This book gathers work from over a decade of study, and seeks to better understand and support how learners become tradespeople. The research programme applies recent concepts from neuroscience, educational psychology and technology-enhanced learning to explain and help overcome the challenges of learning in trades-learning contexts. Due to the complex and multifarious nature of the work characterising trade occupations, learning how to become a tradesperson requires a significant commitment in terms of time, along with physical and cognitive effort. All modalities (visual, aural, haptic etc.) and literacies (text, numerical, spatial etc.) are required when undertaking trade work. Manual dexterity and strength, coupled with the technical and tacit knowledge required for complex problem solving, not to mention suitable dispositional approaches, must all be learnt and focused on becoming a tradesperson. However, there is a substantial gap in the literature on 'how people learn a trade' and 'how to teach a trade'. In this book, contemporary teaching and learning approaches and strategies, as derived through practice-based participatory research, are used to highlight and discuss pragmatic solutions to facilitate the learning and teaching of trade skills, knowledge and dispositions. The approaches and strategies discussed include the implementation of technology-enhanced learning; project-based inquiry/problem-based learning; and recommendations to ensure learners are prepared for the future of work.

This book examines challenges associated with the education of teachers in and for rural places. It offers a new perspective with respect to how Canadian educators are shifting the conversation toward a hopeful discourse concerning how educators can foster meaningful rural learning environments, which will contribute to building stronger rural communities and regions. A central focus of the book is emerging reconceptualization of education, place and indigeneity in Canadian education in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Though the challenge of addressing rural teaching and learning lies partly in the nuances and complexities of unique places, there are also common threads that affect virtually all communities in rural, regional and remote educational, cultural, economic, and social geographies. Chapters in this collection provide current research in Canadian rural education including examples and stories from the field - contributed by teachers, administrators, and superintendents - on the challenges and creative opportunities that they have discovered in their own rural context, giving hope and inspiration for what is possible. The book will appeal to all readers interested in rural education and teacher education, as well as to those concerned with educational inequality and indigenous education.

The field of information technology continues to advance at a brisk pace, including the use of Remote Laboratory (RL) systems in education and research. To address the needs of remote laboratory development for such purposes, the authors present a new state-of-the-art unified framework for RL system development. Included are solutions to commonly encountered RL implementation issues such as third-party plugin, traversing firewalls, cross platform running, and scalability, etc. Additionally, the book introduces a new application architecture of remote lab for mobile-optimized RL application development for Mobile Learning (M-Learning). It also shows how to design and organize the remote experiments at different universities and make available a framework source code. The book is intended to serve as a complete guide for remote lab system design and implementation for an audience comprised of researchers, practitioners and students to enable them to rapidly and flexibly implement RL systems for a range of fields.

This book aims to provide insight into how digital technologies may bridge and enhance formal and informal workplace learning. It features four major themes: 1. Current research exploring the theoretical underpinnings of digital workplace learning. 2. Insights into available digital technologies as well as organizational requirements for technology-enhanced learning in the workplace. 3. Issues and challenges for designing and implementing digital workplace learning as well as strategies for assessments of learning in the workplace. 4. Case studies, empirical research findings, and innovative examples from organizations which successfully adopted digital workplace learning.

This edited book focuses on current practices, challenges and innovations in the emerging field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). By combining diverse, empirically-proven and innovative ESP practices from all over the world with inspiring theoretical input and reflections from experienced practitioners, the authors in this volume examine both best-practice examples and ESP programmes which by various metrics are deemed to have failed. This book will be of interest to practitioners, teacher educators and researchers working in the field of ESP, as well as readers interested in language education and curriculum development more broadly.

This book addresses the education and training of Members of Parliament (MPs). It examines existing training programs offered in various countries around the world, evaluates their strengths and weaknesses and makes recommendations for a new approach, which aligns the professional development of MPs to 21st century requirements. Contributors address the role of parliamentarians, how to prepare them for their multi-faceted functions, the importance of ethics in any program, the requirement for more sophisticated adult learning approaches, human resource implications and the need to reform existing education and training models. The book will appeal to scholars in the fields of political science, adult education and human resource management, as well as to parliamentarians interested in enhancing their skills so as to perform more efficiently and effectively.

This book describes how a support structure can be built to enhance peer-to-peer (and also students-to-lecturers) communication and support. It informs lecturers on how they can decide if they should adopt one or more social media tools to facilitate students' learning, communication, and support for an internship program. This book introduces a participatory design approach that can help develop a pedagogy that will make good use of social media tools on internship learning. It presents a framework for experiential internship learning, integrating helpful educational practices such as participatory design approach and the use of social media.

