Careers

This chapter uses the lives of Caroline and Jane Kenney to offer new insights into the relationship between suffrage, feminism, and educational reform. While the links between the teaching profession, the women’s movement, and the suffrage campaign have long been recognized, teachers’ interests in suffrage are usually framed in terms of demands for equal pay, workplace rights, and professional status. This chapter instead explores the Kenney sisters’ interests in the purpose and meaning of education, especially for women, through their commitment to pedagogical reform and innovative education. It shows how their access to a network of reformers, gained through their suffrage work and connections, was one of their most important resources, allowing them to pursue their interests across national boundaries. Their careers suggest some of the possibilities open to feminist teachers who were committed to personal, professional, and political advancement, and who had the resources and opportunities to pursue their goals.

Using design-based research to explore the influence of context in promoting pedagogical reform

Many developing countries are seeking to improve the quality of education by promoting the use of learner-centred pedagogy as part of system wide reform. Yet many studies reveal a gap between what is envisaged in policy and what happens in practice and the inherent limitations of uncritical adoption of 'best practice' from elsewhere into local contexts. Therefore design-based research (DBR), as an interventionist approach, was selected to investigate the conditions under which the innovation of learner-centred education can be implemented in the authentic setting of a Maldivian island school. The paper elaborates the rationale underpinning this choice and a discussion of the defining features of DBR as they applied in this study: acknowledging the importance of context; facilitating collaboration between researcher and participants; and attending to a theoretical output of the research. The participatory approach which underpinned how DBR was utilised in the study and its implications for enhancing the context-appropriateness of and teachers' engagement with the reforms is also discussed. In so doing, the paper illustrates the ways in which the defining features of DBR respond to the call for better attention to context as a means for enabling greater success of global reform efforts.

Research on Intangible Cultural Heritage Education and Inheritance in Universities

This paper first analyzes the advantages and problems of intangible cultural heritage education and inheritance in Chinese universities, and then points out the key points of local universities in constructing the education system of intangible cultural heritage in terms of curriculum setting, textbook preparation and pedagogical reform, and perfecting teacher deployment and teaching conditions.

An Investigation into the Design of Blended Teaching in the Basic German Classroom

The rapid development of information technology has constantly promoted innovation and pedagogical reform of educational practice models. Blended teaching provides an ever-innovative new way of thinking for the current classroom teaching reform. Based on the definition of the concept of blended teaching and the study of the theories related to blended teaching, this paper describes the basic design of German classroom teaching in a blended curriculum.

Pedagogical Reform at Primary Schools in Nepal: Examining the Child Centred Teaching

In the history of Nepalese education, 1853 AD marked the entry of the English system of education by the establishment of Durbar Elementary School by Jung Bahadur Rana after his return from his visit to Great Britain. The English type followed the British model of India, which was at one time accredited based on the Oxford and Cambridge examinations. Several other types of education, such as Buddhist Bihar, Hindu Ashram, and Gandhian Basic Education, existed side by side. Present-day, Nepalese school education has been facing two major enduring challenges: increasing access to education and improving the quality of education, which has now been put together as quality education for all. Explicitly or implicitly, Nepalese education documents forward learner-centered education (LCT) to improve the quality of education. Indented quality needs to be implemented at the classroom level, which yet seems not been materializing in the Nepalese context. It is, therefore, essential to analyze various facets of the LCT in the Nepalese context to weave different aspects together to achieve LCT in the Nepalese school classrooms. The major objective of the present article is to analyze the pedagogical reform at primary school from LCT perspectives in Nepal. Thus the present study wasdescriptive. Library documents and online documents were used as tools for the collection of data. The results of the present study indicated that what has been intended LCT practices have not been implemented. Still, there is a need to clarify envisioned LCT pedagogical approaches and its effective implementation. It will be worthwhile to plan a step by step implementation and development plan and execute it incrementally with emphasis on building upon successes and expanding.