In this article, the author critiques the notion of accountability in teachers' work. It serves to place in context the rationale and introduction of accountability mechanisms, such as the performance management policy, as implemented in South Australian public education. Further, it serves to illustrate what MacPherson (1998, p. 4) describes as…

A report published by the Lexington Institute presents findings on the effectiveness of New Jersey's Abbott v. Burke court decisions from the late 1990s through 2009. The report argues that the reforms ordered by the state's supreme court failed to significantly increase student achievement despite what it terms as dramatic increases in spending.…

In this study, I explore the challenges, tensions, and opportunities facing a major research-intensive public university related to public service and engaged scholarship as the university system and higher education in general increase emphasis on service and engagement. This project was designed in cooperation with the university's Center for…

The article analyzes the last two decades of higher education reforms in Slovenia. During the "period of transition," they were led by national as well as international initiatives. At an early stage, the national initiatives were mainly based on criticisms of the last reform made by the former regime, although the generation of new…

Current government discourses on partnerships tend to assume an uncritical belief in the existence of equal ownership and equal power relations between development partners and partner governments. The rhetoric of shared visions, common strategic directions or complementary approaches to development in the Pacific begs the question of how such…

When he was still President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now mayor-elect of Chicago, famously quipped: "Never allow a crisis to go to waste." Republican governors in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and other states have certainly taken that advice to heart. By emphasizing, and in some cases manipulating, the red ink flowing through…

The small sultanate of Brunei, located on the island of Borneo in the South China Sea, introduced bilingual education shortly after independence. As a consequence, Brunei's Ministry of Education outsourced much of its English language teaching requirements to qualified expatriate teachers. Despite over 25 years of systemic English language…

Adolescent substance use is a significant challenge for adolescents, their families, and the larger society. Clinicians and researchers continue to explore ways to effectively engage both families and substance using adolescents in an effort to improve treatment outcome. Therapeutic engagement can be especially difficult for immigrant families…

Visual culture studies have become the focus of research in recent years mainly due to the frequent use of art applications in Visual Arts courses in primary schools and the inadequate content of discipline based art education for the interpretation of today's multiple stimulants. By interrogating students' semantic stratums related to visuals,…

The UK coalition Government's call to end the "bias" towards inclusion represents a shift in "policy speak" as the new administration attempts to re-narrate special education by putting forward a "reasonable and sensible" solution to the "problem of inclusion". However, implicit in the call is the assumption…

This article critically analyses research on young people's internet use. Based on a literature analysis, it examines which young people do what on the internet. These results invite a reflection on the dominant discourse on the digital divide. Within this discourse, there is a strong focus on the use of the internet for information purposes only,…

Recent high-profile rape cases in Australia involving Muslim and Indigenous minority groups have heightened contention around issues of culture, gender and justice. The article critically examines the culturalising of rape as an ethnic minority issue in the public and legal discourse associated with these cases. This examination problematises the…

The course for the final year project for engineering students, because of its strongly research-based, open-ended format, tends to not have well defined learning outcomes, which are also not aligned with any accepted pedagogical philosophy or learning technology. To address this problem, the revised Bloom's taxonomy table of Anderson and…

This paper describes how irony is used to negatively evaluate student behaviour in sequences where students disrupt or resist the official business of the lesson and thus challenge the teacher's authority. Irony-implicative utterances, i.e. utterances hearable as ironic in their context, are examined from two complementary perspectives: (i) the…

There has been a widespread belief that teachers in Asian contexts including Japan and China are well protected by a tradition that reveres teachers. However, in Chinese contexts, cultural traditions have been found to undermine the teaching profession, together with educational reforms and societal changes. This paper reports on an inquiry that…