New Directions In Education

A collection of essays which critically examines education in the African context and presents possible courses of action to reinvent its future.

Through rapid developments in commerce, transportation and communication, people once separated by space, language and politics are now interwoven into a complex global system (Friedman, 2005). With the rise of new technology, local populations, businesses and states are better equipped to participate and act in a thriving international environment. Rising instability in the Middle East is immediately reported to oil and gas brokers in the U.S. Within seconds cable channels, iPods, social networking sites, and cell phones are relaying how protests in Egypt and Libya give hope to citizens around the world yearning for freedom. As events like 9/11 and the 2008 Financial Crisis have demonstrated, there is no retreating from the interconnectedness of the global system. As societies strive to empower citizens with the skills, understandings and dispositions needed to operate in an interconnected global age, teachers are being encouraged to help students use technologies to develop new knowledge and foster cross cultural understandings. As pressures mount for society to equip today’s youth with both the global and digital understandings necessary to confront the challenges of the 21st century, a more thorough analysis must be undertaken to examine the role of technology on student learning (Peters, 2009). This work will highlight the complex, contested, and contingent ways new technologies are being used by today’s youth in a digital and global age. This text will present audiences with in-demand research that investigates the ways in which student use of technology mediates and complicates their learning about the world, its people, and global issues.

A comprehensive study that is also practical and realistic, New Directions in Special Education outlines principles for decisionmaking about special education at every level—from the family to the classroom, school, and district—and for state and federal policy. With this volume, leading scholar and disability advocate Thomas Hehir opens a new round of debate on the future of special education. Extending the conceptual framework developed in his seminal 2002 article in the Harvard Educational Review, "Eliminating Ableism in Education," Hehir examines the ways that cultural attitudes about disability systematically distort the education of children with special needs and uses this analysis to lay out a fresh approach to special education policy and practice. Hehir traces the roots of "ableism"—the pervasive devaluation of people with disabilities—and shows how negative attitudes continue to shape debates in the field. He assesses recent trends in special education policy, particularly the shift of emphasis from compliance to outcomes, and discusses in depth the successes and limitations of the inclusion movement. He also investigates the impact of standards-based reforms on children with disabilities and critically examines the promise of Universal Design for Learning.

This book is based on the workshop that kickstarted the NATO Science Committee Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology. We invited the leaders in the field to attend this inaugural meeting and were delighted by the quality of the attendance, the papers delivered at the workshop and this book. Many of the authors have subsequently run other meetings funded by the Special Programme and have, or are in the process of, editing books which focus on particular topics. This book covers all the major themes in the area ranging from fundamental theoretical work to empirical studies of state of the art technological innovations. Tim O'Shea chaired the NATO Survey Group which planned the Programme and the subsequent Panel which disbursed funds in the first two years of the Programme. He would like to thank the other group and panel members, namely, Professor N Balacheff, Professor D Bjomer, Professor H Bouma, Professor P C Duchastel, Professor A Dias de Figueiredo, Dr D Jonassen and Professor T Liao. He would like to offer his special thanks to Dr L V da Cunha the NATO Programme Director for his unfailing support and patience. Eileen Scanlon was the Director of the Workshop which is the basis of this book. She offers heartfelt thanks to the contributors and to the following who provided practical help with the meeting or the production of this book: Mrs Pauline Adams, Dr Mike Baker, Mrs Kathy Evans, Mrs Patricia Roe, Mr Dave Perry and Ms Fiona Spensley.

New Directions for Research in Foreign Language Education brings together contributions by reputed scholars that examine the challenges, opportunities, and benefits of teaching and learning foreign languages. With a particular focus on languages other than English, the book looks at the socio-political dimension of language learning and teaching and the need to re-theorize multilingualism for our age. The volume includes a range of perspectives, from language teaching as an act of reconciliation to language learning across the lifespan, from innovations in assessment and curriculum to critical appraisals of pedagogy and textbook materials. Each chapter presents a clear case study drawn from diverse contexts to illustrate the different concerns of the contributors. The book is a valuable resource for all students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers who share an interest in researching multilingualism and the different facets of teaching and learning foreign languages.

Provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive review of contemporary research in education policy implementation. A companion to Allan R. Odden’s Education Policy Implementation, also published by SUNY Press, this book presents original work by a new generation of scholars contributing to education policy implementation research. The contributors define education policy implementation as the product of the interaction among particular policies, people, and places. Their analyses of previous generations of implementation research reveal that contemporary findings not only build directly on lessons learned from the past, but also seek to deepen past findings. These contemporary researchers also break from the past by seeking a more nuanced, contingent, and rigorous theory-based explication of how implementation unfolds. They argue that researchers and practitioners can help improve education policy implementation by not asking simply what works, but rather focusing their attention on what works, for whom, where, when, and why. Meredith I. Honig is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle.