Thematic units are more than isolated lists of vocabulary, grammar points, or language functions. It is important to design thematic units from the national standards with clearly defined objectives. They should offer opportunities for connections with other content areas. Units should also have a strong cultural foundation, perhaps centered on a…

In 2002, the Afghanistan Ministry of Education adopted a new National Curriculum Framework, created to promote child-centred teaching and learning strategies for the next generation of Afghan schools. As is often the case in post-conflict education development, a cadre of international curriculum consultants was hired to facilitate the production…

The rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will shape global resource use, the location of market demand and international institutions and interdependencies in the decade to come. In this paper we argue that an understanding of the historical and institutional context of the BRICs, and the potential shift towards a multi-polar world is…

This article presents an interview with Michael Hacker and David Burghardt, codirectors of Hoftra University's Center for Technological Literacy. Hacker and Burghardt address issues related to technology and engineering. They argue that teachers need to be aware of the problems kids are facing, and how to present these problems in an engaging…

This practical handbook is designed to help anyone who is preparing to teach a world history course--or wants to teach it better. It opens with Peter Stearns's essay "Where Did World History Come From?" and closes with Jerry Bentley's annotated bibliographic guide to the essential content knowledge for teaching world history. In between,…

Teach For America (TFA) teachers are placed in urban, impoverished, and highly diverse schools. The purpose of this study was to examine the challenges faced by TFA teachers (or corps members) in culturally and linguistically diverse schools in urban St. Louis. In examining how TFA teachers perceive and navigate these challenges, educators will…

This paper will discuss "both-ways" as the philosophy which underpins course programs and operations at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, the only tertiary institution in Australia that caters exclusively to Indigenous students. This paper draws on recent research undertaken by the author focusing on the following…

Media education has been around for quite some time in the West (Bazalgette et al. 1990), but it only started to gain acceptance in Asia (Cheung 2005), particularly in Hong Kong, in the last decade. Recently, it has been gaining more attention in Hong Kong thanks to the curriculum reform in which liberal studies will become one of the four core…

International studies on the knowledge of mathematics at the generalist-class teaching level have indicated that Slovene students are quite skilled at computations, but have difficulties solving mathematical problems. This finding stimulated us to create a problem-based instruction model. We wanted to find out whether the students in the…

This article describes and analyzes a program of work in elementary mathematics teacher education at the University of Michigan that has, for a decade, been a site for the development of approaches to preparing beginning K-8 mathematics teachers that are both aimed at practice and centered in content. Among the products of this work are video…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the potential and the challenges of successful integration of ePortfolios and graduate attributes into the curriculum. Design/methodology/approach: An argument is presented about the positioning of ePortfolios, and their links to graduate attributes, that draws upon the experiences of working with…

America's sense of community is broken down; its sense of connectedness and the collective is "collapsing." That these senses ever existed is a matter for considerable debate. But, as the new millennium gains momentum and neoliberalism seeks expansion, the author argues that a focus on rekindling these concepts of community,…

hapTEL, an interdisciplinary project funded by two UK research councils from 2007 to 2011, involves a large interdisciplinary team (with undergraduate and post-graduate student participants) which has been developing and evaluating a virtual learning system within an HE healthcare education setting, working on three overlapping strands. Strand 1…

A traditional approach centred on weekly lectures, perhaps supported by tutorials, still predominates in modern legal education in Australia. This approach tends to focus on the transmission of knowledge about legal rules and doctrine to students, who adopt a largely passive role. Criticisms of the traditional approach have led to law schools…

In this article, we report the results of an instrumental, mixed methods case study (Stake, 1995) of a culturally responsive school-based evaluation initiative. In studying culturally responsive school-based evaluation, we found some broader issues with school-based evaluation more generally. These challenges include what knowledge schools need to…