Education for Sustainable Development: a coherent philosophy for environmental education?

In recent years there has been a growing consensus that environmental education should be orientated around the idea of ‘sustainable development’. This paper examines some of the ambiguities and tensions that exist within this notion and suggests that its considerable attractions may be outweighed by its lack of clarity with regard to a range of fundamental values and principles which motivate environmental concern. It is argued that our relationship with nature is a central element of our sense of identity and that whereas sustainable development is highly problematical when taken as a statement of policy, sustainability conceived of as a frame of mind may have positive and wide‐reaching educational implications. Issues concerning the kinds of knowledge and approaches to teaching that should characterise environmental education are raised.     

The Question Concerning the Aims of Moral Education: Meillassoux’s Ethic of Immortality

In this article, the thesis that moral education is best served through education for irreligious thinking will be put forward. At stake here is the acknowledgment of a disquieting kernel at the deepest level of thinking that is usually glossed over or sedated. I will attempt to confront and articulate this kernel and discuss its repercussions for moral education in reference to the contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s groundbreaking philosophical project articulated in his debut book After Finitude. Stated briefly, the kernel I am referring to concerns the groundlessness of being and the radical ethical attitude it embodies. Two contrasting orientations when confronted with the notion of such an understanding of being can be identified. I will refer to these, simply, as religious and irreligious thinking. My wager is that religious thinking evades the kernel and needs to be overcome by irreligious thinking, which should constitute the aim of moral education.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Development of China’s Higher Vocational Education

Abstract

After more than 20 years of practice and construction, China’s higher vocational education has developed into an important educational category and become an important force in the development of China’s higher education. But in the course of this development, higher vocational education is facing problems such as excessively fast development, weak content building, severely inadequate investment, and uneven regional development. Therefore, the government must create a policy environment suitable for the equitable development of higher education, establish fair education spending policies, strongly promote the balanced development of regional higher vocational education, and strive to strengthen basic capabilities for quality projects.     

Implementing Education for Sustainable Development in schools: learning from teachers’ reflections

In recent years, in the UK, there has been a significant focus on research in Education for Sustainable Development/Global Citizenship Education (ESD/GCE) in initial teacher education and on projects and initiatives used with pupils in schools. However, there has been less specific focus on the ‘voices’ of teachers who have undertaken such projects: the documentation of their perceptions of effective pedagogy for the development of their pupils’ learning and, importantly, the development of their own concepts and values in relation to sustainability education as a result of implementing ESD/GCE-related topics. This paper aims to provide data from this relatively under-reported area. It examines what the teachers learned about effective pedagogy from undertaking a systematic study of their own practice in ESD/GCE-based topics, and it highlights the development of their own understanding of, and values about the place of ESD/GCE in the curriculum. The paper presents an analysis of the reflective journals kept by 10 teachers during the planning and implementation of ESD/GCE projects within their own classrooms. Findings emerging from the study were that critical reflection on their work gave the teachers the confidence to adopt the more learner-centred pedagogy of ESD/GCE, and that teachers, too, were able to benefit from the participation in ESD/GCE activities.     

Education in Sustainable Development: How Can Science Education Contribute to the Vulnerability Perception?

Education for human development within the constraints of sustainability is problematic for schools. On one hand, it is a political idea that continues to evolve with successive compromises between social groups with differing or even conflicting interests. ESD is therefore inherently ‘non-disciplinary’ and cannot be the basis of a single school subject if we wish to keep the creativity that results from the dynamics at work. On the other hand, SD leads us to think collectively about solutions that ensure a future of our choosing that preserves the biological capacity of the planet and to reduce our vulnerability. The sciences thus have a key role: their ability to question the world and to model the consequences of collective and individual choices. But there is a risk of technocratic drift and SD leads us to think about society’s values and aims. A new link is established between sciences and humanities with a democratic model in sight. This paper presents what is possible out of the prospective scenarios method within general and compulsory education by seeking, through an empirical approach, to determine its feasibility, its contributions, its limits, and to locate the place of science education in the elaboration of the perception of “vulnerability”. Both primary and secondary schools are concerned.     

Developing an Instrument for Identifying Secondary Teachers’ Beliefs About Education for Sustainable Development in China

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been recently recognized as an important area in the new Chinese educational reform. As teachers play a pivotal role, knowing and developing an effective and easy-to-use instrument for tapping teachers’ beliefs is essential. This article reports an attempt to develop an instrument with mixed methods. The finalized instruments comprise two subscales with satisfactory reliability indices obtained. Sustainability values (VSD) consists of four dimensions: respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and democracy, nonviolence, and peace. Teaching beliefs of ESD (TESD) consists of three dimensions: relevance to daily life; students’ need in the future; and integrated teaching. With these validated instruments, future research and potential problems will be less strenuous.     

