SensePublishers – förlag

Low-Fat Love unfolds over three seasons as Prilly Greene and Janice Goldwyn, adversarial editors at a New York press, experience personal change relating to the men (and absence of women) in their lives. Ultimately, each woman is pushed to confront her own image of herself, exploring her insecurities, the stagnation in her life and her reasons for having settled for low-fat love. Along with Prilly and Janice, a cast of offbeat characters’ stories are interwoven throughout the book. Low-Fat Love is underscored with a commentary about female identity-building and self-acceptance and how, too often, women become trapped in limited visions of themselves. Women’s media is used as a signpost throughout the book in order to make visible the context in which women come to think of themselves as well as the men and women in their lives. In this respect Low-Fat Love offers a critical commentary about popular culture and the social construction of femininity. Grounded in a decade of interview research with young women and written in a fun, chick-lit voice, the novel can be read for pleasure or used as supplemental reading in a variety of social science or women’s/gender studies courses as well as courses in popular culture, qualitative research or arts-based research.

Paige Michaels comes from the kind of wealth that few experience. The daughter of a notoriously successful banker who wielded great political power, she grew up in an extraordinary world peopled by the leaders of tomorrow. Now one mistake rooted in her past is threatening to unravel her perfect life. After years as a stay-at-home mother in New Jersey, Mollie Johnston convinces her husband to move back to New York, to fulfill her dream of living amid the bright lights. Mollie is uncomfortable in her own body and always worried about how others see her. Once she sees how the other half lives, will she come to see herself and her marriage more clearly? Gwen McAndrews is the ultimate New York socialite, and the envy of those impressed by her grandeur, but is there more than meets the eye? Along with Paige, Mollie and Gwen, a cast of characters’ stories are interwoven into the text—parents, children, care-takers, childhood friends, old lovers and spouses. American Circumstance is a novel about appearance versus reality; how people’s lives and relationships look to others versus how they are experienced, and the complex ways that social class shapes identity and relationships. American Circumstance provides a window into the replication of wealth, power and privilege. Through the protagonist’s work with an international women’s organization the novel is underscored with a narrative about how gender, social class and race intertwine on a global scale, and problems are all relative. There are also strong narratives about how family and friends influence identity and the things we say and don’t say to each other. While fictional, American Circumstance is grounded in autoethnographic observations and more than a decade of teaching and research about gender, class, race, identity and relationships. The novel can be used as supplemental reading in courses that deal with gender, social class, power, family systems, relational communication, intimate relationshipsand/or identity, or it can be read entirely for pleasure.

"Foregrounds contributes to the development of theories of learning, in particular to theories of learning mathematics. It is relevant to students, student teachers, and researchers in the field of education as well as in mathematics education.Foregrounds contains six parts. Part I provides a summary of the notion of foreground as it has developed since the author introduced the idea in Towards a Philosophy of Critical Mathematics Education. In Part II, the reader meets some students who tell us about their neighbourhood, about drug dealing, violence, and about playing football. They tell us about their teachers, about mathematics, and about what they would like their teachers to do. They tell us about their hopes, expectations, and frustrations.Part III presents the notions of intentionality and life-world as developed by Brentano and Husserl. However, in Part IV the author provides a radical reinterpretation of these two notions. He describes “real-life intentionalities” and “real-life worlds” as profoundly structured by a range of social factors.Part V is composed as a meeting between, on the one hand, the students and their experiences as presented in Part II, and on the other hand these notions of “real-life intentionalities” and “real-life worlds”. Through this meeting the author develops further the notion of foreground. The concluding part (Part VI) brings more examples as illustrations.Ole Skovsmose has a special interest in critical mathematics education. He has investigated the landscape of investigation, students’ experience of meaning, project work, mathematics education and democracy, mathematics in action, and mathematics and power. He has published more than 20 books in Danish, English and Portuguese as well as a huge number of articles.Sense has published the following books by Ole Skovsmose: Travelling through Education, In Doubt, An Invitation to Critical Mathematics Education, and Opening the Cage: Critique and Politics ofMathematics Education, which is edited together with Brian Greer."

