Product Description: The World Leaders in Education: Lessons from the Successes and Drawbacks of Their Methods explores the practices and policies that the highest-ranking nations in education implement to achieve their success. Topics include the education of disadvantaged students; cultural attitudes toward education; teacher preparation; and teacher salaries...read more

Product Description: In most countries in the world, school education is the business of the state. Even if forms and functions differ, the imparting of elementary knowledge is universally regarded as a public function. Yet this is neither self-evident nor self-explanatory...read more

The essays in this volume offer a groundbreaking comparative analysis of religious education, and state policies towards religious education in seven different countries and in the European Union as a whole. They pose a crucial question: can religious education contribute to a shared public sphere and foster solidarity across different ethnic and religious communities? In many traditional societies and even in what are largely secular European societies, our place in creation, the meaning of good and evil, and the definition of the good life, virtue, and moral action, are all primarily addressed in religious terms. It is in fact hard to come to grips with these issues without recourse to religious language, traditions, and frames of reference. Yet, religious languages and identities divide as much as unite, and provide a site of contestation and strife as much as a sense of peace and belonging Not surprisingly, different countries approach religious education in dramatically different ways. Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism addresses a pervasive problem: how can religious education provide a framework of meaning, replete with its language of inclusion and community, without at the same time drawing borders and so excluding certain individuals and communities from its terms of collective membership and belonging?The authors offer in-depth analysis of such pluralistic countries as Bulgaria, Israel, Malaysia, and Turkey, as well as Cyprus - a country split along lines of ethno-religious difference. They also examine the connection between religious education and the terms of citizenship in the EU, France, and the USA, illuminating the challenges of educating our citizenry in an age of religious resurgence and global politics.

Product Description: Education systems in Europe have been undergoing profound changes within the last few years. New actors, procedures, and arenas of policymaking have emerged which strongly affect today's education systems. Although traditionally assumed to be a genuinely 'national' policy field, international initiatives and programmes - among the most prominent ones being the PISA study for secondary education and the Bologna Process for higher education - have triggered fundamental reforms in many countries...read more

Product Description: This book unites a dynamic group of scholars who examine linkages among local, national, and international levels of educational policy and practice. Utilizing multi-sited, ethnographic approaches, the essays explore vertical interactions across diverse levels of policy and practice while prompting horizontal comparisons across twelve sites in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas...read more

Product Description: At a time when the power of schools and both state and federal education authorities to guide young people’s sense of belonging is being challenged by multilingualism, by the claims of supra- and subnational regions and minorities, by memories of national catastrophes and crimes, and by out-of-school educational media, this collection of essays provides an apposite exploration of the ways in which shared narratives continue to be transmitted and learnt...read more

Product Description: In education, the idea of freedom, autonomy, and accountability are commonly regarded as very important, but educational policy-makers do not always pay sufficient attention to the tensions among them. Thus, freedom or school autonomy may be sacrificed to accountability, or accountability may be weakened in an effort to provide a wider range of choices for parents, or to give more decision-making authority to individual schools...read more

Product Description: Teachers are the most important single element of the education system but what does it take to create high quality teachers in today’s world? Around the world, countries are struggling to understand how to change their schools to meet global demands...read more

The book provides a selection of fresh snapshots into the literature on educational inclusion and the ways in which this enhances equal education opportunity.

Product Description: Margret A. Winzer and Kas Mazurek combine two disciplines in this collection, comparative and international studies and special education, to explore the ways that diverse nations respond to persons who are exceptional. Their learned contributors also explore the changing parameters of special education, employing comparative studies theories and methods to document, explore, discuss, and analyze social and educational inclusion...read more

Product Description: This publication argues for work by the Commonwealth and others on the particular and distinct challenges of education in small states, and for the need to examine the impact of changing global contexts, to document the changing nature and significance of recent and contemporary education policy priorities, and to advance the case for new and strengthened initiatives for education in small states...read more