A comparative overview of citizenship education in Cyprus

Cyprus is a Mediterranean island divided into two political sections. For political agreement to be possible between the North (Turkish) and South (Greek), Cyprus should give full consideration to citizenship education at schools with the aim of transmitting shared values and helping students become EU citizens. In this research, two citizenship textbooks which were designed and used for eighth grade level were examined using content analysis. One was a Greek book used in South Cyprus and the other one was a Turkish book used in North Cyprus. Both textbooks were prepared and published in the respective mainland states (Greece and Turkey) and reflected the culture of these countries. Although Turkey is a candidate state for the European Union, the Turkish book focuses on empowering local citizen identity in the nation state and does not discuss broader issues related to global citizenship. By contrast, the Greek textbook covers both national and global issues concerning citizenship. Silman and ?ağlar suggest that North and South Cyprus should design their own citizenship books to promote the concepts of interdependence, multiculturalism, democracy, human rights and respect for cultural diversity. The researchers believe that this could facilitate a possible political agreement between the two sides.     

走出困境的选择:新编高中思想政治教材三大看点

从方法论的意义上观察新编高中思想政治教材编写方略的选择,可归纳出三大看点:优化案例,淡化定义,强化辨析。由此呈现出来教材编写模式的新特点,堪称思想政治课教材沿革历程中的标志性变化:既在理念层面体现了知识观、教材观、教学观和评价观的新意义,又在操作层面上反映了“凸显观点、关注过程”基本思路的新设计;既是基础教育课程改革的内在要求,又是新时期增强思想政治教育针对性、主动性、实效性的必然选择。     

新时代统编教材建设:实践特色与价值意蕴

进入新时代,党中央、国务院作出了中小学道德与法治(思想政治)、语文、历史三科教材统编统审统用的决策部署,明确提出编写好统编教材的政治要求、系统推出使用好统编教材的工作机制、牢牢把握宣传好统编教材的舆论导向,为新时代统编教材建设提供了基本遵循。坚持政治优势与制度优势相结合、坚持加强资源保障与夯实人才支撑相统一、坚持知识体系与育人体系良性互动、坚持政策引导与改革创新双向驱动,彰显了统编教材建设的实践特色。落实国家事权的新理念、探索教材治理的新路径、传播教材建设的新话语,凸显了统编教材发挥铸魂育人功能的重大价值。     

A system of education,not just a university: Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of education

Because of the political reforms demanded by his political philosophy, Jefferson was always focused on instantiating a system of education to edify all persons according to their needs and to prevent those governing at every level from lusting after power and fame instead of governing in pursuance of the interests of the general citizenry. That notion of a system of education—offering a basic education for all citizens and high-lever education and access to it for the intellectually and morally elite—at the time would have been unique to Virginia and it showed the extent to which Jefferson recognized both the political ills of his day and that those political ills could only be remedied through educational reform. This paper is a critical analysis of that system of education, from ward schools to the University of Virginia.     

New directions in the moral education curriculum in Chinese primary schools

An analysis is presented of the problems that have existed for over 20 years in the moral education curriculum in primary schools of China. These include the separation of moral education from children's lives, the moralizing and memorization used as the basic methods of teaching and learning, and the overlaps between courses on society and ideological moral character. The paper then introduces the main innovations in the contemporary reform of the primary moral education curriculum, including lifelong moral education as its theoretical foundation and making the development of children's morality relate to life, with ‘real’ everyday life events as source materials for textbooks. Embodied in the textbooks are some new ideas behind the revised educational objectives, such as putting oneself in another's position, ecological interdependence, ‘win‐win’, dialogue, sharing and diversity. As the curriculum is child centred so the textbooks use a dialogical pedagogy. In conclusion the paper considers ongoing and new challenges for moral education in primary schools to be faced by the curriculum reform.     

The Reform of History Textbooks and Its Future Trends

In the 1990s, amid the surging tides of reform in China, the editorial board of history in the People's Education Publishing House released a set of history textbooks for junior high school nine-year mandatory education (hereafter, the new textbook). This set of textbooks has now been in use for a few years. It has been evaluated positively by teachers, students, and experts, and has also been officially approved by the State Education Commission. Since the early 1950s, the People's Education Publishing House has compiled many sets of textbooks on various school subjects for our country's primary and secondary schools. We have gained a great deal of experience, but we have also learned quite a few lessons. The new textbook is a bold and creative innovation created on the basis of previous textbooks. As the chief editor of the new textbook, I want to talk about our experiments and explorations, hoping thereby to exchange views with our colleagues both at home and abroad.     

