As the target year for the current Millennium Development Goal of universal completion of primary education approaches, three World Bank economists have proposed its replacement with a Millennium Learning Goal. This is part of a trend of increased privileging of learning outcomes. The proposal is assessed from the perspective of human rights-based…

In spite of numerous definitions of quality, consensus on what constitutes quality is less clear and contested. Using South Africa as a case study, this paper explores the current conceptual thinking and debates about education quality. Specifically the paper reviews selected South African policy texts to identify how some of the global dimensions…

Research capacity building and its impact on policy and practice are increasingly highlighted in the literature on international research partnerships. In the field of education and development, it is recognised that, in the past, international research collaborations have tended to be dominated by the agenda of Northern partners. Partly in…

In sub-Saharan Africa, education conducted through a European language is associated with low school achievement. Both teachers and learners may often not be fluent enough to use the language as a medium of instruction. In these circumstances, both also make use of a common African language. They switch between two languages in the plenary…

Previous studies on the role of the school in influencing attainment in South African schools have concluded that the inequalities which are known to exist in these are still largely due to the legacy of the Apartheid system. More recently, policy focus has been on narrowing the gap between the attainment of different socio-economic groups by…

This research examines the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) topics in 12 popular multicultural education textbooks. Following a line-by-line analysis of each textbook, the findings report the extent to which LGBT topics were included in each text and the themes that became apparent in how LGBT topics were treated. The…

This article details a field-based methods course for preservice teachers that has been designed to integrate shared teaching experiences in elementary classrooms with ongoing critical dialogues with a focus on highlighting the complexities of teaching. I describe the structure of the course and explore the use of coteaching and cogenerative…

Policy documents informing the profession of teaching in Australia and elsewhere explicitly recommend nurturing those new to the profession working collaboratively with colleagues. Key to the development and growth of beginning teachers is the informal exchange of ideas and knowledge between colleagues--essentially through the functioning of a…

In this article, we examine teacher educators' views on research-based teacher education. Finnish research-based teacher education has four characteristics: (1) the study programme is structured according to a systematic analysis of education; (2) all teaching is based on research; (3) activities are organized in such a way that students can…

Although teachers often report that they subscribe to cooperative learning (CL) to help students attain social and academic goals, research indicates that they often have difficulties implementing and sustaining their commitment. The purpose of this study is to report on the reflections of seven middle-year teachers who had embedded CL in their…

In this article I share the results of a seven-year case study of an educator who began his career without formal preservice teacher education, as a participant in Teach for America. Steven (a pseudonym) began teaching mathematics in an urban middle school, later teaching social studies to English language learners, and is currently a principal of…

Where does Finnish science education come from? Where will it go? The following outside view reflects on relations, which Finns consider "normal" (and thus unrecognizable in introspection) in science education. But what is "normal" in Finnish culture cannot be considered "normal" for science education in other cultures, for example in Germany. The…

Cosmology in its current meaning of the science of the universe is a topic that attracts as much popular as scientific interest. This paper argues that modern cosmology and its philosophical aspects should have a prominent place in science education. In the context of science teaching a partly historical approach is recommended, in particular an…

I examine the association between the observable physical world and the mathematical models of theoretical physics. These models will exhibit many entities that have no counterpart in the physical world, but which are still necessary for the mathematical description of physical systems. Moreover, when the model is applied to the analysis of a…

This article sketches a framework of ideas developed in the context of decades of physics teacher-education that was entitled the "perceptional approach". Individual learning and the scientific enterprise are interpreted as different manifestations of the same process aimed at understanding the natural and social worlds. The process is understood…