Evaluation of the non‐formal forest education sector in the state of North Rhine‐Westphalia,Germany: organisations,programmes and framework conditions

Although a large number of different organisations offer various forest education programmes within Germany, specific information (i.e., sectoral and programme content and provision at a state level) is lacking. This study used a survey of all 61 forest education organisations (43 respondents) in the state of North Rhine‐Westphalia, Germany, to evaluate its forest education sector, with a specific focus on the organisations, demand for its services, forest educational programmes and framework conditions. Input from expert interviews was also used to develop recommendations. The study indicates that, especially with children as the main target group, many non‐formal programmes are offered to support the formal environmental education sector and to promote leisure activities in the forest. Yet, despite a high demand for forest education, low personnel resources restrict the number of visits and activities, principally owing to limited financial resource. We also discuss the provision of innovative new educational programmes and supplementary services, combined with increased quality management, that could be beneficial to the future development of the sector in NRW.     

The children of the educational expansion era in Germany: education and further training participation in the life‐course

In this article, we examine the social dimension of inequality in educational participation. We look at the social transmission and gender‐specific channelling of education and further training in the context of employment and family. Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data collected from a multi‐level empirical life‐course study (Hamburg Biographical and Life‐Course Panel: 1980–2006) conducted with a sample of the 1979 cohort of secondary school graduates in Hamburg, Germany, we discuss the education and further training practices in their lives – with special emphasis on social class of origin and gender.     

Achievement goal orientation and differences in self‐reported copying behaviour across academic programmes

This survey study investigated the relationship between achievement goal orientation and self‐reported copying behaviour among college students (N = 2007) enrolled in five different academic programmes in Thailand. Results of statistical analysis showed several significant findings: performance approach goal orientation, performance avoidance goal orientation, academic major in humanities, gender and grade point average were the best predictors of self‐reported frequency of copying behaviour. Compared with humanities students, management, engineering, science and vocational students were significantly more performance avoidance goal oriented and reported significantly higher frequency of copying behaviour. We primarily use achievement goal theory to interpret the effect of multiple goal orientations on self‐reported copying behaviour across academic programmes.     

The Bachelor and Mice

1. There lived a bachelor. He built a small thatched shed. He lived in it alone. 有个单身汉,用茅草盖了一间小房子-他一个人孤零零地住在里面-2.One day he found a little m ouserunning on the ground.H e thought itfunny.So he scattered som e grains ofwheatforthe m ouse.有一天,他发现有一只小老鼠在地上跑。他觉得这个小家伙很好玩,于是就撒了几个麦粒给它。3.O ne m onth later,m ore and m orem ice cam e here,buthe didn'thate them.H e allowed the m ice to be in and out.一个月后,老鼠渐渐地多了起来,可他并没…     

Strategies of remembrance in pre‐unification West Germany

By examining instances of dramatically rejected speech, critics can identify codes of the unsayable in a culture/situation, and by identifying what cannot be said publicly are better equipped to distinguish between types of national identity. In the years leading to German reunification, West German national identity was based upon various strategies of remembrance that are identified through a comparison of two speeches: Richard von Weizsäcker's celebrated 1985 parliamentary address commemorating the end of the Second World War in Europe and Philipp Jenninger's dramatically rejected parliamentary address in 1988 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht.     

The socio‐political significance of changes to the vocational education system in Germany

This paper explores the effects on social inequality in Germany of ongoing changes to the employment system and, thus, vocational education. Results based on an examination of the literature indicate that students from increasingly middle‐class backgrounds with higher levels of general, rather than vocational, educational attainment are winning the competition for ever‐fewer apprenticeships. Progress for women in education is accompanied by relative declines in men’s performance on high school exit examinations and does not translate into success in the employment system. Employers are abandoning the corporate‐state organization of vocational education. The paper concludes that school degrees are increasingly important for later career opportunities. As a result, the educational system is increasingly stratified, contributing to social inequality in Germany.     

Dimensions of Eighteenth‐century Educational Thinking in Germany: Rhetoric and Gender Anthropology

The development of pedagogical science in eighteenth‐century Germany unfolded in close connection with the emergence of the modern bourgeoisie and its emancipation from a still absolutist society. While social and political structures in Britain and France were changed by revolutions, the relative weakness of the German bourgeoisie led to the adoption of a reformist strategy to effect social modernization. In this context, pedagogics, education, schools and schooling became a vital means of political and economic transformation towards a modern, bourgeois‐capitalist society. Therein the emergence of modern pedagogical thought and the development of the bourgeoisie were mutual preconditions: several initially quite disparate strands of thought coalesced to form a new pedagogical thinking in Germany during the later Enlightenment. The essay reconstructs how new thinking emerged by charting the integration of two bodies of knowledge into this renewal and refounding of pedagogics: the transformation of elements of rhetoric into building blocks of modern pedagogical thought, on the one hand, and of gender anthropology as its foundation, on the other.     