Utilizing the LPS dataset, Algebra Teaching around the World documents eighth grade algebra teaching across a variety of countries that differ geographically and culturally. Different issues in algebra teaching are reported, and different theories are used to characterize algebra lessons or to compare algebra teaching in different countries. Many commonalities in algebra teaching around the world are identified, but there are also striking and deep-rooted differences. The different ways algebra was taught in different countries point to how algebra teaching may be embedded in the culture and the general traditions of mathematics education of the countries concerned. In particular, a comparison is made between algebra lessons in the Confucian-Heritage Culture (CHC) countries and ‘Western’ countries. It seems that a common emphasis of algebra teaching in CHC countries is the ‘linkage’ or ‘coherence’ of mathematics concepts, both within an algebraic topic and between topics. On the other hand, contemporary algebra teaching in many Western school systems places increasing emphasis on the use of algebra in mathematical modeling in ‘real world’ contexts and in the instructional use of metaphors, where meaning construction is assisted by invoking contexts outside the domain of algebraic manipulation, with the intention to helping students to form connections between algebra and other aspects of their experience. Algebra Teaching around the World should be of value to researchers with a focus on algebra, pedagogy or international comparisons of education. Because of the pedagogical variations noted here, there is a great deal of material that will be of interest to both teachers and teacher educators.

This book consists of interviews with the most important mathematics educators of our time. These interviews were originally published in the International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education and are now being offered to a wider readership for the first time, collected in a single volume. Among the individuals interviewed are scholars from Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States who have made a significant impact on the development of mathematics education in their countries and internationally. The interviews cover their biographies, including their memories of their own studies in mathematics and their intellectual formation, their experience as researchers and teachers, and their visions of the history and future development of mathematics education.The book will be of interest to anyone involved in research in mathematics education, and anyone interested in the history of mathematics education.

As has been abundantly documented in the popular and academic press, the humanities are facing challenging times marked by national debate regarding the importance of the humanities in higher education, program and budget cuts, and an ever-decreasing number of tenure-track jobs. In addition, the humanities face quite literally a quantification of their value as the Academy adopts a more corporate mindset. This volume provides advice to professionals in the humanities on how to forge a useful, compelling, and productive career. The book’s 13 chapters address professional approaches to developing and maintaining an active research agenda, fomenting the ideals of the teacher-scholar model, managing the service demands within and outside the college or university, and navigating institutional politics. The collection offers practical and theoretical approaches to higher education, personal anecdotes, intelligent advice, and interviews with colleagues in the humanities. Specific themes addressed include the transition from graduate student to humanities professional, diverging from prescribed paths, the humanities professor as creative writer, moving from secondary to post-secondary education, humanities in an international, market-based context, and participation in governance structures. Cover photograph ‘Silent Flutes’ by Adilia D. Ortega

Education is always evolving, consistently with a society in flux. So transformations in learning and pedagogy are necessary. These endless, rapid changes in pedagogy influence students and educators in a variety of ways and awake diverse emotions, from happiness to fear, from joy to anger. Emotions are proven to influence the ways students interact with the world. In the present book, the authors reflect on emotions and education from multiple perspectives: the socio-cultural perspective that looks at interactions among individuals, the creation and recreation of the self and others, the study of collaboration, change processes (transformative learning) and aesthetic and creative learning processes. The purpose of this volume is to reflect on students’ and educators’ emotional responses. The construction of a safe, stimulating learning climate is essential in innovative learning processes - emotional interactions, student-teacher relations and student-student interaction lay the foundation for collaboration and deep learning. The present book offers empirical documentation and theoretical reflections on how pedagogical and educational changes might challenge or facilitate learning for students and educators.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the longest, ongoing hot-and-cold war of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has produced more refugees than any current conflict, generating fully one quarter of all refugees worldwide. Everyone knows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is important itself, and is also fueling tensions throughout the Middle East. Yet most people shy away from this conflict, claiming it is “just too complicated” to understand. This book is written for people who want a point of entry into the conversation. It offers both a historic and analytic framework. Readers, whether acting as students, parishioners, neighbors, voters, or dinner guests will find in these pages an analysis of the most commonly heard Israeli positions, and a succinct account of the Palestinian voices we seldom hear. I argue that human rights standards have never been used as the basis on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved and that only these standards can produce a just and sustainable resolution. This book will be useful for classes in Middle East studies, peace and conflict studies, Middle East history, sociology of race, and political science. It can be helpful for church groups, labor groups, or other grass roots organizations committed to social justice, and for all readers who wish to be informed about this important topic.“Professor Spangler’s … quest for historical and political understanding takes us on a brave and intimate journey into the consequences of Jewish privilege and Jewish victimhood, the agendas of imperial superpowers, and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” Alice Rothchild, MD, author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, and producer and director of documentary film, Voices Across the Divide“[A] sharp, poignant, well-documented dossier [that] provides readers with all the most-needed facts to grasp the conflict and get involved.” – Sam Bahour,co-editor of Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians and business development consultant and activist based in Palestine“[T]his one is exceptional! It recounts a historical tale; it provides theoretical underpinnings; it does comparative work; it examines all the details and aspects of ongoing debates; and it brings all to life with real-life stories … the wonder of this book is its insistence on hope – not a naïve, idealistic hope, but one accompanied by a tool-box for concrete action that might right the wrongs of this tragic tale.” Anat Biletzki, Professor of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University and Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy, Quinnipiac University; Chairperson of B’Tselem, 2001–2006Eve Spangler is a sociologist and a human and civil rights activist. For the last decade, her work has focused on the Israel/Palestine conflict; she argues that human rights are the neglected standards that could lead to a just and sustainable solution.