Examining Competition in Ontario’s Higher Education Market

Financial challenges have forced many publicly funded academic institutions in Ontario to adopt a corporate model and to use market tools to compete in the higher education market and maintain their enrolment and revenue levels. This study has analyzed how competition affects publicly funded universities in Ontario. Competition was examined by relating universities’ expenditures on price and non-price competitive variables (awards, marketing, graduates, and professors), as well as population to the total number of applicants, total number of enrollees, and capacity filling ratio over the period of 2006–2013. The study used quantitative research design and panel data regression method to draw conclusions. This study provides empirical evidence on how the effect of the adopted competitive variables varies for each university.     

Do the Study of Education and Teacher Education Belong at a Liberal Arts College?

The question whether the study of education and teacher education belong at a liberal arts college deserves careful consideration. In this essay Bruce Kimball analyzes and finds unpersuasive the three principled rationales that are most often advanced on behalf of excluding educational studies, teacher education, or both from a liberal arts college. Specifically, Kimball argues that no principled definition of the conventional liberal arts disciplines excludes the study of education without barring other fields now regarded as legitimate, and consistency demands that all such fields be excluded if any are. In addition, teacher education, even if considered as merely “craft know‐how” or as professional training, cannot be excluded from liberal arts colleges without arbitrarily classifying it as suspect and subjecting it to strict scrutiny. But the question of whether educational studies or teacher education fit any asserted definition of liberal education does not finally resolve the question of whether they belong in a liberal arts college. Kimball concludes by suggesting that there are moral and prudential reasons for liberal arts colleges to offer teacher education and, concomitantly, the study of education, even apart from the unpersuasive objections that they do not fit a definition of liberal education.     

Fred Clarke’s Ideals of Liberal Democracy: State and Community in Education

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the continuity and changes in Clarke’s ideas about the State and community in education, especially in relation to a rapidly changing political situation in England in the 1930s and 1940s. His ideas evolved in the intellectual context of British idealism. Moreover, in response to the threat to democracy arising from Fascism or Totalitarianism, the distinction between the State and community was a key theme in Clarke’s ideals of liberal democracy. Additionally, this paper also proposes the implications of Clarke’s ideas for future educational development.     

Canada’s Industry-University Co-op Education Accreditation System and Its Inspiration for the Evaluation of China’s Industry-University-Institute Cooperative Education

Abstract

The high degree of interest that higher education systems around the world have in employability has driven the profound development of industry-university cooperative education. Canada’s industry-university co-op education system has served as a model for global cooperative education, and its accreditation system guarantees the high quality of cooperative education. Canada’s industry-university co-op education accreditation system is characterized by the authority of the certifying institution, scientific accreditation standards, and operable review criteria. As it continuously improves, it has always embodied the best practices of co-op education. The social environment and administrative mechanisms for Chinese industry-university-institute cooperative education are still immature, and the primary functions of its evaluation system, including monitoring and diagnosis, feedback and regulation, and incentives and guidance, are an important starting point for perfecting the system. In learning from Canada’s accreditation experiences, it is necessary to update the concept of cooperative education, refine evaluation entities, and build a Chinese industry-university-institute cooperative education accreditation system with global vision, to further improve evaluation methods.     

Canada’s Implementation of the Right to Education for Students with Disabilities

This article analyses the content and legal implementation of the right to education as a human right in Canada. It seeks to expose the extent to which Canadian legislative mechanisms have succeeded in protecting the right to education of students with disabilities by using students with epilepsy as a test case. To that end, the article examines the barriers faced by students with epilepsy in realising their right to education. It explores the content of the right to education in international law so as to provide an ideal against which the legal implementation of the right to education in Canada can be measured. In examining the degree to which legal implementation of the right to education for students with disabilities lives up to the ideals espoused in international law, the article analyses the effectiveness of the legal mechanisms that implement the right to education for students with epilepsy in addressing the three types of barriers faced by these students. The revelation of where students with epilepsy fall through the cracks serves as a reflection of the limits of current legal mechanisms in protecting the right to education for students with disabilities.     