我国中小学教材研究述评

自从新一轮基础教育课程改革以来,我国学者采用文献法、内容分析法、文本对比法和问卷调查法等不同的研究方法,从宏观和微观两个层面对中小学教材进行了广泛的研究。宏观层面的研究主要包括教材的功能和地位、教材制度的建设、教材的结构、教材的评价等;微观层面的研究主要包括教材内容的社会学分析、教材插图的研究、教材话语呈现方式的研究、从文化角度对教材文本呈现的内容进行分析、中外教材的比较研究、新旧教材的比较研究、单一学科教材的比较研究等。从研究的视角、研究的内容和研究的方法上讲,我国中小学教材研究还有待进一步深入和完善。     

晚清新式学堂的汉译历史教科书

汉译历史教科书在晚清的出现,是中国社会新旧交替的特殊背景下发生的学术现象,经历了不同的发展时期,其真正在近代中国的学校教育中普及,是在晚清新式学堂纷纷使用汉译历史教科书作为教学蓝本开始。而这一阶段,又经历了洋务运动、维新运动和书院改制这三个教育改革时期。     

Engaging the community, targeted interventions: achieving scale in basic education reform

In 1983, after over 10 years of working on mathematics education reform in the Philippines, I wrote a paper for a Tokyo conference arguing that education reform in developing countries such as the Philippines should begin by working on macro-problems, namely the social, political, and economic environment of the schools, as a context for the micro-problems, the usual concerns of curriculum, teacher training, textbooks, and so forth. This article recounts how we carried out this approach to education reform in three large-scale initiatives: the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP), the Synergeia Foundation, and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development. The TEEP is an education project for the 23 poorest provinces in the Philippines, which began in the mid-1990s and was carried out fully from 2000 to 2006. The Synergeia Foundation, Inc. and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development are organizations which have been working with elementary schools on the scale of whole towns, cities, and provinces. They are also now beginning their work with high schools. What these initiatives have in common is that they begin by engaging the community, the school superintendents and supervisors, principals, teachers, parents, and political and civic leaders. A process is followed to have them focus on the realities of their schools, develop consensus on strategic plans and priorities, and participate in the process of achieving goals. Implementation then focuses on what we call targeted interventions, such as teacher training, educational materials, and physical facilities, which address the agreed-on priorities. The evaluation of the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP) at its end in 2006 shows that the approach leads to major improvement on a large scale. We are seeing the same kind of results in the work of Synergeia Foundation, Inc. and the Ateneo Center for Educational Development.     

Teaching in transition: Examining school-based gender inequities in central/southeastern Europe and the former Soviet Union

In the last decade, gender equity has become one of the most prominent issues in education reform efforts worldwide. Yet, questions of gender equity have received very little attention in the education reform efforts in the post-socialist countries during the transition period. Focusing on the political, economic, and social changes of the 1990s, this article examines school-based gender equity as it is treated in textbooks, curriculum, teacher attitudes, school environment, leadership and tracking. The article presents gender-sensitive strategies for reform and explores how existing ‘gender-neutral’ education practices detrimentally affect gender equity in schools, providing country-specific examples. The article concludes with recommendations for teaching in transition, given the education sphere's strong potential to redress gender inequities.     

中学历史课程资源开发与利用的调查研究

新一轮基础教育课程改革重视课程资源的开发和利用。通过对安徽省芜湖、合肥、宿州、安庆等地区中学历史课程资源开发利用情况的调查,发现当前教师在课程资源观念、新课程历史教材使用以及如何有效开发利用历史课程资源等方面仍存在一些问题。为进一步推进历史新课程实施,需要关注、分析并解决这些问题。     

Political ideology and Taiwanese school curricula

Taiwanese textbooks play a central role in Taiwanese education. In the wake of the political reform and social protest movements of the 1970s and 1980s that prompted Taiwanese educational reform, critics have charged that traditional curricula tend to reinforce the dominant national Chinese cultural identity. The purpose of this article is to review recent research on the complex ideological processes in Taiwan’s school curriculum. The article begins with an overview of the political and social impact on social studies curricula in Taiwan from 1949 to the present, followed by a theoretical discussion of the interrelationship between school curriculum and political ideology using an analysis of Taiwanese textbooks as evidence. The article then suggests a number of classroom practices and methodologies for elementary and secondary school teachers in social studies classes.     

The quest for an inclusive curriculum and assessment culture: The national council for vocational awards 1991–2001

This paper draws on psychoanalytic and socio-political perspectives of trauma and emotion to examine how critical emotional praxis may serve as a pedagogical tool for reconciliation education. A major challenge for teachers in traumatized societies struggling to enact reconciliation education is that emotions of trauma are often appropriated by social and political institutions, including schools, to justify particular collective narratives and ideologies. The prospects of critical emotional praxis are explored through two vignettes from an on-going ethnographic research in Cyprus, a country of protracted ethnic conflict. The first vignette focuses on how emotions of trauma are politically appropriated in a classroom while the second shows how one teacher manages to enact critical emotional praxis with her students to undermine the political appropriation of emotions of trauma. The paper concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications and recommendations for future research.     

