of the study is based on interviews with Tibetans in exile-from incarnations and highly placed ecclesiastical and secular government leaders to farmers, herdsmen, and housewives. The result is important not only as the record of a culture, but also as it is related by the authors to the broader issue of the modernization of non-Western traditional societies.




The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society


Book Description

In The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society, John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji has two main goals. The first is to provide an exploration of aspects of indigenous Yoruba philosophy of law. The second is to relate this philosophy of law to the Yoruba indigenous traditions of governance, with a view to appreciating the relevance of the Yoruba traditions of law and governance to contemporary African experiments with imported Western democracy in the 21st century. This book is devoted to what can be described as a juridical forensic investigation of Nigeria’s predicament of developmental deficit, leading to gross and unconscionable impoverishment of large segments of the population, in the midst of so much natural resources and abundant human capital, using Yoruba indigenous legal traditions as reflective template. Bewaji urges that Africa has to take seriously the necessity of obedience, observance, enforcement and operation of law as no respecter of persons, groups, affiliations and pedigrees as was in the case in the societies founded by our ancestors, rather than the present scenario whereby the highest bidder procures semblances of justice from a crooked system of common law which was never designed to be fair, equitable and just to the disadvantaged in society.




Understanding Neoliberal Rule in Higher Education


Book Description

The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase “free market” gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future. The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between institutions of higher education and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on education and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside universities and colleges. Teaching faculty, research faculty, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic higher education and a more democratic society would consider this volume essential reading.




Course Syllabi in Faculties of Education


Book Description

Course Syllabi in Faculties of Education problematizes one of the least researched phenomena in teacher education, the design of course syllabi, using critical and decolonial approaches. This book looks at the struggles that scholars, policy makers, and educators from a diverse range of countries including Australia, Canada, India, Iran, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the USA, and Zambia face as they design course syllabi in higher education settings. The chapter authors argue that course syllabi are political constructions, representing intense sites of struggles over visions of teacher education and visions of society. As such, they are deeply immersed in what Walter Mignolo calls the “geopolitics of knowledge”. Authors also show how syllabi have become akin to contractual documents that define relations between instructors and students Based on a set of empirically grounded studies that are compared and contrasted, the chapters offer a clearer picture of how course syllabi function within distinct socio-political, economic, and historical contexts of practice and teacher education.