Education policy is premised on its instrumentalist approach. This instrumentalism is based on narrow assumptions concerning people (the subject), decision-making (power), problem-solving (science and methodology), and knowledge (epistemology). Policy, Geophilosophy, and Education reconceptualises the object, and hence, the objectives, of education policy. Specifically, the book illustrates how education policy positions and constitutes objects and subjects through emergent policy arrangements that simultaneously influence how policy is sensed, embodied, and enacted. The book examines the disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to education policy analysis over the last sixty years, and reveals how policy analysis constitutes the ontologies and epistemologies of policy. In order to reconceptualise policy, Policy, Geophilosophy, and Education uses ideas of spatiality, affect and problematization from the disciplines of geography and philosophy. The book problematizes case-vignettes to illustrate the complex and often paradoxical relations between neo-liberal education policy equity, and educational inequalities produced in the representational registers of race and ethnicity.

"This book brings together eminent global theorists and practitioners to share their views on the evolution of career counselling in recent decades. Multiple changes of a fundamental and complex nature, as well as related challenges in the world of work, have necessitated career counselling to undergo such an evolution. The authors examine the future nature and scope of new directions in the field of career counselling psychology and they critically reflect on, as well as promote the predominant theoretical and conceptual framework of the field of career counselling. The latest models and methods in and for the 21st century are explored and teased out, including Mark Savickas’ proposal to shift the focus in interventions from conceptualising the self as content to seeing the self as a process. This approach is in keeping with the notion of career as a story and consistent with leading theories such as Jean Guichard’s self-construction framework and the life design paradigm. The authors deliver an avant garde text that is easy to read and use without diluting the conceptual and terminological complexities of the field. The book is an invaluable resource for new, emerging and experienced researchers, academics, scholars, researchers, psychologists, social workers, teachers and clients: • It merges what is known about the field with emerging approaches.• It gives an overview of theoretical paradigms that can be applied to a changing world of work.• It makes a critical analysis of germane questions such as “What does the future hold for the field of career counselling and how can challenges be turned into opportunities?” and “How can different paradigms, approaches and strategies be harnessed to promote clients’ career-life wellbeing and resilience?”.• It facilitates an understanding of the skills necessary to deal with career-related transitions, challenges and barriers to help people acquire transferable career-life skills and career(-choice) readiness. • It examines the importance of career adaptability and how people can develop this vital 21st century (survival) competency.• It challenges career counsellors to grasp and acquire skills to promote and advocate social justice agendas.• It promotes and demonstrates the exciting and promising notion of dialogue writing to enhance the dialogical work of the career counsellor and client.Individually and collectively, the authors team up to blend retrospect and prospect, and they make a concerted effort to convert 21st century challenges and frontiers in career counselling into opportunities, hurt into hope, hopelessness into inspiration."                       

A Man Comes from Someplace: Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Timeis a cultural study of a multi-generational Jewish family from a shtetl in southwestern Ukraine before World War I to their international lives in the 21st century.The narrative, told from multiple perspectives, becomes a transformative space for re-presenting family stories as cultural performance. The studydraws from many sources: ethnographic interviews with an oral storyteller (the author’s father), family letters, papers from immigration and relief organizations of the 1920s, eyewitness reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, genealogy, and cultural, historical, and literary research.The book investigates the ways family stories can be collected, interpreted, and re-presented to situate story in history and to re-envision connections between the past, present, and future. Family stories become memory sites for interrogating questions of loss and displacement, exile, immigration, survival, resilience, and identity. Stories function as antidotes to trauma, a means of making sense of the world. Memoryis an act of resistance, the refusal to be silenced or erased, the insistence that we know the past and remember those who came before.Judith Pearl Summerfield,Professor Emerita in English, Queens College, The City University of New York, is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for teaching, scholarship, and research. She has written extensively about rhetoric, composition, narrative studies, and education. In 2011, she found her way back to the place her family had come from in Ukraine.

