On paper, CONFINTEA VI, the United Nations world conference on adult education that took place in Brazil in December, was just as important as the climate change conference in Copenhagen that took place the following week. As a UN conference it attracted delegations from 162 countries, many headed up by ministers. In total, about 2,000 people…

At the end of the 30th volume of IJED and in the year that the journal published its 1000th paper, it is appropriate to look back at the journal's development. In doing so, this article will discuss a series of important issues regarding the future of the field of international education and development and how it engages with development studies.…

Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only adult residential college, was founded in the 1930s by Philip Kerr, 11th Marquis of Lothian. This paper traces the debates concerning the college and the rationale for adult residential education until the 1950s, focusing on the difficulties that Newbattle faced in establishing itself as a central part of…

The relationship between education and state formation in the United States differed from that in other countries in ways that have yet to be adequately accounted for in comparative and theoretical literatures. Specifically, in the northern United States, very high levels of mass school attendance and funding were achieved prior to and outside…

The study reported in this article focused on the scholastic life of John Nelson Darby and his contributions to the Bible college movement. Darby continues to exert a great influence on Christianity, particularly conservative evangelical Christianity. This research provides a discussion of the forces that conspired to shape the direction of…

In their dealings with educators in the Southern Cape region of South Africa, the researchers observed among them a degree of negativity and pessimism about the implementation of the Further Education and Training (FET) policy and curriculum during 2006. Exploratory discussions supported the surmise that a gap existed between policy formulation…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) SLO-Based Grading Makes Assessment an Integral Part of Teaching (Nagy N. Bengiamin and Christina Leimer); (2) Editor's Notes: Assessing Assessment's ROI (Trudy W. Banta); (3) Assessment Plans: A Tool for Sanity (Shannon M. Sexton); and (4) Lessons from…

Education is often seen as the key agency in international development and poverty reduction. Frequently the emphasis is on the economic and social role of education in development. This book, on the other hand, is unusual in explicitly examining the political role of education in development. In particular, it sets out the theories, evidence and…

The sectoral divide between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education in Australia is blurring as a consequence of broader social and economic pressures for a more highly skilled population, but also as a consequence of government policies designed to develop tertiary education markets and to diversify institutional types. The…

This year is designated as Thailand's "English Speaking Year" with the aim of improving the communicative competence of Thais for the upcoming integration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2015. The consistent low-level proficiency of the Thais in the English language has led to numerous curriculum revisions and…

This article examines the uptake of "suzhi"--roughly glossed as "quality"--in China's recent curriculum reform called "suzhi jiaoyu" (Education for Quality) in the rural ethnic context of Qiandongnan. It engages with three layers of analysis. First is a brief etymological overview of "suzhi" to map out its…

This article discusses competing perspectives on the value of the General Educational Development (GED) credential. Although scholars and journalists debate the worth of the credential, urban youth continue to pursue the GED, especially as proxy for inadequate schooling. Using qualitative data from a participatory action research project, the…

This article aims to share experience from a Swedish project on the introduction and implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education with both national and international perspectives. The project, "OER--resources for learning", was part of the National Library of Sweden Open Access initiative and aimed at exploring, raising…

Lifelong learning has become a prominent fixture in educational policy in recent years in many countries around the world. In terms of teacher education, it is now widely accepted that initial teacher education is insufficient for the lifelong professional needs of teachers. From September 2012, initial teacher education in Ireland will be offered…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to re-examine the unique political economy of Germany's dual apprenticeship training model and its underlying philosophy of corporatist governance. It responds to recent arguments suggesting that Germany's collectivist skill regime is under threat, increasingly giving way to the introduction of…