This article focuses on farmers' use of literacy for individual decision-making on crop-water management and crop choices and investigates how farmer participants perceive the usefulness of Farmer Water School (FWS) training. It draws upon a study conducted with farmers of Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, India. This study has demonstrated that…

Since gaining independence from South Africa in 1990, Namibia has placed considerable emphasis on education, including adult learning. As a means of improving the quality of adult learning, the Namibian Ministry of Education commissioned the development of national standards in 2010 to express competency requirements for adult educators.…

Globally, private supplementary tutoring is a huge business and the practice is expanding rapidly in many regions of the world where it never existed before. In some of these regions it is posing a novel set of challenges for education planners and policy makers. The aim of this study was to examine the extent to which supplementary tutoring is…

This study investigated the career paths of 625 university graduates who prepared to be secondary school teachers in Oman, their assessment of their current work situation, and the extent to which their initial commitment to teaching was related to their subsequent career satisfaction and intention to remain in teaching. While nearly all graduates…

The national language of Tanzania is Kiswahili. However, Tanzania has two official languages: English, introduced in colonial times, and Kiswahili, the actual "lingua franca" spoken by 99 per cent of the population. Kiswahili websites and internet content are gradually increasing, and equipment is becoming more affordable. The research reported on…

Delaying girls' early marriage is a critical public health and education goal in developing countries, in which their own or their mothers' education may play an important role. This paper reviews the existing evidence of any relationship between girls' schooling or women's literacy education and delayed marriage for themselves or their daughters.…

This article deals with the fact that most children in Africa are taught in a language neither they nor their teachers master, resulting in poor education outcomes. While there are also donor interests and donor competition involved in retaining ex-colonial languages, as well as an African elite that may profit from this system, one of the main…

Drawing into a discussion of the politicisation of emotion, this paper develops a framework to analyse some of the processes and strategies by which educational policies and pedagogical practices "emotionalise" the representation of refugees in conflict-ridden societies such as Cyprus and explores the implications for peace education. In…

While universal literacy is one of the most pervasive targets of today's educational systems, it is at the same time perhaps the narrowest of all goals. Standardised testing reduces language and literacy to tasks associated with reading and writing. As learning communities become increasingly diverse, teachers, administrators and policy makers are…

As new laws on education were gradually adopted in post-communist states after 1989, the countries also dealt with the problem of how to include home education in their own legislation. This article investigates the development of legislation on home education in five states of post-communist Central Europe: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia,…

Globalisation, transnational policies and adult education--This paper examines policy documents produced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the European Union (EU) in the field of adult education and learning. Both these entities address adult education as an explicit object of policy. This paper…

A professional learning community (PLC) facilitates collaborative learning among colleagues at all levels in their common working environment. PLCs are particularly useful in schools, with teachers and principals meeting regularly to solve problems relating to teaching and learning. Being a means of improving student achievement, PLCs have…

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), an initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was carried out in the early to mid-1990s across more than 20 countries. It was followed in the early years of the 21st century by the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) survey and the Programme for the International…

While China has a long history of private institutions of higher learning, they disappeared almost entirely after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and did not re-emerge until the 1980s. Their reappearance is one of the ramifications of economic marketisation and privatisation in China. But private higher education…

Pre-colonial Africa was neither an educationally nor a technologically unsophisticated continent. While education was an integral part of the culture, issues of language identification and standardisation which are subject to contentious debate today were insignificant. Children learned community knowledge and history by asking questions instead…