Literacy learning continues to be central to schooling, and is currently of major concern to educators, policy developers, and members of the public alike. However, the proliferation of communication channels in this digital era requires a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of literacy and the pedagogy of literacy teaching and teacher education.   This text brings together papers by experts in teacher education, literacy, and information technology to help chart a way forward in this complex area. Because of their background in teacher education, the authors are realistic about what is appropriate and feasible – they do not just jump on a technology bandwagon – but they are also able to provide extended examples of how to embed technology in the practice of teacher education. “Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective (literacy, teacher education and digital technology) and informed by a range of empirical studies, policyanalyses and scholarly reflection, this book makes a unique contribution to the literature on one of education’s most pressing challenges: how we prepare teachers of literacy at a time when understandings of literacy are expanding. Chapters by leading researchers are complemented by those offering illuminating vignettes of practice that, in turn, provide opportunities for interrogation by the rich theoretical toolkit that characterizes the field. The book is thoughtfully structured and manages a coherence that is rare in edited collections. An impressive and heartening read.” – Viv Ellis, Professor of Education at Brunel University, England and Bergen University College in Norway

This book looks at some of the underlying theories of educational technology (means), and ways in which this technology is guided in practice (ends). The authors are intent on producing ends that prepare students to undertake new analyses and evaluations that can result in new possibilities for democratic action. Emphasis is on their understanding of and position within educational technology – as opposed to using or applying educational technology. The work is not written from the point of view that their embeddedness within educational technology has a utilitarian end in mind, but rather that their situatedness within educational technology (a practice in itself) leaves open possibilities for new ways of understanding democratic education. This book is organised into six interrelated themes that work towards the cultivation of educational technology as a human practice which guides pedagogic encounters on the basis of taking risks in relation to which the unexpected, unimaginable is always possible.

A Pedagogy of Cinema is the first book to apply Deleuze’s concept of cinema to the pedagogic context. Cinema is opened up by this action from the straightforward educative analysis of film, to the systematic unfolding of image. A Pedagogy of Cinema explores what it means to engender cinema-thinking from image. This book does not overlay images from films with an educational approach to them, but looks to the images themselves to produce philosophy. This approach to utilising image in education is wholly new, and has the potential to transform classroom practice with respect to teaching and learning about cinema. The authors have carefully chosen specific examples of images to illustrate such transformational processes, and have fitted them into in depth analysis that is derived from the images. The result is a combination of image and text that advances the field of cinema study for and in education with a philosophical intent.“This outstanding new book asks a vital question for our time. How can we educate effectively in a digitalized, corporatized, Orwellian-surveillance-controlled, globalized world  This question is equally a challenge asked of our ability to think outside of the limiting parameters of the control society, and the forces which daily propel us ever-quicker towards worldwide homogenization. With great lucidity, Cole and Bradley offer us profound hope in Gilles Deleuze’s increasingly popular notion of ‘cine-thinking’. They explore and explain the potential that this sophisticated idea holds for learning, in an easy going and accessible way, and with a range of fantastic films: from ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Performance’ through to ‘Under the Skin’ and ‘Snowpiercer’. This extremely engaging and compelling text is likely to enliven scholars and students everywhere.” – David Martin-Jones, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, UK

Mindfulness and Educating Citizens for Everyday Life invites readers to explore the role mindfulness can play in mediating how we enact social life in today’s increasingly challenging and challenged world. The educators and researchers who have contributed to this book use mindfulness as a lens to address and untangle what is becoming a profoundly complicated way of being within the reality of global capitalism. Education is framed broadly – the research transcends the walls of classrooms and includes museums, nursing homes, hospitals, AA meetings, and homes. Hence, the chapters feature participants occupying varied social positions and spaces that may be situated in different parts of the globe. The authors address two overarching and dialectically related themes of mindfulness and wellness and collectively the chapters expand possibilities for readers to act mindfully in a world in which wellness and wellbeing are pervasive concerns as a fragile Earth adapts to a dynamic flux of human-led changes that threaten the future of lifeworlds that support humanity and myriad species that face extinction. The authors do not offer oversimplified solutions to dramatically switch direction and preserve life, as we have known it. Instead, the ideas that emerge from the research presented in this volume expand possibilities for informed conduct, self-help, and educating citizens with a goal of individuals and collectives transforming lifeworlds by embracing mindfulness-saturated ontologies.

