This book unravels the 'new reality' of national educational reforms, exploring optimal strategic directions for education and training. Offering a particular emphasis on EU-wide political guidelines, it encompasses lifelong learning across all levels, and it showcases the pivotal role of modern skills in education for reducing poverty, promoting…

Competent social work practice includes the use of advocacy to promote equal opportunity and justice for all individuals, particularly those living in vulnerable circumstances. Group role-play exercises are an innovative teaching method that can promote advocacy skills guided by social work values and the code of ethics. Group role-play exercises…

Cultural Political Vignettes (CPVs) are hypothetical situations involving ethical or social dilemmas presented to students in the form of brief vignettes. They help students consider and discuss questions about ethics, society, and responsibility, and develop both skills (like critical thinking) and dispositions (like empathy) needed to be a…

Extracurricular inter-professional activities advance pre-service student skills and confidence before joining the workforce. This article describes an extracurricular model, whereby students engaged in experiential learning, and had the opportunity to challenge themselves in interprofessional groups guided by faculty and inspired by professionals…

This article briefly overviews the likely future of education as planned after the 2015 Conservative election success. Although education was not a major item in election manifestos or in subsequent discussion, the Department for Education claims that it is rolling out one of the most ambitious education reform movements in the world. How the…

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller "Nudge," Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple "nudges" to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around "Nudge." In…

This teacher-oriented guide presents information and resources for use in increasing political literacy of K-12 social studies students. The main objective of the guide is to further civic literacy through increased knowledge and understanding of political structures and processes and of effective citizen participation. Emphasis is on helping…

The rationale, goals, curriculum components, instructional strategies, and curriculum development process of a two-semester, secondary-level political science course, "Comparing Political Experiences," are described in this paper. Developed as part of the High School Political Science Curriculum Project at Indiana University, the major…

A proposed project would develop a rural policy studies program for high school seniors in northern New York State. The program would deal with value positions as they pertain to the improvement of social conditions, use a variety of sources and kinds of knowledge, emphasize development and use of thinking skills, and concentrate on how knowledge…