Today's global economy requires a highly skilled labor force that is prepared to compete on the world stage. Studies from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Brookings Institution, and the Conference Board have all identified building and maintaining a highly skilled workforce as a national and local imperative. If America is…

Knowledge, power and democracy are being more explicitly related to higher education globally. Increasingly there are calls for cognitive justice and the development of a sociology of absences, particularly in relation to structures of inequalities and knowledge production from the Global South. The university of the future will need to be…

Globalization and the increasingly multicultural characteristic of many countries and societies have placed an acute spotlight on whether nations are able to develop citizens who are multiculturally educated and globally engaged. While the character and citizenship education literature in Asia and the Pacific often mentions intercultural…

Globalization and the knowledge economy have opened up worldwide agendas for national development. Following this is the emphasis on the social dimension, otherwise known as social capital. Much of social capital includes "soft skills" and "twenty-first century skills", which broadly cover critical, creative and inventive…

Higher education institutions are crucial in the present. Universities play a role that varies with time and evolves with society. Globalization is changing the world and affecting higher education institutions in all their intrinsic characteristics: personnel, programs, infrastructures and students. Analyzed is the relevant research on cultural…

This article explores how teachers navigate and respond to the competing pressures of school change in a global policy context. In postcommunist Albania, national policies reflecting global norms for the teacher's role overshadowed complex and cultural aspects of teaching and learning and, as a result, led to gaps in implementation. On the basis…

This article reports a commissioned research project on exploring the emerging issues and challenges of attracting Asian students to study in Hong Kong's higher education institutions. Findings reveal the rapidly growing demand for quality transnational education in Asia and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of exporting Hong…

In this article, we draw on our research on the digital portable library, eGranary, undertaken in a rural Ugandan village in 2008, to contribute to place-based studies of digital literacy. Our research project investigated the uptake of eGranary by students in the community, focusing on six secondary students who worked as library scholars in the…

Information technology can be a game changer in higher education, as it has been in other sectors. Information technology has brought about much of the economic growth of the past century, accelerating globalization and fostering democracy. This chapter explores many ways that information technology can be a game changer. Some are as simple as…

Pattern generalisation has become an important feature of mathematics classrooms around the globe. Sometimes these activities focus purely on given numerical terms, but the use of pictorial or figural patterns is now becoming part of the standard repertoire for such generalisation exercises. From a pedagogic point of view, the investigation of…

This paper argues that universities do have responsibilities to their wider communities, and that those responsibilities--or that "engagement"--should be managed in a way that is not solely dictated by the university. The paper, which focuses on UK universities, first explains why the contemporary context makes it important to consider…

International Baccalaureate (IB) programs are turning up in a diverse mix of school districts, an attempt to add rigor and depth. For rich and for poor, for big schools and small ones, IB has become a way to add rigor and depth to public school curricula. But each school district has adapted IB for its own needs. Some use it in all schools for all…

Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour's theories help expose such pedagogy's limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work…

This article sketches a post-Occidental interpretation of the historical/conceptual relationships between modern western education and European civilizational identity formation. Modern western education will be interpreted as a modern/colonial institution that emerged along with the sixteenth-century responses to the questions provoked by the…

This paper examines rationales, aspirations, assumptions and methods shaping an international assessment of learning outcomes: the OECD's Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) feasibility study. The first part of the paper is analytical, exploring formative rationales, and shaping contexts and normative perspectives that frame…