This occasional paper provides the views of 17 "thought leaders" in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector. Their insight and opinions were sought to inform a larger research project focused on the student entitlement reforms that were introduced into the national VET system from 2012. These individuals offered a…

National standards for student achievement have been developed in the arts in a process that paralleled the standards discussions being held in mathematics, language arts, science, history, and other areas. The standards process, while demanding, has generated important discussion and debate about which art forms, what kind of knowledge, and what…

This paper reports on the use of teaching portfolios to assist in curriculum revision and the exploration of instructional practices used by middle school technology and engineering education teachers. Two new middle school technology and engineering education units were developed through the Engineering for All (EfA) project. One EfA unit focused…

The purpose of this investigation was to better understand how administrators of special education prioritize leadership statements that are part of professional standards related to leading special education programs. The article begins by examining professional identities and professionalization of special education leadership and administration…

If educators are to educate they must be accorded some level of trust. Anthony Giddens claims that because trust is not easily created, it is now being replaced with "confidence" because this latter disposition is much easier to give and is more convenient. It is argued in this paper that this shift from trust to confidence stifles…

The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a ubiquitous part of medical education, although there is some debate about its value, particularly around possible impact on learning. Literature and research regarding the OSCE is most often situated within the psychometric or competency discourses of assessment. This paper describes an…

Purpose: Modern educational environment in the system of vocational education focuses on the requirements of labour market and those of employers to the content of graduates' professional competencies. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop practical guidance on the arrangement of cooperation between labour market and regional vocational…

In today's academic environment, there is a tenacious effort to better educate our children. Unfortunately, federal and local budget constraints often limit our ability to create highly effective learning environments. As educators, it becomes our task to identify cost effective activities that will have a positive impact on our student's…

This paper reports results of a review of Ethiopian universities' Senate governance documents: Senate legislation of public universities and the Ethiopian Higher Education Proclamation of 2009, in light of the Bologna Process. The result revealed that Ethiopian public universities were categorised as hierarchal (top-down) in terms of Senate…

Current day literary criticisms written in world englishes often seem to be a little hard to comprehend for readers because of critics' tendency to use too much decorative language with too many theoretical views, jargons, and references of different sorts just to stick to an assumed standard of scholarly writing. This paper, based on a…

This Instructors Perspectives' essay from Robert Blake initiates a discussion on publishing language textbooks. It is followed by responses from Annamaria Bellezza, Nikolaus Euba, and Mark Kaiser.

Education is frequently cited as the path to an informed citizenry with an optimistic economic outlook. Consequently, it is not surprising that there is an initiative to extend postsecondary educational opportunities to underserved and at-risk demographics. A challenge facing educators that serve at-risk populations is the tension between…

Tracking remains a pervasive sorting mechanism in US high schools. Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration provides a useful framework for understanding how tracking is enacted and how its inequities might be interrupted. This study examines whether teachers reify tracks by systematically structuring generative rules differently for students in…

A large number of countries worldwide have established quality assurance mechanisms in Higher Education, ranging from the long-engrained system (United States) to more recent developments in Europe, Latin America and other regions. This study explores the way Higher Education institutions, as examples of autonomous organisations, respond to a new…

This study looks at how African-American (AA) dialects in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" novel should be translated into the Indonesian language. For the data, sayings by AA characters featuring the African-American English (AAE) phonological dialect were selected. An emphasis was placed on how Twain makes use of…