Schools in the most deprived areas in Brazil are marked by extreme poverty, a situation that has obvious consequences for the everyday life in schools and for efforts to develop a supportive culture of schooling. Nevertheless, schools' responses to poverty are far from uniform. Although the context of poverty generally determines what is…

Young people in Africa encounter many difficulties in entering the labour market and in searching for decent and productive jobs. Research on the links between formal education and vocational training and their economic returns are especially crucial in understanding the inadequate demand for their labour. This article presents evidence based on…

The international literature contains few formal analyses of the state of Colombian higher education and its most critical issues. This article systematically and comparatively analyzes the emergence of Colombian doctoral programmes within a national and international context. It shows that, while Colombia has experienced a significant growth in…

The 2006 UNESCO conference "Building Creative Competencies for the 21st Century" had international participants and a global reach. The Director-General's proclamation that "Creativity is our hope" captured the essence of the proceedings and participants saw the focus on creativity as offering solutions to global problems.…

This paper discusses the degree to which recently reported relationships between the classroom management techniques and coping styles of Australian teachers apply in two other national settings: China and Israel. Little is known about which teacher characteristics relate to their approach to classroom management, although researchers in Australia…

In national education systems worldwide, teacher quality has become synonymous with education reform efforts, but a more elusive goal is empirically measuring teacher quality. One proposed measure of teacher quality, teacher licensing, also known as certification, is an increasingly ubiquitous component of national education systems and…

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the academic aims of curriculum reforms and the teaching roles related to them are similar, but non-teaching roles are likely to vary across countries. Taking an organization studies perspective, this article compares teachers' roles in reform along the Botswana-South Africa border. Though these teachers share language and…

This article examines how different histories and contexts of political and educational change in Botswana and South Africa have shaped the more regular classroom practice observed in Botswana. It does this through an interpretive synthesis and comparison of four key moments of educational change in Botswana and South Africa during the twentieth…

This article describes how a detailed notebook analysis was used to assess and compare the opportunity to learn of a sample of grade 6 students from 126 classes in South East Botswana and North West Province, South Africa. Students' mathematics notebooks provided the main data source for estimating how much time is spent on the subject during the…

This article compares key features of the labour markets for teachers across Botswana and South Africa in order to seek possible explanations for the apparently larger teacher shortages in South Africa. It is argued that South African teachers earn relatively lower wages when compared to professionals with comparable qualifications; they have also…

How do university students perceive the key relationship between their university education and the labour market? This article describes the perceptions that 827 Egyptian and Omani seniors--both males and females, studying commerce, education, and engineering--hold about that relationship. For these students, a major motivation for attending…

This study analyses the policies for financing higher education in six Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia. It assesses the adequacy of spending on higher education, the efficiency with which resources are utilized, and the equity implications of resource allocations. Based on six detailed case studies, this…

Since the 1980s, children with disabilities in China have been integrated into general education settings; the practice is termed "sui ban jiu du", literally "learning in a regular classroom" (LRC). The term LRC means "receiving special education in general education classrooms", and it is regarded as a practical form of inclusion in China. This…

This article examines the responses of some 1,500 Canadians to a public opinion survey on knowledge of the Holocaust, awareness of genocide, and attitudes towards discrimination and diversity. Based on one of the most detailed surveys conducted to date on Holocaust knowledge, the study found strong correlations between greater reported Holocaust…

In contrast to the situation in England and Wales, Holocaust education in Scotland is not mandatory and is not delivered to every school student. Still, it is offered frequently. In this article we show how Scotland's changing curriculum, the introduction of Holocaust Memorial Day, and the Lessons from Auschwitz Project have contributed to the…