Leadership toward excellence is vital in shaping human and ecological life, but who defines and benefits from excellence? In religious and educational communities, visions of excellence can serve to support the flourishing of life, and also to critique perspectives that reinforce individualism and hierarchical systems. This paper explores…

Addressing the worldwide challenges threatening humanity today, such as the global pandemic and climate change, requires learning and action at scales including and extending far beyond personal development. The concept of andragogy popularized by Malcolm Knowles focuses on the individual and does not attend to wider social contexts and collective…

Driving across tracts of new-home development in El Paso, Texas, one can't miss the signs of charter-school momentum. Charter-school enrollment has been growing in Texas for years, but in many localities and even at the state level, charter schools had until recently encountered harsher treatment from policymakers than what advocates have…

A growing number of charter schools are serving rural communities. More than 320,000 students are enrolled in rural charter schools across the United States. Due to a smaller population and geographic isolation, charter schools in rural areas face many challenges. The autonomy and flexibility of the charter school model can help mitigate some of…

The Wallace Foundation commissioned Research for Action and McClanahan Associates to study how out-of-school time intermediaries (OSTIs) responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the role they could play in supporting communities moving forward. Citywide out-of-school time (OST) systems encompass a wide variety of afterschool and summer programs and…

Patricia Floriet, who taught for 22 years at the Institute for Political Sciences in Grenoble, sends these observations and reflections on the way the pandemic has affected all those connected to education in her village in south-east France.

American college towns represent a unique but understudied feature of the global educational landscape. With hundreds of college towns dotting the American geographical landscape, this uniqueness is particularly relevant for rural higher education. This article identifies a taxonomy of characteristics found commonly in the everyday environments of…

Cities around the world are increasingly developing city-wide lifelong learning strategies to promote individual and civic adaptation to major economic, technological, and environmental challenges. Such initiatives, however, have not yet received commensurate research attention from education researchers and it is not yet clear that we have the…

This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that resists approaches to inequality that generalise about 'best practices' for schools in communities facing…

One of the biggest challenges in building sustainable smart cities of the future is skill management and development. Developing the digital skills of the municipalities' workforce is crucial for all occupational profiles and specifically for those that are actively involved in the development and operation of digital services for a smart city. In…

Over the last few years, Norway's lower secondary education has increasingly integrated one device for each student, reflecting broader technological trends in the Western world. To plan for learning and assessment in one-to-one classrooms, this article advocates for an ecological approach by elaborating on the term "educational…

Mayors play a crucial role in helping people attain the education and skills necessary to enter the workforce and climb the economic ladder. While many American cities are thriving today, they are also home to rising levels of economic inequality, driven in part by the difficulty non-college-educated workers face in securing family-sustaining…

Playful Learning Landscapes seeks to transform everyday spaces into playful learning opportunities to maximize "the other 80 percent" of time that children spend outside school. It lies at the intersection of the growing Child Friendly City movement and a global development agenda that calls for access to high-quality early childhood…

Upon assuming power for the first time in 1935, the Norwegian Labour Party delivered on its promise of a major schooling reform. The reform raised minimum instruction time in less developed rural areas and boosted the resources available to rural schools, reducing class size and increasing teacher salaries. We document that cohorts more…

This regional dossier aims to provide concise descriptions and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Lithuanian is a Baltic language that belongs to the Indo-European family. Most of the Lithuanian-speaking minority in Poland is confined to three municipalities near the Polish-Lithuanian border.…