Confronting the challenge of immigrant student underachievement: A comparative analysis of education policies and programs in Canada, New Zealand and England

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Volante ◽  
Don A. Klinger ◽  
Melissa Siegel

Immigrant students consistently demonstrate a performance disadvantage when one considers their achievement against non-immigrant peers. These disadvantages vary across international jurisdictions, suggesting that education system level policies or programs may help to ameliorate or worsen these differences. Our work provides a synthesis of trends from education policies and programs that appear to be associated with more favourable immigrant student achievement outcomes, highlighting three international jurisdictions: Canada, New Zealand, and England. This comparative analysis identifies key features of these education systems that have been associated with the success of their immigrant students. We conclude with a critical view on simple policy borrowing and call for contextually responsive adaptation of promising policies and programs within distinct education systems.

2021 ◽  
pp. 146394912198936
Author(s):  
Olivera Kamenarac

The impacts of neo-liberal education reforms on the early childhood education sector have been a focal point of scholarly critiques in New Zealand. Interestingly, only a few studies have addressed how teacher professional identities and professionalism have changed in response to the neo-liberal context of New Zealand early childhood education. It has been, however, recognised that understanding the complexity of teacher professional identities within the rapidly transforming landscape of early childhood education is a key consideration in implementing and sustaining a change agenda in education policies and practices. In this article, the author draws on data from her research study about how teachers’ professional identities have been reconstructed in response to the shifting discourses in New Zealand early childhood education policies and practices. Specifically, the author explores the construction of teachers as business managers, which has emerged through an interplay of discourses of marketisation and privatisation driving some of the country’s early childhood education policies and practices. It is argued that the construction of teachers as business managers has altered core professional ethical values underpinning the teaching profession, professionalism and the purpose of early childhood education in New Zealand, which were traditionally embedded in discourses of collective democracy, equity and social justice.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Zawacki-Richter ◽  
Yasar Kondakci ◽  
Svenja Bedenlier ◽  
Uthman Alturki ◽  
Ahmed Aldraiweesh ◽  
...  

Abstract In many countries, open and distance education is perceived as a way to meet the growing need for higher education. This paper explores the development of online and distance education in three countries that are still a white spot on the landscape of international distance education research although they have implemented elaborated distance education systems: Turkey, Russia and Saudi-Arabia. In order to understand the current state of distance education systems in the three countries, their respective systems are described from a historical perspective, compared in regard to their organization, important institutions for open and distance education and current developments. This comparative analysis directs the focus on little investigated education systems and contributes to an enhanced understanding of their past, present, and future.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Faith Esera

<p>The official language of Sāmoa is Samoan, but the majority of the population speak English as a second language. Because of early contact with missionaries and colonial powers, the English language soon became widely acknowledged and used in Sāmoa. Even after Sāmoa became independent from New Zealand, the English language was and is still recognised, but not made official, in the Constitution of Sāmoa and education policies.  This paper reports on the languages that are present in the linguistic landscape of Sāmoa. The main purpose of the study was to identify the predominant language used in Sāmoa, and to analyse ‘hybridity’ or ‘dualism’ on signs that contained the Samoan language. The data consists of 987 signs taken from two survey areas, Apia and Salelologa, using a digital camera. Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) ‘Place Semiotics’ was used to give an overview of the preferred code in the LL of Sāmoa. The ‘Motu Analysis’, a reconceptualization of Backhaus’s ‘part writing’ types, was used to analyse how two or more languages are used and positioned on signs in the LL; this analysis responds to the research question on ‘hybridity’. The final step involved a closer analysis of the subset of signs containing the Samoan language to detect signs of hybridity through loanwords and semantic extensions.  The results of the analyses indicated that English is the dominant language in the linguistic landscape of Sāmoa despite lacking official status in the language policies of Sāmoa. The findings further reveal that the English influence on the Samoan language on the signs is reflected more in semantic loans than loanwords, revealing a healthier picture of the Samoan language. The study concludes with possible lines of research for further studies in Sāmoa and the Pacific.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 231
Author(s):  
Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere ◽  
Mike King ◽  
Steve Glassey

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