Purpose: The paper seeks to propose the basic competencies of environmental social scientists regarding policy analysis for sustainable development. The ultimate goal is to contribute to an improvement of educational programmes in higher education by suggesting a toolbox that should be integrated in the curriculum. Design/methodology/approach:…

An interesting trend is sweeping the nation's Christian higher education movement. During the 20th century, Christian liberal arts colleges and universities were frequently established and founded with names that included their denominational affiliation or the word "Christian" in them. In recent years, the trend has been to omit any religious…

This study was aimed at sorting out conflicting results in the literature concerning 2-month-olds' sensitivity to interpersonal contingency, and investigated the potential role of infants' positive emotion in contingency detection. Infants were randomly assigned to an experimental group (EG) that was presented an uninterrupted live-replay-live…

Is it possible for principals/heads to be effective educational leaders? In this study, we compared the work of principals/heads in two policy contexts. In Policy Context 1, standards for student performance were common and well-established, and authority was devolved to the school level for reshaping the school to meet those standards. In…

With little or no effort to test underlying assumptions in the South African context, South African career counsellors have traditionally depended on "proven" assessment methods. Career counselling needs to move away from the almost sole use of psychometric tests to an approach that recognises an individual's social and historical…

This paper examines current official discourses on school discipline in Britain. It analyses New Labour's recent documents in education, such as the party's manifestos, Green and White papers, and official guidelines, to understand which particular understandings of discipline are being promoted. In spite of a political commitment to social…

This paper reports the findings of a study conducted on a foreign language course at a large mid-west university in the USA. In the study a web-based tool which supports both linear and non-linear learning environments was designed and developed for this course. The aim of this study was to find out students' preferences pertaining to the learning…

C. Hetherington (1991) hypothesized that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adolescents may experience a "bottleneck effect" in career development because of internal psychological energy focusing on issues surrounding sexual identity. This assertion has not yet been tested, however, in the career development literature. The authors examined the…

In this article, I reinterpret the stories of two students who dropped out of a vocational school for care work, which turned them into a category of ongoing policy concern: early school leavers. The stories were recorded over a three-year period, as part of an ethnographic study of motivation and aspiration of 150 young people at the Amsterdam…

This paper considers what early years practitioners need to know about bilingual acquisition. It argues that bilingualism is not only an asset in the classroom and the community, but also an individual and family achievement that requires commitment and determination. The different contexts of bilingual acquisition are considered, along with the…

The world is increasingly characterised by profound income, health and social inequalities (Appadurai, 2000). In recent decades development initiatives aimed at reducing these inequalities have been situated in a context of increasing globalisation with a dominant neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. This paper argues that neo-liberal globalisation…

This paper begins with a description of my work in a Canadian school of education, where I now realize that I was well insulated from the US context, where many are highly critical of teacher education. My recent move to Stanford University immediately immersed me in the highly controversial practices being imposed on schools and schools of…

The "drop-out" of working-class students from universities has been identified as one of the most pressing issues for the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom. This article draws on the initial findings of a major research project that explores the meanings and implications of such withdrawal from HE amongst young…

The authors' approach to using pattern-centered analyses and longitudinal data addresses how configurations of personal and contextual factors forecast the educational achievement and attainments of different youth across adolescence. Here, they discuss various types of pattern-centered analyses and provide an empirical illustration of how these…

Within education policy in England the principle of inclusion has been established as a goal and a factor on which improvements in overall standards are seen to depend. Prominent within the drive to raise standards has been a demonstrable need to improve the National Curriculum attainment of members of certain minority ethnic groups, some of which…