British Colonial Higher Education Policy-making in the 1930s: The case of a plan to establish a university in Cyprus

This article examines Britain's colonial education policy in Cyprus in the late 1930s, and more specifically, its efforts to establish a university on the island. The British unpublished plan for a university in Cyprus is considered in the light of the particular social and political context of Cyprus and also in relation to Britain's broader colonial education policy. Primary source material is used as the basis for investigation and analysis.     

Identity issues in Taiwan's history curriculum

As a result of Taiwan's peculiar political situation, national identity has become a crucial and controversial issue in the history curriculum. This chapter analyzes the changing role of nationalism in the history curriculum from 1980 onwards, focusing on the ways in which politics has affected the history curriculum. In particular, it examines how, why and to what extent the focus of the curriculum has shifted from China to Taiwan. Relying on analysis of the content of official syllabuses and textbooks for elementary and junior high schools, it concludes that Chinese identity was emphasized before the 1990s, while Taiwanese identity has been given greater emphasis more recently. The emergence of the identity issue has been part cause, part consequence of the democratization process and the shift of political power away from the KMT old-guard and towards more ‘nativist’ Taiwanese elements.     

The politics of rural school reform: Escuela Nueva in Colombia

This article explores the history and politics of rural school reform in Colombia, focusing on the Escuela Nueva programme. In particular, it assesses the motivations of the Colombian State in promoting a comprehensive reform of its rural schools. We argue that Colombia's unique political context was, in large part, responsible for its novel approach to school reform. As the political context shifted, however, so to did the State's posture to rural schooling. We track the Escuela Nueva programme through three phases (grassroots, formalized and decoupled) to demonstrate how social actors, their interests at a specific point in time, and the distribution of power among them, are crucial elements for understanding the motivation and outcomes of social policy making. In other words, this research portrays education reform as a dynamic process that is continuously shaped and reshaped as political actors and institutions compete for influence and scarce resources in a variable social arena.     

高校思想政治理论课新教改中的人文精神培养

《中共中央宣传部、教育部关于进一步加强和改进高等学校思想政治理论课的意见的实施方案》规定,从2006年秋季起新入学的本科生思想政治理论课的课程设置和教材内容都将做全面的改动。本次教改中新教材内容有“三贴近”的显著特点———贴近现实、贴近大学生思想实际、贴近当前大家关心的热点问题,其核心宗旨及精神实质与人文精神具有内在的深刻的一致性。培育大学生人文素质和人文精神,应是高校政治理论课教改的主要思路和基本对策。     

对中小学教科书循环使用的几点思考

中小学教科书循环使用问题,在广泛热议了若干年后,终于出台了教育部、财政部联合发布的《关于全面实施农村义务教育教科书免费提供和做好部分教科书循环使用工作的意见》。但目前的循环使用仍然是局部的,有限的,全面实施中小学教科书循环使用还有很长的路要走,还有很多问题需要思考、研究,如循环使用后学生学习模式、教师教学模式、学业评价模式如何改革,教科书蕴涵的文化情结问题如何解决,出版行业如何面对由此引起的挑战,教科书循环使用管理工作如何做深、做细等等。唯有深入分析、跟踪研究、切实解决这些问题,才能推动教科书循环使用成为一项长远的、利国利民的教育制度。     

青岛市中小学课程改革的现状分析与思考

课程改革是整个教育改革的核心问题。青岛市中小学课程改革已进行了多年 ,也取得了一定成绩 ,尤其是高中选修课学分制、职业教育改革和小学“双语”教学改革实验 ,均获得了较成功的经验 ,但仍有较大差距。青岛市作为沿海经济发达地区 ,必须及早针对课程结构和内容进行改革 ,以带动基础教育管理、教材内容、教学方法和教学手段等方面的全面改革。本文针对青岛市现行课程存在的一些弊端作了较为全面的剖析 ,并提出了今后课程改革的基本思路     

试论高中语文选修教材的特点和存在的问题

高中语文选修教材截至目前已经出版了七十多种,这些选修教材在编写理念、开发种类、编制方式、教材内容、教材对象等方面体现出了很多的新特点,在语文教育史上具有重要的意义。但是在教材编写和使用中也存在着诸如缺少精品教材、编写队伍一线教师缺乏、教材使用"生本"让位于"考本"等问题。