In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability – in local living as well as in education – is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.

In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend.

This book explores the fascinating and complex interactions between the ways that culture and education operate within and across societies. In some cases, education is imagined as an integrated part of general cultural phenomena; in others, educational interventions become the means for transforming the cultural circumstances of different populations. The contributors to this volume show how certain educational practices produce new cultural and professional knowledge; discuss the impacts of initially foreign educational ideas and institutions on established cultural institutions in very different societies; and explore the impacts of modernity and modern educational ideas on more traditional gendered and religious practices and communities. The book also provided striking examples of when these impacts were not benign. Increasingly powerful twentieth-century governments attempted to use education and schools to produce new, reformed citizens suitable for their newly created colonial, national, socialist, and fascist states. The expectation was that cultural and social transformation might be engineered, in major part, through schooling. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

While race and culture remain important variables in how young people experience schools, they are often misunderstood by educators and school personnel. Building on three studies that investigated schools successful in closing the achievement gap, Tyrone Howard shows how adopting greater awareness and comprehensive understanding of race and culture can improve educational outcomes. Important reading for anyone who is genuinely committed to promoting educational equity and excellence for all children, this accessible book: Outlines the changing racial, ethnic, and cultural demographics in U.S. schools. Calls for educators to pay serious attention to how race and culture play out in school settings. Presents empirical data from schools that have improved achievement outcomes for racially and culturally diverse students. Focuses on ways in which educators can partner with parents and communities.

This powerful book shows the many unintended ways in which social and educational policy can shape, if not constrain, the work of educating students. Focusing on the creation and history of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) from its inception in 1965 to the present, Stein shows how underlying assumptions of policymakers and bureaucratic red tape actually interfere with both educational practice and the goals of the legislation itself. This examination is especially timely, given the recent passage of the No Child Left Behind Act and its sweeping attempts to raise achievement and reduce failure, especially for underserved populations.

Considered the father of multicultural education in the US and known throughout the world as one of the field’s most important founder, theorist and researcher, James A. Banks has collected here twenty-one of his most important and best works from across the span of his career. Drawing out the major themes that have shaped the field of multicultural education as well as outlining the development of Banks’ own career, these articles, chapters and papers focus on eight key issues: black studies and the teaching of history research and research issues teaching ethnic studies teaching social studies for decision-making and citizen action multiethnic education and school reform multicultural education and knowledge construction the global dimensions of multicultural education democracy, diversity and citizenship education. The last part of the book consists of a selected bibliography of all Banks’ publications over his forty-year career, as a source of further reading on each of these pivotal ideas.

This book analyzes equity and diversity in schools and teacher education. Within this broad and necessary context, the book raises some critical issues not previously explored in many multicultural and urban education texts.

Publisher Description

This anthology contains selected papers from the 'Science as Culture' conference held at Lake Como, and Pavia University Italy, 15-19 September 1999. The conference, attended by about 220 individuals from thirty countries, was a joint venture of the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group (its fifth conference) and the History of Physics and Physics Teaching Division of the European Physical Society (its eighth conference). The magnificient Villa Olmo, on the lakeshore, provided a memorable location for the presentors of the 160 papers and the audience that discussed them. The conference was part of local celebrations of the bicentenary of Alessandro Volta's creation of the battery in 1799. Volta was born in Como in 1745, and for forty years from 1778 he was professor of experimental physics at Pavia University. The conference was fortunate to have had the generous financial support of the Italian government's Volta Bicentenary Fund, Lombardy region, Pavia University, Italian Research Council, and Kluwer Academic Publishers. The papers included here, have or will be, published in the journal Science & Education, the inaugural volume (1992) of which was a landmark in the history of science education publication, because it was the first journal in the field devoted to contributions from historical, philosophical and sociological scholarship. Clearly these 'foundational' disciplines inform numerous theoretical, curricular and pedagogical debates in science education. Contemporary Concerns The reseach promoted by the International and European Groups, and by the journal, is central to science education programmes in most areas of the world.

This collection of Ralph Smith's writings provides a comprehensive overview of his extraordinary contributions to understanding the importance of aesthetics in education. These essays record his lifelong efforts to construct a defensible rationale for the arts in general education and a workable curriculum for art education in our public schools (K-16). The topics covered range from liberal education to arts education, the relationship of art, aesthetics, and aesthetic education to teaching and curriculum, the arts and the humanities, and cultural diversity.