This paper is based on a study conducted to establish if academic practice in a university designated as Azania is aligning or diverting from the expectations of the rising knowledge society in South Africa. The paper is motivated by the emerging national needs specific to the production, dissemination and application of knowledge as the country…

This book explores recent trends in the knowledge-based society and education field in Asia-Pacific and discusses future challenges in the region. It presents studies on the development of scientific thought in the field on the knowledge-based society in the Pacific Circle. This book explores the theoretical framework of the knowledge-based…

Chinese education scholars Cesan Wang and Qiquan Zhong led a debate over knowledge centredness versus student centredness in China's ongoing pre-collegiate curriculum reform. The debate was considered the most influential academic event in the past 30 years in the field of education in China. Employing a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this…

This article examines language trainers as language workers in an Austrian language education company. The study interrogates what the trainers' discourses, ideologies and practices about the nature of their work are, and how these reside within the logic and discursive practices of their employer. A close analysis of interview, ethnographic and…

Foreign language education primarily aims to cultivate learners' competence to communicate in an additional language. However, the meaning of communication competence is not entirely transparent, especially given the current neoliberal valorization of communication in the knowledge economy. The meaning of communication can be scrutinized in two…

This paper takes a post-structural approach, examining what and how issues are framed in the parenting policy, "Incredible Years," through Foucault's (1977, 1980, 1991, 2003, 2004) notion of "governmentality and discursive normalisation." By unpacking discourses of parenting produced by Incredible Years as an accepted parenting…

In these early stages of implementation of the English computing curriculum policy reforms, there are uncertainties with regards to the intentions of computing to young people. To date, research regarding the English computing curriculum has been mostly concerned with the content of the curriculum, its delivery and surrounding pedagogy. In…

The discourse of twenty-first century learning argues that education should prepare students for successful living in the twenty-first century workplace and society. It challenges all educators with the idea that contemporary education is unable to do so, as it is designed to replicate an industrial age model, essentially rear-focused, rather than…

Internationalisation have recently featured in discussions and initiatives related to various fields of higher education. Educational leaders, institutions and national policy-makers, but also international actors, such as the European Union and UNESCO, have promoted the internationalisation of higher education. Increasing emphasis on…

Around the mid-2000s a crisis discourse emerged in educational policy-making in the EU and in Sweden. Using the EU and Sweden as empirical references, this article explores how this crisis discourse has been and is employed by politicians and NGOs. Discourse Institutionalism is used as an overall theoretical framework focusing on how the crisis…

This paper reflects on the relevance and applicability of "key transferable skills" to the higher education curriculum. Although they are regarded as having common currency within universities, it is argued that their uncritical acceptance devalues and distorts the nature and character of the teaching and learning employed in academe.…