Empowerment For Teaching Excellence Through Virtuous Agency

This books offers new ways to think about teaching excellence in higher education and presents a definition of the concept of teaching excellence. It offers a fresh interpretation of Boyers famous account of scholarship as the foundation of university teaching. To fully understand the nature of teaching excellence in higher education, the book gives an account of the various dimensions of the domain of university teaching and the core drivers required to bring those domains to life. The idea of empowerment underlies the journey to excellence in teaching. The book argues that university lecturers aspiring to become excellent should be active agents, strongly pursuing the development of their perfectible abilities required for high quality teaching. The work draws on recent developments in virtue theory to set out the qualities of character requisite for guiding and driving university lecturers to grow and develop into excellent teachers.

By investigating the re-emergence of intellectual, moral, and civic virtues in the practice and teaching of science, this text challenges the increasing professionalization of science; questions the view of scientific knowledge as objective; and highlights the relationship between democracy and science. Written by a range of experts in science, the history of science, education and philosophy, the text establishes the historical relationship between natural philosophy and the Aristotelian virtues before moving to the challenges that the relationship faces, with the emergence, and increasing hegemony, brought about by the professionalization of science. Exploring how virtues relate to citizenship, technology, and politics, the chapters in this work illustrate the ways in which virtues are integral to understanding the values and limitations of science, and its role in informing democratic engagement. The text also demonstrates how the guiding virtues of scientific inquiry can be communicated in the classroom to the benefit of both individuals and wider societies. Scholars in the fields of Philosophy of Science, Ethics and Philosophy of Education, as well as Science Education, will find this book to be highly useful.

South African education faces tremendous challenges - several of which relate to curriculum development. The aim of this guide is to empower teachers to become agents of curriculum change, to make a positive contribution towards the development and transformation of education.

This book demonstrates the central role of ethical character in effective social work practice. Showcasing select biographies of social workers, it reveals how skilled practitioners have developed such core virtues as compassion, love, commitment, prudence, respect for human dignity and a critical sense of social justice through the course of their working lives, and how they apply these virtues in a wide variety of settings and situations to enhance the well-being of the people and communities they work with. As such, the book offers a powerful and inspiring resource to help educators, students and practitioners understand the unbreakable link between what social workers and other social welfare and social development professionals do and who they are, and thereby cultivate core qualities that should be promoted. “Pawar, Hugman, Alexandra and Anscombe have found a novel and creative way to explore virtues in social work by examining the career contributions of a group of social work practitioners engaged in ‘virtuous action’. Their stories are inspiring and they provide much-needed role models for students and practitioners embarking on empowering practice” – Dr. Mel Gray, Professor of Social Work, The University of Newcastle. New South Wales, Australia. "In an age where the virtues of truth, cooperation and “doing the right thing” are increasingly being eroded in public life, this book serves as both an inspiration and invaluable resource to all social work practitioners seeking to reflect on, and improve their practice" - Dr. Martin Ryan, Social Worker, Counsellor/Community Educator, Jesuit Social Services, Melbourne. “The editors are to be commended for examining the virtuous characters of these ten professional social workers. The use of detailed biographies is an innovative and important approach which helps us to appreciate just what a tremendous impact the virtues can have." - Dr. Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, Director, The Character Project, Wake Forest University, USA.

Centering on a qualitative study of three female English teachers in Shanghai, China, the book explores female language teachers' perceived discrepancies and agency exercised in their teaching, research and teacher learning practices. By adopting multiple research methods, such as narrative questionnaire, metaphor, timeline, interview and classroom observation, this study reveals that female language teachers’ agency is a dynamic entity manifested in the ongoing negotiation of agency belief, agency practice, and agency inclination, as well as the interaction of individual and the environment. Though there are certain limitations concerning representativeness and generalizability, the author provides a thick description of how female language teachers in China are exercising agency to fulfill their career development, which offers insightful suggestions to language education in both China and broader areas globally. The book will appeal to researchers studying teacher education and foreign (English) language teaching, university teachers, especially female foreign language teachers, PhD students and graduate students, as well as career women.

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and human environments. Poverty also goes against the core values of democratic societies. Lotter talks about poverty in ways that depict this devastating human condition clearly. He shows why inequalities associated with poverty require our serious moral concern.

Many countries now employ national evaluation systems to demonstrate publicly that universities provide a quality education. However, the current processes of quality evaluation are often detached from the practices of teaching and learning. In particular, those who teach and those who learn still have to be won over to such audit processes.This book argues that it is time for the higher education sector to concern itself with the human dimension so as to develop both academic professionalism and students’ commitment to their learning. Based on five completed research projects, which explore academics’ and students’ experiences and their views of quality evaluation, the book argues that developing the intrinsic values of teaching and learning held by academics and students is key to achieving high quality education.In this book, the author critically reviews the four most frequently used terms related to current quality evaluation: ‘fitness for purpose’, ‘value for money’, ‘student satisfaction’ and ‘students-as-customers’, and argues for a motivationally intelligent quality approach, emphasising the moral dimension and the intrinsic values of academics and students. The author also outlines an improved quality evaluation system that encourages and increases academics’ and students’ commitment to teaching and learning.