This is a novel about appearance versus reality – how our lives and relationships appear to others versus how they are experienced, and the complex ways that social class shapes identity, relationships, and the codes of friendship. American Circumstance also provides a window into the replication of wealth, power, and privilege. The novel can be used as supplemental reading in courses across the disciplines that deal with gender, social class, inequality, power, family systems, relational communication, intimate relationships, identity, American culture, narrative or creative writing. It can also be read in book clubs or entirely for pleasure. “American Circumstance is wonderful! The characters and story invite you into a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Highly recommended!!” – Carl Leggo, Ph.D., University of British Columbia“American Circumstance kept me up! I wanted to see how the characters’ lives untangled. I loved how Leavy challenged my cultural assumptions. Students will have a lot to talk about as they discover the ''sociology of everyday life'' embedded in the fiction.” – Laurel Richardson, Ph.D., The Ohio State University“The characters were so compelling that I couldn’t stop reading … a great beach read, or class text.” – U. Melissa Anyiwo, Ph.D., Curry College“Leavy writes in an engaging way that helps you ask important questions about class issues in America. This story keeps you interested and wondering why women make the choices they do.” – Margaret A. Robbins, The Journal of Language & Literacy Education“American Circumstance is one of my favorite texts to assign to my sociology students.” – Cheryl Llewellyn, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts LowellPatricia Leavy, Ph.D., is an award-winning independent sociologist and best-selling author.

Belonging is an issue that affects us all, but for those who have been displaced, unsettled or made ‘homeless’ by the increased movements associated with the contemporary globalising era, belonging is under constant challenge. Migration throws into question not only the belongings of those who physically migrate, but also, particularly in a postcolonial context, the belongings of those who are indigenous to and ‘settlers’ in countries of migration, subsequent generations born to migrants, and those who are left behind in countries of origin. Negotiating Belongings utilises narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to explore the negotiations for belonging for six women from Dinka communities originating in southern Sudan. It explores belonging, particularly in relation to migration, through a consideration of belonging to nation-states, ethnic groups, community, family and kin. In exploring how the journeys towards desired belongings are haunted by various social processes such as colonisation, power, ‘race’ and gender, the author argues that negotiating belonging is a continual movement between being and becoming. The research utilises and demands different ways of listening to and really hearing the narratives of the women as embedded within non-Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through this it develops an understanding of the relational ontology, cieng, that governs the ways in which the women exist in the world. The women’s narratives alongside the author’s experience within the Dinka community provide particular ways to interrogate the intersections of being and becoming on the haunted journey to belonging. The relational ontology of cieng provides an additional way of understanding belonging, becoming and being as always relational.

This volume addresses questions that lie at the core of research into education. It examines the way in which the institutional embeddedness and the social and ethnic composition of students affect educational performance, skill formation, and behavioral outcomes. It discusses the manner in which educational institutions accomplish social integration. It poses the question of whether they can reduce social inequality, – or whether they even facilitate the transformation of heterogeneity into social inequality. Divided into five parts, the volume offers new insights into the many factors, processes and policies that affect performance levels and social inequality in educational institutions. It presents current empirical work on social processes in educational institutions and their outcomes. While its main focus is on the primary and secondary level of education and on occupational training, the book also presents analyses of institutional effects on transitions from vocational training into tertiary educational institutions in an interdisciplinary and internationally comparative approach.

"What is caring research and how to conduct it? This book defines the new concept of caring research as a combination of two perspectives. Caring research means research that aims to promote well-being. It is focused on a good quality of life, human strengths and active life, as well as characteristics and positive development in human beings that act as buffers against malaise and help coping with adversities in life. In addition, caring research cares for the researcher well-being. Caring research is conducted by people who share the passion and enthusiasm to influence positively and collaborate. Caring research includes the joy of working and researching together. Thus, caring research is manifested in the relationships between researchers, supervisors, students, and other experts, and their mutual open and respectful interaction. The Basics of Caring Research analyzes these two elements of caring research through several viewpoints that are to illustrate the manifold nature of caring research as positively-focused and positively-conducted research. The book also includes critical analysis of the current requirements and future challenges of caring research.The book serves as a text book in, for example, research studies in psychology and educational and behavioral sciences.  Researchers and supervisors find it a useful tool to support their supervision of various academic theses.

