Working Knowledge In A Globalizing World

Covers issues of vocational education and training (VET) in light of social and economic changes, such as apprenticeship, information technology, structural adjustment, and shifting regional political and economic agendas. Reports on global VET concerns in a dozen countries around the world.

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.

The essays in this collection address the current crisis in area studies, a crisis that differs from its perennial struggle with the established academic disciplines. This crisis stems from the confluence of three related circumstances: the end of the Cold War; greater economic and cultural fluidity across political borders; and contradictory intellectual trends in the academy, which include on the one hand a renaissance of universalizing thinking in the social sciences and on the other .hand, the rise of post-colonial studies and debates about modernity, postmodernity, and cultural hybridization. Although the essays differ markedly in their focus and strategies, the authors all demonstrate that local knowledge, including serious study of individual cultures and proficiency in foreign languages, which are vital to understanding rapidly changing global patterns and to countering universal claims by the social sciences. While the authors also agree that area studies must reject their enthnocentric heritages and adopt inventive new contours, they present a diversity

Local knowledge refers to knowledge and expertise, which originate from local and indigenous cultures that have developed over time. Its practices have been absorbed naturally and effortlessly into the local communities. However, due to globalization and modernization, much of this knowledge has not been practiced and will be lost in time if efforts are not taken to preserve, conserve and transfer it to the community. Through the discussion of six articles written based on local and international research findings, this book brings together researchers committed to local knowledge in sharing the process of documentation on local knowledge transfer issues and challenges, and the methodology of knowledge transfer. Thus, new ideas are presented to promote the practice of preserving and conserving local knowledge to the practitioners, students and communities.

In communications, health care, and economics, events, discoveries, and decisions that originate beyond national borders today routinely influence national policies and practices. But how are our system of education, and particularly our universities, affected by globalization? A New World of Knowledge examines how globalization has obliged universities in Canada to reassess and rethink the international dimension of their mission and practice. All now include an international dimension in their mission statement. Is this a true statement of educational principles? Or is it simply a marketing message intended to position the university to cope with budget reductions through the sale of educational services? A New World of Knowledge looks at the important role that Canadian universities have played in shaping Canada's response to the problems of international development. It provides the historical backdrop and level of analysis needed to properly inform choices for the future of higher education in Canada and abroad. The book will interest teachers and administrators in institutions of higher education, especially in international affairs and educational studies; practitioners in organizations that depend on university linkages (such as in NGOs and research-granting organizations); government officials in the education sector; and students looking for an international education.

In Knowledge, Curriculum, and Preparation for Work, Stephanie Allais and Yael Shalem offer a timely collection of articles approaching debates on economic and social change and employment within different types of economies.

This book discusses new contradictions in the processes of vocational education. It poses questions on how today's knowledge is to be taught and what should be learned within vocational education. The meanings of work, the characteristics of knowledge and knowing, and the processes of vocational learning and educating are complex in contemporary societies. The vocabularies, discourses, and policies are changing globally. Coexisting and contradictory processes, practices, ideas, and ideals shift, waver, and then take hold. It is difficult to understand how they relate to their societies and to the lives of human beings. The neo-liberal policies governing the relations between capital and labour - the state and the labour market - severely affect both the changing and unchanging features of working and learning. The book approaches vocational education from three perspectives: moral and symbolic orders that are embedded in cultural and social relations, working and knowing at school and at the work place, and the dynamic combination of knowing and working as these are experienced within the ideas and practices of vocational education.

This book's unique perspective stems from its “knowledgediamond” framework to examine how individuals, communities,organizations and host industries reciprocally influence each otherin the course of knowledge work. This highly topical book focuses on work-based projects as afocus for organizational learning. Establishes the link between individual, community,organization and industry learning. Suggests that organizations need to recognise and understandthis link if they are to capitalize on project-basedlearning. Incorporates material on project-based learning in virtualcommunities. Refers to different examples, such as the film industry, thesoftware industry and the boat building industry. Includes end-of-chapter questions provoking reflection anddiscussion.