Through Target 4.7 of SDG4 on 'quality education', Agenda 2030 invites governments to take ownership of progress towards ensuring 'Education for Sustainable Development' (ESD) becomes embedded into all levels of education. However, conceptual analysis suggests an ongoing blindspot related to the significance of systems literacy in fostering the…

"Systems Approach to Early Childhood Development: Bridging Theory, Policy and Practice" offers a comprehensive and compelling, evidence-based roadmap for strengthening development in early childhood years. Drawing on neuroscience, developmental psychology, developmental diversity and laws for protecting children, the book presents the…

India is home to the largest population of adolescents in the world, of which nearly half experience one or more adverse childhood experiences. Despite rising interest in building trauma-sensitive school systems globally, such initiatives are limited in India. This paper presents the development, implementation, and acceptability of the Fostering…

Purpose: As the skills economy becomes the norm, learning focused on skills, learners who understand those skills and can iterate the learners to potential employers, and hiring personnel who prioritize skills when making personnel decisions create a visible currency that can be leveraged by all the stakeholders. This paper seeks to analyze those…

System theory defines the life course ("Lebenslauf") as the medium of education. It is a medium, because the educator sees it as a potential for intervention, impressing pedagogically acceptable forms onto it. Yet the single individuals who are educated are autonomous observers who are exposed to an immense quantity of possible…

Visual attention both guides and is guided by learning and memory systems. In this article, we use a multiple-memory systems framework to examine the interplay between attention and memory that begins in early postnatal life. We review how attention and memory interact to support infant development with respect to perceptual learning about objects…

The need for change in the education system is obvious and overwhelming. But each stakeholder group has its own ideas about why the system is broken and how to fix it. Competing priorities, political inertia and diminishing budgets maintain the dysfunctional status quo. This essential text examines the underlying causes behind the key challenges…

This book explores the online behavior and safeguarding of children with special education needs (SEN) in the digital world. Founded in research which evidences key stakeholder perspectives, this book informs and guides stakeholders towards sensibly balancing risk and opportunities online with an understanding that SEN children may face some…

The Grand Challenges for Social Work were introduced by the American Academy for Social Work & Social Welfare in 2016, which are social problems that are interrelated and "exceedingly complex". We discuss the relevance of complexity theory, operationalized by complex adaptive systems (CAS), to the Grand Challenges. CAS moves beyond…

The purpose of career guidance includes the support of citizens' agency. In this article, we develop a framework for analysing the internal structure of agency within career guidance theory. This framework is inspired by relational sociology. The approach is used in an analysis of two contemporary career guidance theories: the systems theory…

This article explains and provides the theoretical foundations for and examples of systematization of experiences as a way to plan and evaluate socially engaged university extension programs.

Academic and research libraries are undergoing a profound transformation, shaped by technological advancements, shifting societal dynamics, and evolving institutional priorities. This essay examines how these forces are driving libraries to evolve into specialized and distinct models, shaping their future and drawing parallels to the Cambrian…

In this article, we examine the transformative influence of Anthropocene-driven semantics on the education system through Luhmann's social systems theory. We analyze how the historical and current concepts of "Human" and individuality have shaped educational semantics and influenced the system's self-description. Critical perspectives…

We defend in this paper the importance of redistributing power in the field of education development by enhancing the self-sustainability of education initiatives and minimizing their roots in dependency -- these as pre-requisites for improving their sustainable development outcomes. We do this by considering an education development initiative…

We present this brief reflection on key aspects of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the implications of the worldwide focus on achieving the sustainable development goals as external observers of the evaluation endeavor around the world. We have conducted and participated in evaluations, but it is not our primary field of work and…