Pre-university engineering education has become the topic of increasing interest in technology education circles. It can provide content for the E in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, which is in the interest of technology educators at different educational levels as it builds the bridge between them and the science and mathematics educators. In this book goals for pre-university engineering education are explored as well as existing practices from a variety of countries. The coming years will show if pre-university engineering education will catch on. The trend towards STEM integrated education that today can be seen in many countries will certainly create a further need and stimulus for that to happen. Hopefully this book can contribute to such a development of both formal and informal K-12 engineering education. Not only for preparing the next generation of engineers, but also for the technological literacy of future citizens.

Statistics and probability are fascinating fields, tightly interwoven with the context of the problems which have to be modelled. The authors demonstrate how investigations and experiments provide promising teaching strategies to help high-school students acquire statistical and probabilistic literacy.In the first chapter the authors put into practice the following educational principles, reflecting their views of how these subjects should be taught: a focus on the most relevant ideas and postpone extensions to later stages; illustrating the complementary/dual nature of statistical and probabilistic reasoning; utilising the potential of technology and show its limits; and reflecting on the different levels of formalisation to meet the wide variety of students’ previous knowledge, abilities, and learning types.The remaining chapters deal with exploratory data analysis, modelling information by probabilities, exploring and modelling association, and with sampling and inference. Throughout the book, a modelling view of the concepts guides the presentation.In each chapter, the development of a cluster of fundamental ideas is centred around a statistical study or a real-world problem that leads to statistical questions requiring data in order to be answered. The concepts developed are designed to lead to meaningful solutions rather than remain abstract entities. For each cluster of ideas, the authors review the relevant research on misconceptions and synthesise the results of research in order to support teaching of statistics and probability in high school.What makes this book unique is its rich source of worked-through tasks and its focus on the interrelations between teaching and empirical research on understanding statistics and probability.

The purpose and impact of the professional doctorate – or EdD (Doctor of Education) – has long been debated. What should it be? Who should do it? Why is it worth doing? How should it be taught? What makes the EdD distinctive, unique and worthwhile? Internationally, at the level of program development and provision, universities are increasing the range of transformative professional doctorate practices while recruiting larger numbers of students from a wider range of professions. Transformative Doctoral Research Practices for Professionals offers unique insight into the teaching, learning, thinking and doing of doctoral education. In the form of a collaboratively authored volume this book offers the first institutional-specific collection that focuses on doctoral research practices. It showcases: the practices of researching professionals atdifferent phases and stages of a five year doctoral journey; the imperative of reflexivity as one moves from practitioner to researching professional and scholar; and the placing of ‘practice’ at the centre of a doctoral program specifically designed for professionals. This book shares the lived-through debates, deliberations, challenges and experiences of a group of professional (practitioner) doctoral students, their supervisors and lecturers. The critical perspectives and examples explored offer a wealth of insights on the distinct practices and unique journeying of professional practitioners embarking on professional doctorates. This volume invites you to reflect on and enter into dialogue with your peers and professional learning and research communities about the distinctiveness of the professional doctorate.

Much has been written of late about the need to reform school systems across the world. In like manner there have been many attempts to change school systems for the better but without a great deal of success. This, in part, has much to do with the inertia in school systems and the nature of the work. The professional isolation of teachers from one another in schools is no excuse but it is a key factor in the development of system wide professional capital. This book explores the importance of school leadership and the use of digital media to develop social capital in schools. Particular examples of school reforms that focused on developing professional capital with varying degrees of success are to be seen in the UAE, in reforms to the Australian middle school, and in attempts to reform the Community College in the USA.  Throughout the book there are three powerful ideas associated with successful large scale reforms. First, there are the structural elements that all successful school systems have in common including revised curriculum standards, a reliable assessment system, technical skills of teachers and school leaders, a comprehensive data system, rewards and remuneration of workforce and policy documents to support change. Second, strategic imperatives such as the singular focus on teaching and learning for student success, the need to build workforce capacity in schools, the need to ensure system wide implementation of reforms and the importance of collaboration and team building. Third, the systematic development of professional learning communities and teacher leadership will increase social capital in schools which will ensure student success. This book looks at overcoming the inertia to school reform in education systems caused by structural deficiencies, strategic shortfalls and implementation procedures.

