Although global higher education partnerships can promote greater intercultural understanding, establish unique environments for student and faculty development, and generate opportunities for innovative and entrepreneurial ventures, they can be beset with problems that negate their potential effectiveness. This paper proposes that open systems…

Community college students are an untapped reservoir of talent and including them in social work education aligns with the values of the profession. Yet these students encounter formidable obstacles on the path from a 2-year degree to an affordable social work degree. In this article, we describe the systems thinking underlying a newly instituted…

One of the enduring problems in the education system is the gap between theory and practice, where the research to improve teaching and learning is not fully realised in the classroom. This has impacted the effectiveness of education reform. We take a systems thinking approach to better understand the complexity of an education system, which…

Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran propose that, even as events of this decade have exposed stress points in existing top-down, closed systems within education and other public institutions, they have also created prime opportunities to rethink and redesign those systems in ways that encourage civic participation and invigorate local democracy. In…

This article is the result of work carried out within the scope of Erasmus+ project Kit@: Media competency training for professionals in day-care centres and comparable institutions in rural areas of Europe. Its main objective is to describe ECE systems, curriculum guidelines, pre-service teacher training curricula and teacher profiles related to…

Worldwide, policymakers, health system managers, practitioners and researchers struggle to use evidence to improve policy and practice. There is growing recognition that this challenge relates to the complex systems in which we work. The corresponding increase in complexity-related discourse remains primarily at a theoretical level. This paper…

All youth need the support of parents, family members, and other caring adults. Parents and families are children's first teachers and, in many respects, their most influential role models and motivators. Among the varied efforts to ensure that children succeed and thrive, there is growing acknowledgement of how critically important it is to…

State reforms and philanthropic investments seeking to improve public education in California have made substantial changes in recent years--from what students learn and how they learn it to how schools are funded and evaluated. Most efforts have focused on one level at a time, either K-12 schools, community colleges, or four-year postsecondary…

This chapter examines the role of systems and consortia in scaling and implementing undergraduate research through a study of the efforts of six systems and consortia working together with the Council on Undergraduate Research.

Education for All has been a concept at the heart of international development since 1990 and has found its latest instantiation within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as SDG 4, "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all". Open education, in the form of resources and…

A national qualifications framework (NQF) is an instrument used to classify a country's qualifications at different levels. Each level is defined by a set of learning outcomes expected at that level. NQFs can be useful tools in education and training reforms and are vital reference points for lifelong learning and comparing qualifications across…

This paper presents an array of structural configurations that invite new consideration of the necessary conditions for developing systemic school reform; first by reviewing the current literature, and then by examining thirty-six existing partnerships as structural configurations, an exploratory typology for the analysis of successful…

The "Global Inventory of Regional and National Qualifications Frameworks," the result of collaborative work between the European Training Foundation (ETF), the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop), UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] and UIL [UNESCO Institute for…

The article is meant to assess the ways in which the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and its Great Cities Commitment can serve as a model of academic institutional change that anchors or is, otherwise, foundational to academic institutional achievement and urban development. Through both normative discussion and case study, the article…

Although the value of school-community partnerships is unquestioned, the reasons for success and failure are not sufficiently understood. This mixed-methods case study examines 60 years of partnering at one urban high school, using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory to better understand the effect on student development as measured by…