Civics and Values in the Asia‐Pacific Region

The Asia‐Pacific region has witnessed a substantial and frequently profound surge of interest in civics and democratic citizenship in recent years. This change has been driven by global forces and educational policy initiatives at national level in most countries and more localized levels in others. In turn these policies have been driven by a perceived need for a more active, participatory citizenry in a time of accelerated capitalism and globalization. A key feature of the policies in the region has been the deliberate inclusion of a set of values based on concepts of the ‘good’ citizen and democratic citizenship. This article examines these developments in selected countries within the region, with particular emphasis upon the values initiatives taken, in an attempt to make sense of the changing scene in civics education.

This article was prepared as part of a project funded by the Pacific Basin Research Center and Soka University.     

Representing self‐in‐society: education for citizenship and the social‐subjects curriculum in Scotland

The documented social‐subjects curricula for Scottish 5–16 year olds are analysed for representations of ‘self‐in‐society’. Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education‐for‐Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also relevant throughout the UK and beyond and our analysis of the social subjects has wider relevance.

An ideal‐type analysis was used on documents including national guidelines, examination syllabuses, examination papers, and assessor instructions. Our analysis suggests that in these documents: the self is seen as an abstract; people are understood by category; society is the sum of discrete institutions; self‐in‐society is fully defined; and this representation of society is not contested. This representation becomes increasingly exclusive with age/ability and may be linked to assumed modes of curricular division, teaching and assessment. We discuss how this overall picture might affect students’ sense of ‘agency’ in the light of citizenship education. We conclude that the social‐subjects’ curricular representation of self‐in‐society may not fully support the Scottish Education‐for‐Citizenship framework.     

Partnerships and parents – relationships in tutorial programmes

The tutorial system is considered to be a useful pedagogical intervention to improve student retention, particularly in the context of a first-year student’s experience of entering university. For these novice students to achieve academic success, it is important that they are given access to the subject-specific knowledge and practices in their different disciplines, that is, that they acquire ‘epistemological access’. A recent study of the tutorial system in a South African university (Layton, D.M. [2013]. A social realist account of the tutorial system at the University of Johannesburg (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Rhodes University, Grahamstown), sought to discover to what extent tutorials were discursively constructed as being about the enablement of epistemological access. This paper focuses on two discourses that emerged from the study – the parent discourse and the partnership discourse. Both discourses were concerned with relationships between key stakeholders in the tutorial programme. Given that tutorials are considered to be spaces in which more intimate learning can take place than in the anonymous environment of the large lecture hall, an interrogation of the relationships fostered in tutorials is important. The parent discourse, in which students were positioned as ‘kids’ needing care, was supportive of new students but ran the risk of being patronising and reductionist. The partnerships discourse, in which tutors and academics were seen to be working together towards the common goal of student success, was seen to be enabling of epistemological access. But it required a commitment to teaching endeavours that was in tension with the institutional focus on research. Through a social realist analysis of the two discourses constructing relationships in the tutorial system, we conclude that these discourses have the power to both constrain and enable the extent to which the tutorial system can be a site of epistemological access.     

Measuring students’ interest in physics ‐ design and results of a cross‐sectional study in the Federal Republic of Germany

A test to determine students’ interest in physics was developed on the basis of a curricular model of physics education with three dimensions: topic, context and activity. It was administered to about 4000 students in the 11‐16 age range attending different types of school in the Federal Republic. The results suggest that context is by far the most dominating dimension; the interest structure is independent of the type of school; the gap in interest between boys and girls may be closed if physics is treated not solely as a scientific enterprise but also in its connection to our society as a whole, including controversial issues.     

Bachelor Graduates on the Labour Market. A Cross‐national Comparison of the Employers' Viewpoint

One of the most vehemently discussed questions in the process of restructuring traditional long study programmes according to the Bachelor/Master model is how to develop first cycle curricula and degrees which are a meaningful preparation for a following Master programme as well as for the labour market—as stressed in the Bologna Declaration. It remains to be seen for which occupational levels undergraduate programmes will prepare and how these new degrees will be assessed on the labour markets in different countries in Europe. The article focuses on the employers' viewpoint, giving an overview of the assessment of Bachelor degrees in four countries: Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Norway. As it is a very early stage to provide in‐depth analyses because so far there are hardly any Bachelor graduates on the labour markets, the article illustrates from a more analytical perspective what factors might influence their transition to the world of work and the development of their further careers.     

Inclusive education in the academy: pedagogical and political imperatives in a master’s course

Many universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in inclusive education. There has been much research into the impact of these courses, but little is written about their design. This article focuses on a master’s course in inclusive education in a South African university. The course positions inclusive education as a critical education project and is designed around the four propositions presented by Slee in The Irregular School (2011. Milton Park: Routledge). Using Bernsteinian ideas about pedagogising knowledge, this article accounts for the pedagogical choices made in content selection and course design. The focal questions in the course are described, together with an indication of the range of additional texts that students read. Given that Slee asserts that inclusive education is a political project, and that Allan (2010. “The Inclusive Teacher Educator: Spaces for Civic Engagement.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31 (4): 411–422) urges inclusive teacher educators to reorientate themselves towards civic duty, I argue that producing a pedagogic discourse of inclusive education is a political task that should result in both the teacher educator and the students being oriented towards a critique of existing exclusionary arrangements and an activism that leads to change.     

