Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

This paper falls into two parts--a Western interpretation and an Eastern critique of the same process. The first part provides an interpretation of how we learn to become culturally embedded individuals. The paper notes the learning processes in the formation of the cultural and national self. We, in the West, have traditionally assumed that the…

Despite its multilingual nature Cameroon's educational system provides for full immersion into either French-medium or English-medium education from the first year schooling. Following political tensions in the early 1990s the country decided to reaffirm its commitment to promote bilingualism in the educational system with the outcome being the…

The last few decades have witnessed both an expansion and a transformation of immigration flows, which pose significant challenges with respect to how people work with differences across culture and space. Against this background, this paper explores how some Chinese immigrant engineers respond to differences in the Canadian labour market. It not…

The PISA survey influences educational policies through an international competitive process which is not wholly rationally-oriented. Firstly, PISA league tables act normatively upon the definition of formal educational aims while the survey tests cannot evaluate the educational systems' relative strengths with regards to such aims. We argue that…

This research review examines trends in recent scholarship concerning primary school literacy instruction in Southern Africa. Past scholarship, particularly that which originated from western researchers, focused on technical or structural issues facing literacy instruction in the region, such as language of instruction, school conditions,…

The cultural validity of a psychological or educational theory is a function of its sensitizing and heuristic power for a given task addressed by a given community. African universities have inherited from the West a number of institutionalized arrangements for learning that tend to decontextualize the learning process by extracting learners from…

In light of globalization-driven educational demands and growing student alienation, there is a pressing need to reevaluate the cultural context of schooling and learning. Comparative education studies have potential to illuminate the complex interplay of personal, social, and structural factors that influence student engagement in particular…

An overview of Mexican history since the Revolution (1917) examines the centrality of the middle class in the development of the corporativist state and its recent unraveling, the role assigned to and played by education within the corporativist political configuration, and how a corporativist state conditions educational systems and practices. A…

Links aspects of peripherality to the issue of education in small island states. Studies island states as isolated products of the formative period of our world economic order. Discusses implications for contemporary island education, especially structure and curriculum. 55 references. (Author/TES)

Interviews were conducted with 244 women teaching in universities in Finland, France, East Germany, West Germany, and Great Britain to discover causes for the minority position of women who teach in universities. Women's position appeared to depend not on characteristics of individual educational systems but on common factors--social attitudes,…

Discusses the problems of perspective in dealing with minority cultures, citing many examples from world history. Discusses effects of dominant languages and cultures upon minority ones. Mobility is examined as a feature of peripheral cultures with fragile economies. Implications for multicultural education discussed. 23 notes and references. (TES)

School governance reform in post-apartheid South Africa aimed to democratize schooling while accommodating diverse school histories of underdevelopment or self-management. Analysis of relevant legislation shows the reform was structured to allow representative democracy and partnerships. But two recent studies suggest that governance reforms have…

Examines religious traditions--Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Western Christianity--to see how women were taught and what knowledge was transmitted to them. Notes that women have always had some access to religious knowledge in informal ways but were excluded from formal education once sacred knowledge became transmitted in an…

Discusses three areas in which prevailing attitudes seem to work against equal opportunities for women: (1) attitudes underlying female choices of certain subjects and occupations; (2) attitudes of society and employers toward women workers; and (3) attitudes which attribute child-care and domestic tasks almost exclusively to females. (JHZ)