A EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONAL AUDIT

The project of CRE for a European institutional audit of higher education institutions is presented, justified, and briefly described. It responds to the increasing concerns of all actors involved in higher education with quality in every meaning of the word. As the integration of Europe proceeds, as course programmes increasingly emphasize inter‐disciplinarity, as students and teachers become increasingly mobile, the role and importance of such a Europe‐wide audit is enhanced.

     

Cinquante années de débats et de recherches sur l’école française

Two major factors have contributed to the evolution of French historiography in the history of education in the past 50 years. The first relates to the general orientation of public debate about schools, which has shifted from a paradigm concerning democratisation to one that focuses on student success rates and the efforts to eliminate inequalities of all sorts. The second factor that has affected scholarly orientations lies in changes linked to academic positioning between pedagogy, history, and the educational sciences in the context of increasing university hirings, at least until recently. These two changes in terms of scholarly paradigms and scholarly professional identities have encouraged the development of a certain number of approaches and questions: a reconsideration of the historic role of the State, an interest in a greater diversity of actors in the educational process, and a re-evaluation of the cognitive, cultural and social effects of teaching at all levels. Despite this, the history of education plays a minor role today in France, not only in teacher training but also in debates about the future of schools.     

Watching MOOCs together: investigating co-located MOOC study groups

Research suggests that massive open online course (MOOC) students prefer to study in groups, and that social facilitation within the study groups may render the learning of difficult concepts a pleasing experience. We report on a longitudinal study that investigates how co-located study groups watch and study MOOC videos together. The study was conducted with on-campus flipped classroom students. Our subjects reported an overall high satisfaction with the study group style. The research reveals that students like to stay synchronized in the group while watching MOOC videos. However, they have to find a balance between synchronization, video interaction, and the amount of conversation. Watching MOOCs on a shared display addresses the need of synchronicity, and the distribution of control can increase the video interactivities.     

Books on Research Methodology

Mary N. Barton and Marion V. Bell's compilation Reference Books: A Brief Guide (Baltimere: Enoch Pratt Free Library, $1.25)

Martha L. Hackman's The Practical Bibliographer (Prentice-Hall, $5.95 cloth, $2.95 paper)

Hubert M. Blalock An Introduction to Social Research (Prentice-Hall, $5.95 cloth, $2.95 paper)     

Service ‘CUIDE'‐‐Coopération Universitaire pour l'Information et la Documentation des Enseignants

The ongoing reform in science education in many countries, including Israel, has attainment of scientific literacy for all as one of its main goals. In this context, it is important to provide teachers with the opportunity to construct meaning for the term science literacy and by doing so to obtain a clear understanding of the new teaching goals. Here we report on a study in which teachers, as part of their professional development, were involved in defining the term ‘chemical literacy’; they discussed the need for it, and suggested educational experiences that are necessary in order to attain it. The programme was conducted as part of a reform in the content, as well as in the pedagogy, of chemistry education in Israel. The collected data provide some insights regarding the process by which the teachers’ perception of ‘chemical literacy’ developed and the way actual school practice influences teachers’ perception of ‘chemical literacy’.     

La regulación alimenticia del carácter: Mitos,realidades y consecuencias prácticas

RESUMEN

Este trabajo plantea y justifica la necesidad de buscar modelos alimenticios que permitan al niño proseguir sus estudios en óptimas condiciones. Existe una relación entre los alimentos ingeridos, el funcionamiento intelectual y el carácter. Los padres y educadores, junto con el niño, deben encontrar el régimen que más le convenga.     

Adult literacy education and development in Thailand: an historical analysis of policies and programmes from the 1930s to the present

This study of adult literacy education in Thailand analyses the ways in which the Thai state has historically shaped adult literacy education policies for development. For the authoritarian Thai state of the 1940s and 1950s, literacy education was a means of promoting nationalism through an imagined community of Thai citizens. For the developmentalist state of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, literacy education was the means to create a new Thai working class for industrial capitalism and export-oriented growth. For the liberal democratic state of the 1990s, literacy education was re-oriented toward a post-Fordist economy. Most recently, in the wake of the 1997 economic crisis and subsequent IMF and ADB ‘structural adjustment’ policies, state educational policies have shifted to an emphasis on fiscal economics over education. While state ideologies of educational policy are dominant in this historical narrative, they also possess internal contradictions contested by popular movements and social groups outside dominant classes. Literacy education in Thailand is, as such, not only the site of production and reproduction of state ideologies, but also of struggles over their meaning. Thus we find within the authoritarian nationalism of the 1940s and 1950s, a movement for popular democracy through literacy education born of the 1932 Revolution; within the work-oriented literacy programs of the 1970s, a trend towards broader community development inspired by the student revolution of October 1973; and within the neoliberal Thai state's embrace of globalization, a call for further democratization of educational opportunities first promoted by the May 1992 uprising and then embodied in the new Constitution of 1997 and the Education Act of 1999.     

Activist forest monks,adult learning and the Buddhist environmental movement in Thailand 1

In the tradition of grassroots environmental movements worldwide, activist Buddhist monks in rural Thailand have, since the late 1980s, led a popular movement to protect local forest, water and land resources while at the same time challenging dominant state and corporate ‘economist’ development paradigms. Most famously, these ‘development monks’ (phra nak phathanaa) and ‘ecology monks’ (phra nak anuraksaa) have led local villagers and NGO activists in the symbolic ordaining of large trees and forests (buat paa). They do this in the hope that they will not only protect forests from logging, but also teach local people the value of conserving forest resources. This paper charts the history, philosophy and practice of the activist forest monk movement in Thailand, its contribution to our collective knowledge of adult education in new social movements, and its value to environmental adult education.