Evaluating large‐scale interactive radio programmes

This article focuses on the challenges involved in conducting evaluations of interactive radio programmes in South Africa with large numbers of schools, teachers, and learners. It focuses on the role such large‐scale evaluation has played during the South African radio learning programme’s development stage, as well as during its subsequent sustained implementation phase. The model evolved for evaluation of interactive radio instruction is based within the context of a shoestring/real‐world evaluation tradition, where funding for internal evaluation has been limited over the period of the programme’s development to scale, necessitating focused use of resources in a longitudinal evaluation design. The evaluation approach is participatory and multimethod, linking the requirements of external summative evaluation conducted for accountability, with data yielded by internal (formative and developmental) evaluation. This is done through internal and formative evaluative studies of limited scope, combined with developmental classroom‐based evaluation based on the logic of project team members working with teachers to promote the programme’s self‐evaluative capacity.     

Analysing the types of TV programmes viewed by children from different socio‐economic strata based on their self‐report in the Turkish context

This research investigated the amount of time that children from different socio‐economic strata spend watching television per week and whether there was a difference among children from low, middle and upper socio‐economic strata with regard to viewing programme types, including action adventure, news and information, competitions, sports, paparazzi shows, cartoons, child informative and musical and comedy. Preparing and conducting this investigation involved a survey including TV programme types and the amount of time the participants spent watching television per week. Four hundred and ninety‐two primary school children participated. They came from low, middle and upper socio‐economic strata from three different primary schools in Turkey. The results indicate that significant differences exist among children from low, middle and upper socio‐economic strata with respect to viewing different programme types like action adventure, competitions, paparazzi shows, child informative and musical and comedy, while there was a non‐significant difference among the participants from different socio‐economic strata in viewing news and information, sports and cartoons. Some implications for further research have been made for prospective researchers.

L'analyse des types de Television programmes pour les enfants de differentes classes socio‐economiques basées sur leur proper rapport dans le contexte turc

Cette recherche a exposé la quantité de temps que les enfants de differentes classes socio‐economiques ont depensé pour regarder la TV par semaine; s'il y avait une différence parmi les enfants de hautes, moyennes et basses classes socio‐economiques du point de vue des types de programme tels ques l'aventure d'action, les nouvelles la compétition d'information, les sports, le paparazzi shows, les bandes dessinées, celle d'information pour les enfants et la comédie. Préparer et conduire cette recherche a developpé une enquete comprenant les types de programme et la quantité de temps que les participants depensent pour regarder la TV par semaine. Les 492 éleves d'école primaire ont participés à cette investigation. Ils sont venus des hautes, moyennes et basses classes socio‐economiques parmi trois differents écoles primaries en Turquie. Les resultats indiquent que les differences significatives existent parmi les enfants de hautes, moyennes et basses classes socio‐economiques du point de vue des types de programme tels ques l'aventure d'action, les nouvelles la compétition d'information, les sports, le paparazzi shows, les bandes dessinées celle d'information pour les enfants et la comédie et la musique tandis qu'il n'y a pas de difference importante parmi les participants de differents de classes socio‐economiques mentionnés en regardant respectivement les nouvelles et information, les sports, les bandes dessinées. Certaines déductions pour une recherché ont été executé pour les recherches prospective.

Analyse der von Kindern verschiedener sozio‐ökonomischer Schichten ausgewähltenTypen von Fernsehprogrammen, basierend auf Eigenberichten in türkischem Kontext

In diesem Artikel werden die Zeit, die Kinder, die aus unterschiedlichen sozio‐ökonomischen Schichten kommen, in einer Woche beim Fernsehen verbringen haben, und ob es einen zeitlichen Unterschied zwischen den Kindern, die beim Fernsehen von den Programmen wie Musik‐komödie, Kinderprogramme, Zeichentrickfilme, Paparazzi‐show, Sports, Wettbewerben, Nachrichten, Abenteuerfilme gibt, untersucht. Der Zweck der Vorbereitung und Durchführung dieser Unterschung ist die Feststellung der Zeit, die die Teilnehmer in einer Woche zu den Fernsehprogrammen angewendet haben. 492 Grundschulschüler haben daran teilgenommen. Die Teilnehmer sind Grundschulschüler, die zu den unteren, mittleren und oberen sozio‐ökonomischen Klassen in der Türkei gehören. Das Ergebnis der Forschung zeigte, dass unter den Teilnehmern von unterschiedlichen sozio‐ökonomischen schichten beim Fernsehen von programmen wie nacheinander, Zeichentrickfilme, Sports und Nachrichten keinen zeitlichen Unterschied, demgegenüber beim Fernsehen von Programmen wie Musik‐komödie, Kinderprogramme, Paparazzi‐shows, Wettbewerbs und Abenteuerfilme einen wesentlichen Unterschied gibt. Zum Schluss wurde für hoffnungsvolle Forschungen manche Vorschlaege gemacht.