James H. Williams – författare

In the most in-depth look at education in Cambodia to date, scholars long engaged in research on Cambodia provide historical context and unpack key issues of high relevance to Cambodia and other developing countries as they expand and modernize their education systems and grapple with challenges to providing a quality and equitable education.

In the most in-depth look at education in Cambodia to date, scholars long engaged in research on Cambodia provide historical context and unpack key issues of high relevance to Cambodia and other developing countries as they expand and modernize their education systems and grapple with challenges to providing a quality and equitable education.

Policy-Making for Education Reform in Developing Countries aims at helping policymakers in developing countries better understand the processes and strategies for education reform, and the policy options available to them. This text focuses on the content of reform-options and strategies for achieving educational improvement at different levels of the system, e.g., primary, secondary, tertiary; for different sub-sectors, e.g., management, teachers; and for different purposes with which education systems are tasked, e.g., reaching peripheral groups of students, linking youth and employment. A holistic approach is increasingly recognized as essential to realizing the promises of education for the development of social and human capital-innovation in a global economy, sustained economic growth, social harmony and greater civic participation, decreased achievement gaps, and increased equity.

Policy-Making for Education Reform in Developing Countries aims at helping policymakers in developing countries better understand the processes and strategies for education reform, and the policy options available to them. This text focuses on the content of reform-options and strategies for achieving educational improvement at different levels of the system, e.g., primary, secondary, tertiary; for different sub-sectors, e.g., management, teachers; and for different purposes with which education systems are tasked, e.g., reaching peripheral groups of students, linking youth and employment. A holistic approach is increasingly recognized as essential to realizing the promises of education for the development of social and human capital-innovation in a global economy, sustained economic growth, social harmony and greater civic participation, decreased achievement gaps, and increased equity.

A weathered manuscript discovered among old papers was the foundation of this powerful book. James H. Williams’ spellbinding recollections of his adventures before the mast in sailing-ship days bring alive again that gruelling but romantic era on the seas.Though he called himself a common sailor, James H. Williams (1864-1927) was a most uncommon man. An African-American seaman with reddish hair, he left his Massachusetts home to go to sea at the age of eleven. Yet in spite of his limited formal education, he, wrote in later life with a verve and color that many professional writers would envy. Although he had once killed a man in escaping from a hell-ship at Hong Kong, Williams possessed a high sense of moral virtue. A practical man who survived countless storms and two major shipwrecks, he instinctively sought out the ships of masts and spars in an age in which the merchant marine was making its transition from sail to steam. Within him, too, burned a reforming fervor so intense that he became an uncompromising—and highly effective—enemy of all who preyed upon the common seaman.Vivid, salty, and enlivened by an unfailing sense of humor, James H. Williams’ reminiscences form a remarkable chronicle of life and adventure under sail and along the waterfronts of deep-water ports from America to China. Here are the thrill of the whale hunt and the terror of a boat’s crew as an infuriated whale capsizes them. Here are episodes of hardship and the brutality of bucko captains and mates that belied the beauty of taut, queenly ships. Here, too, are magnificent accounts of sailing ships and the stalwart men who manned them; of heroic deeds; of exotic anchorages and boisterous sprees ashore; of the immensity of the sea and its awe-inspiring gales and typhoons; of shipwreck in the English Channel on a bitter winter night; of drifting on a spar in the lonely South Atlantic and surviving for three months on an uninhabited island.

This book examines the shifting portrayal of the nation in school textbooks in 14 countries during periods of rapid political, social, and economic change. Drawing on a range of analytic strategies, the authors examine history and civics textbooks, and the teaching of such texts, along with other prominent curricular materials—children’s readers, a required text penned by the head of state, a holocaust curriculum, etc.. The authors analyze the uses of history and pedagogy in building, reinforcing and/or redefining the nation and state especially in the light of challenges to its legitimacy. The primary focus is on countries in developing or transitional contexts. Issues include the teaching of democratic civics in a multiethnic state with little history of democratic governance; shifts in teaching about the Khmer Rouge in post-conflict Cambodia; children’s readers used to define national space in former republics of the Soviet Union; the development of Holocaust education in a context where citizens were both victims and perpetuators of violence; the creation of a national past in Turkmenistan; and so forth. The case studies are supplemented by commentary, an introduction and conclusion.

This book engages readers in thirteen conversations presented by authors from around the world regarding the role that textbooks play in helping readers imagine membership in the nation. Authors’ voices come from a variety of contexts – some historical, some contemporary, some providing analyses over time. But they all consider the changing portrayal of diversity, belonging and exclusion in multiethnic and diverse societies where silenced, invisible, marginalized members have struggled to make their voices heard and to have their identities incorporated into the national narrative. The authors discuss portrayals of past exclusions around religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, as they look at the shifting boundaries of insider and outsider. This book is thus about “who we are” not only demographically, but also in terms of the past, especially how and whether we teach discredited pasts through textbooks. The concluding chapters provides ways forward in thinking about what can bedone to promote curricula that are more inclusive, critical and positively bonding, in increasingly larger and more inclusive contexts. 

How do schools protect young people and call on the youngest citizens to respond to violent conflict and division operating outside, and sometimes within, school walls? What kinds of curricular representations of conflict contribute to the construction of national identity, and what kinds of encounters challenge presumed boundaries between us and them? Through contemporary and historical case studies—drawn from Cambodia, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Peru, and Rwanda, among others—this collection explores how societies experiencing armed conflict and its aftermath imagine education as a space for forging collective identity, peace and stability, and national citizenship. In some contexts, the erasure of conflict and the homogenization of difference are central to shaping national identities and attitudes. In other cases, collective memory of conflict functions as a central organizing frame through which citizenship and national identity are (re)constructed, with embedded messages about whobelongs and how social belonging is achieved. The essays in this volume illuminate varied and complex inter-relationships between education, conflict, and national identity, while accounting for ways in which policymakers, teachers, youth, and community members replicate, resist, and transform conflict through everyday interactions in educational spaces.

This volume provides an overview of the themes and challenges in curriculum thinking and practice that currently engage policymakers and practitioners across the East Asian and Southeast Asian region. It addresses issues of policy development and implementation, and considers the notion of transversal in a broader sense, including whether the implementation of non-academic concepts can indeed traverse disciplinary, cultural and contextual boundaries.Consisting mainly of contributions by authors from ASEAN and neighboring countries, the volume reflects a distinctly regional perspective and provides a view of national and smaller-scale initiatives, as well as chapters setting these initiatives in an international context. It touches on policy and curriculum development, teaching and learning materials, teacher development, and skills assessment, thereby implicating broad definitional issues as well as specific implementational aspects.