"Context-based science education has led to the transformation of science education in countries all over the world, with changes also visible in learning environments and how these are being shaped. These changes involve authentic problems on research and design, new types of interactions within communities of practice, new content areas and also new challenges for teachers in teaching, motivating, scaffolding and assessing their students, among other things.This book focuses on context-based science education and its resulting changes in the perspective of research on learning environments. It also focuses on the implications for the teachers and the professional development of their competencies and beliefs.The book consists of eleven chapters by experts in various themes surrounding learning environments research and science education, preceded by and concluded with a chapter with reflections on context-based learning environments in science by the editors of this book. The conclusion they draw is that professional development of science teachers may be the most important and the most difficult part of the process of teachers creating context-based learning environments in science, as is the focus in the title of this book."  

Leaders in the Sociology of Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits contains eighteen self-portraits written by some of the leading sociologists of education in the world. Representing the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong, the authors discuss a variety of factors that have affected their lifetime of scholarship, including their childhoods, their education and mentors, the state of the field during their “coming of age,” the institutions where they have worked, the major sociologists during their lifetimes, the political and economic conditions during their lifetimes, and the social and political movements during their lifetimes. These autobiographical essays reveal a great deal not only about their work and their influences, but also about themselves. Taken as a whole, the book provides sociology of knowledge about the creation of sociology of education research since the 1960s. It reveals a number of important themes central to all of the authors’ work, including educational inequality; the influence of the classical sociological theorists, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim; and the influence of more recent classical sociologists of education, Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman. The authors’ research represents a variety of theoretical and methodological orientations including functionalism, conflict and critical theory, interactionist theory and feminist theory, as well as quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods research. Finally, the editors discuss a number of lessons to be learned from the lives and works of these sociologists of education.   

"The research presented in this book provides analytical frameworks and case studies on engineering practices in education and professional work. The studies are inspired by practice theory as well as science and technology studies. The contributions demonstrate how these practices mutually dependent in co-construction processes in different domains of engineering. In order to demonstrate these essentially dynamic features, the empirical material is aimed at unravelling the interrelatedness of educational and work practices in engineering and analysing them as inherently situated in order to understand how engineering professionalism is produced. The studies are motivated by the following questions: How can we understand different engineering practices and how do they relate?Which dimensions facilitate transitions between educational practices and work practices?Where is engineering professionalism learned and the engineering ‘mindset’ constituted?How does engineering professionalism change in response to societal challenges? The studies focus on the responses to societal challenges in education and professional work settings. The outcomes show how engineering has responded to challenges concerning environment, energy, sustainability, design, user interactions, community engagement and entrepreneurship. This has been done through the identification of codes of meaning and the institutions that frame the translation from challenges to professional responses. How these responses are performed within engineering professionalism is crucial for the societal role of engineering.The concluding chapter synthesizes the answers to these questions and the lessons learned from attempts to develop engineering in the different settings studied. It highlights the linkages among them, drawing on findings and details from the individual chapters as well as the literature inwhich they are situated, showing how the different sites interact and produce specific representations and frameworks central to engineering professionalism."

"The concept of world-class universities (WCU) has increasingly gained popularity in the past two decades around the world. WCU are regarded as cornerstone institutions of any academic system and imperative to develop a nation’s competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. The development of such universities is high on the policy agenda of various stakeholders worldwide, in both developed and developing countries and regions, and at both national and institutional levels, to promote their global competitiveness.Visibility and performance are among the most watched concepts in relation to develop WCUs, but remain complicated in nature and with no agreed upon definitions. Existing literature have focused on how to raise universities’ prestige, status, impact and rankings in the global and regional arena on the one hand, and how to enhance universities’ quality, efficiency, effectiveness and academic output on the other. However, whether visibility is a legitimate indicator of performance, or vice versa, is yet to be answered.Matching Visibility and Performance: A Standing Challenge for World-Class Universities provides insights of developing academic excellence from global, national and institutional perspectives, and intends to stimulate discussion on how universities can be ‘globally visible and locally engaged’ and how visibility and performance can be integrated and balanced in practice."