Education And Society New Approaches For New Challenges

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a pedagogical approach that has the capacity to create vibrant and active learning environments in higher education. However, both experienced PBL practitioners and those new to PBL often find themselves looking for guidance on how to engage and energise a PBL curriculum. New Approaches to Problem-based Learning: Revitalising your Practice in Higher Education provides that guidance from a range of different, complementary perspectives. Leading practitioners in the field as well as new voices in PBL teaching and learning have collaborated to produce this text. Each chapter provides practical and experienced accounts of issues and ideas for PBL, as well as a strong theoretical and evidence base. Whether you are an experienced PBL practitioner, or new to the processes and principles of PBL, this book will help you to find ways of revitalising and enriching your practice and of enhancing the learning experience in a range of higher education contexts.

To capitalise on the new international resolve epitomised by COP21 and the agreement on the universal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires a renewed effort to promote new policy thinking and new approaches to the great challenges ahead. Responding to new challenges means we have to ...

Educating for the Twenty-First Century explores critical issues facing education in the 21st century.

The rapidly-evolving world of the 21st century faces tremendous challenges of economic, ecological, social, cultural and global dimensions to be handled by citizens with an increasing self-consciousness. Naming just some of the challenges provides immediate insight into their magnitude, nature and diversity: reduce and prevent international instability, reduce over exploitation of earth resources, respond to the greenhouse threat, meet the needs of a rapidly growing global population, create a fairer distribution of wealth, guide rural and urban development. These are just some of the interrelated and interacting challenges of developing sustainably in a highly dynamic and interconnected world. They are characterised by the need for long-term approaches, the involvement of many stakeholders with conflicting interests and the fact that their approach demands parallel routes on different scales.

This book explores the advantages of and challenges concerning Special Religious Education (SRE) in multicultural Australia and argues for the need for General Religious Education (GRE) as well. Through the lens of the most recent scholarship, and drawing on an in-depth qualitative study and specific case studies, the book examines the current debate on the role of religious education within government schools. It addresses key concepts of values education, spirituality, health and wellbeing, and cultural and religious identity. It analyses why it is important to retain SRE, together with GRE, as government policy. It explores highly relevant, controversial and contested issues regarding SRE, including the 30% of Australia’s population who declare themselves as having “no religion”, and brings fresh insights to the table. While secularization has increased in both the national and international spheres, there has also been an increase in fundamentalism within religious beliefs. Events such as the September 11 terror attacks and the more recent mass shootings by white supremacists and eco-fascists in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Pittsburgh and San Diego in the USA are reminders that religion is still a major actor in the twenty-first century. This poses new challenges for the relationship between church and state, and demonstrates the need to revisit the role of religious education within government schools. While the importance of GRE is generally acknowledged, SRE has increasingly come under attack by some researchers and teacher and parent bodies as being inappropriate and contradictory to the values of the postmodern world. On the other hand, the key stakeholders from all the faith traditions in Australia wish to retain the SRE classes in government schools. The book addresses this burning issue, and shows that it is relevant not only for Australia but also globally.

This book contains papers in the fields of collaborative learning, new learning models and applications, project-based learning, game-based education, educational virtual environments, computer-aided language learning (CALL) and teaching best practices. We are currently witnessing a significant transformation in the development of education and especially post-secondary education. To face these challenges, higher education has to find innovative ways to quickly respond to these new needs. There is also pressure by the new situation in regard to the Covid pandemic. These were the aims connected with the 23rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2020), which was held online by University of Technology Tallinn, Estonia from 23 to 25 September 2020. Since its beginning in 1998, this conference is devoted to new approaches in learning with a focus on collaborative learning. Nowadays the ICL conferences are a forum of the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Learning and Engineering Pedagogy. In this way, we try to bridge the gap between ‘pure’ scientific research and the everyday work of educators. Interested readership includes policymakers, academics, educators, researchers in pedagogy and learning theory, school teachers, learning industry, further and continuing education lecturers, etc.

The title of this anthology mirrors the theme of the 9th Nordic Conference on Adult Education and Learning. The caption reflects how adult education plays an integral part in our societies by advancing new learning that generates possibilities to address contemporary challenges. While the chapters reflect the wide variety of research connected to the field of adult education, the authors agree on the ideal of combining the development of work life competences with the promotion of democratic empowerment, as demonstrated in the tradition of Nordic adult education.