Across the United States, a movement to create a new kind of public school--"autonomous district schools"--is giving districts the freedoms charter schools receive. Like charter schools, autonomous district schools are freed from innovation-inhibiting state and district policies, allowing talented educators to make academic and…

Policy changes are dependent on institutional logic. As they are analogies shared by a group, when metaphors for universities change, they ultimately promote changes to university governance models as well. Taking analogies into account, university reforms have proceeded while revolving around the metaphors of the university as government and the…

Learning in communities of practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today's knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically toward CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or develop a software ecosystem to support their activities.…

Instructional leadership teams (ILTs) advance school improvement by building the capacity of school-based leaders to lead improvement work. The role of central office administrators, and particularly of principal supervisors, supporting the learning and development of ILTs, however, is relatively unknown. This mixed methods study explored the…

When the "for teachers" courses were first introduced at San Diego State University (SDSU) by Frank Stites in U.S. history and Ross Dunn in world history in the 1980s, they represented pioneering efforts to augment the History faculty's commitment to training K-12 teachers. From the start, the courses challenged students to move beyond…

Higher education institutions face many competing priorities and are still expected to serve the public good. Faith-based institutions, in particular, aim to meet a faith-inspired calling and serve the communities in which they are situated while guiding students in their faith formation by integrating service and academic priorities. In this…

This paper proposes a strategy for ethnographically investigating politically disparate education organizations. I develop the notion of researching as a critical secretary: a method of participant-observation conducted alongside those observed to hold the least formal power. Drawing on data from an initial empirical effort to implement this…

In the last five years, the number of international students has increased significantly in Hungary, motivating the creation of a clear promotional strategy and involvement of other agents, such as foreign missions. The role of the national coordinating body, namely Tempus Public Foundation (National Agency, TPF), is inevitable in building a…

Purpose: Given greater awareness of environmental issues and the acceleration of climate change, universities are increasingly requiring undergraduate students to complete coursework in environmental issues. Research has shown that environmental courses hosted in science departments can be too challenging for students with no science background.…

Flipped teaching is a trend within higher education. Through flipped teaching the learning environment can be altered by moving the lecture out of the classroom through online recordings, while in-classroom sessions focus on active learning and engaging students in their own learning process. In this paper, we used focus groups comprised of male…

Purpose: This paper explores the main factors that influence farmers in acquiring agricultural knowledge and adopting technologies with the aim of better understanding the agricultural innovation systems in West Africa. Design/Methodology/Approach: We use data collected between 2013 and 2014 across rice hubs in five West African countries: Benin,…

Despite predominant macro-level changes of performance management at Chinese universities, little attention has been paid to how the disciplinary technologies have been interpreted and enacted at the level of individual academics. Using qualitative data with 26 participants at a Chinese research university, this study provides evidence of…

Despite growing interest in promoting environmental education (EE), as in other countries, its status within the formal education system in Israel is still ambiguous and its effectiveness questionable. Proceeding from the view of structure-agent interdependency, the present study focuses on teachers' identity as key to understanding the situation…

This paper provides a critical account of the role of universities in the development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong.To do so, the paper examines the political economy of Hong Kong's innovation and technology development. It outlines a finance-led regime, under which the vision of long-term innovation initiatives is transformed into…

Within the conditions of rapid development of internationalization processes, the scale of international cooperation between tertiary educational institutions is growing at a quick rate. Currently, the practice of international cooperation between tertiary educational institutions is the most commonly encountered in the form of: international…