China’s Strategy for the Internationalization of Higher Education: An Overview

Over the past decades, the internationalization of higher education in China has had considerable achievements, and has contributed to the current transformation of the Chinese system into one of the largest and arguably most promising ones in the world. Setting the Chinese experience in an international context, this article assesses the latest developments. It argues that China’s internationalization of higher education is part of a much larger process of cultural integration between China and the West. From this perspective, it concludes that although China’s recent developments deserve to be noted, China has a considerable distance to go before its aspirations to create truly world-class universities are fulfilled.     

Education for Liberal Democracy: Universalising a Western Construct?

An influential view of liberalism and its view of education holds that it is a western construct unsuited to non-western societies. Bikhu Parekh's critique of liberal democracy is taken here as representative of that position. In challenging that view, this article shows through an analysis of recent policy that post-apartheid education in South Africa expresses a liberal view of education, just as the political order introduced in 1994 is a liberal one. If we adopt Parekh's principle that societies should be allowed to choose their own destinies, there are transcendental grounds for promoting liberalism and a liberal view of education outside of the liberal western democracies.     

Is the Physical Being Taken out of Physical Education? On the Possible Effects of High-Stakes Testing on an Embattled Profession’s Curriculum Goals

Building on recent discussions regarding how current national standards for physical education promote cognitive outcomes over physical outcomes, the authors explore how a new era in high-stakes testing is also contributing to an emphasis on the cognitive, over the physical. While high-stakes testing has been linked to reducing the amount of physical education schools offer, less attention has been given to the newest phase of high-stakes testing: the use of student achievement test data to evaluate teachers. To explore how this new high-stakes testing may influence physical education curriculum goals, the authors examine new teacher evaluation policies in New York State. The authors then propose an alternative rational for physical education. By promoting the physical—physical activity, exercise, and structured physical movement through physical education programming—physical education can play a unique and key role in creating the conditions for both student cognitive development and improved public health.     

What Are the Goals of Kindergarten? Teachers’ Beliefs and Their Perceptions of the Beliefs of Parents and of Agents of the Education System

Research Findings: The study examined the beliefs of kindergarten teachers (K-teachers) regarding the goals of kindergarten. We asked K-teachers to reflect on their own beliefs, their understanding of parents’ beliefs, and their understanding of the beliefs that guide agents of the education system. We further examined differences between K-teachers based on the type of kindergarten in which they worked (religious or secular) and the socioeconomic status of children’s families (middle-high or middle-low). A total of 120 K-teachers responded to closed questionnaires, and 12 teachers also participated in a semistructured interview. The results revealed an incongruence between K-teachers’ perspectives and their understanding of the positions of parents and of agents of the education system. K-teachers evaluated fostering children’s positive self-esteem as the most important goal and promoting literacy and mathematics skills as the least important. They believed, however, that parents and agents of the education system regard children’s advancement in literacy and mathematics skills as the most important goal. Practice or Policy: Recognizing this incongruence facilitates understanding of the rationale behind K-teachers’ actions and their relationships with parents and professional partners. It enables identification of topics that need to be addressed by the professional education community in order to create a dialogue among K-teachers, families, and policymakers.     

Gender Effects in Children’s Development and Education

This paper attempts to clarify several lines of research on gender in development and education, inter‐relating findings from studies on intuitive/informal knowledge with those from research on achievements and attitudes in science. It acknowledges the declining proportions of male teachers world‐wide and examination successes which indicate a reversal of educational disadvantage from female to male; as well as the recent evidence on the effects of the gender of teachers upon student success. An empirical contribution to the literature is offered, drawing from the gender‐related findings from research on children’s cosmologies in China and New Zealand with 346 boys and 340 girls (of whom 119 boys and 121 girls participated in the current study). The investigation focused on children’s concepts of the motion and shape of the Earth through observational astronomy and gave children opportunities to express their ideas in several modalities. The in‐depth interviews allowed children to share their meanings with gender differences becoming apparent (e.g. girls’ superior ability to visually represent their cosmologies and boys’ greater awareness of gravity). However, these differences were not universal across genders or cultures and marked similarities were apparent both in the content of children’s responses and in their reasoning processes. By comparing boy/girl cosmological concept categories and by tracking their developmental trends by age, statistical evidence revealed the extent of the similarities within and across these diverse cultures. The findings reinforce those from the authors’ knowledge restructuring and cultural mediation studies and provide support for the view that boys and girls have similar, holistic‐rather‐than‐fragmented, cosmologies which have features in common across cultures and ethnic groups.