Based on 55 semi-structured in-depth interviews, this book investigates 15 high-tech engineering co-op professionals' writing experience in the workplace. It shows how the digital age has had a marked impact on the engineers' methods of communication at work, and how on-the -job writing has affected engineers' technical competence, shaped their professional identities, challenged their views on Chinese and English writing, and hindered their success in the workplace. The book identifies three aspects of writing practice: engineers' linguistic and literacy challenges, the reasons behind these challenges, and coping strategies, which suggest that engineers are underprepared and lack necessary support in the workplace. Lastly, the study shows that engineers need to engage in technical literacy through on-the-job writing so that they can fully deal with workplace discourse and socialize with diverse professional groups. Since the sample group interviewed in this book is engineers who studied at universities in the United States and have a foot in the world of school and work as well as knowledge of both Eastern and Western cultures, the book appeals to teachers, students, engineers and scientists who are interested in scientific and technological writing. It is also valuable for educators who prepare scientists, engineers, and technical communicators for professional roles, as well as for communication practitioners who work with engineers.

The computer graphics (CG) industry is an attractive field for undergraduate students, but employers often find that graduates of CG art programmes are not proficient. The result is that many positions are left vacant, despite large numbers of job applicants. This book investigates how student CG artists develop proficiency. The subject is important to the rapidly growing number of educators in this sector, employers of graduates, and students who intend to develop proficiency for the purpose of obtaining employment. Educators will see why teaching software-oriented knowledge to students does not lead to proficiency, but that the development of problem-solving and visualisation skills do. This book follows a narrow focus, as students develop proficiency in a cognitively challenging task known as 'NURBS modelling'. This task was chosen due to an observed relationship between students who succeeded in the task, and students who successfully obtained employment after graduation. In the study this is based on, readers will be shown that knowledge-based explanations for the development of proficiency do not adequately account for proficiency or expertise in this field, where visualisation has been observed to develop suddenly rather than over an extended period of time. This is an unusual but not unique observation. Other studies have shown rapid development of proficiency and expertise in certain professions, such as among telegraph operators, composers and chess players. Based on these observations, the book argues that threshold concepts play a key role in the development of expertise among CG artists.

This volume brings together both political and educational scientists. While educational research literature has so far not systematically addressed the tool of simulations of decision-making, political scientists have hardly used insights from research on assessment or on motivation and interest of students. Almost all political science publications on simulations merely discuss how to implement the tool in class and fall short of providing evidence of the effects on student outcomes such as increased interest and performance. Combining the two disciplines is mutually enriching. Political science benefits from state of the art educational science measuring and testing of the claims made by the proponents of simulations, while educational sciences adds the systematic analysis of simulations of decision-making to their list of empirical objects, which also adds insights to the theories on the affective component of student learning. It is the explicit aim of the volume to address how simulating decision-making environments fosters learning. Implications for research and practice regarding student learning are addressed in all chapters.

This is the foundational book for the new series, Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability. The book canvasses research, practice and policy perspectives in teacher education across diverse geographic, social and political contexts. It explores the lifespan of teacher development from initial preparation through to graduate classroom practice as it occurs in an intensifying culture of standards and regulation. The characterization of initial teacher education (ITE) in a crucible of change permeates throughout the book. The chapters open up new ways of thinking about innovation and accountability in ITE and the professionalization of teaching, exploring fundamental questions, such as "Who are the actors in teacher preparation and how do they interact? How can we learn about the quality of teacher education? Where can we hear the voices of teacher educators and preservice teachers, as well as school-based teacher educators? What are the new and emerging roles of others in teacher education who have not been involved previously, including employing authorities?" (p. 22). While the book provides responses to these and other provocative questions, it also offers new insights into innovative teacher education from a wide range of policy and practice contexts.

This volume considers the role of initial and continuing teacher education in uncertain times. It highlights key principles and methods that preserve curiosity and optimism regarding the potential of teacher education, and regarding the manifold achievements of pre-service and in-service teachers. It explores how teacher education can produce teachers who are committed to counter-oppressive curricula and pedagogies, and reflects the critical role of teacher educators as public academics.

This book explores and progresses the concept of negotiation as a means of describing and explaining individuals' learning in work. It challenges the undertheorised and generic use of the concept in contemporary work-learning research where the concept of negotiation is most often deployed as a taken for granted synonym for interaction, co-participation and collaboration and, hence, used to unproblematically account for workers' learning as engagement in social activity. Through a focus on workers' personal practice and based on extensive longitudinal empirical research, the book advances a conceptual framework, The Three Dimensions of Negotiation, to propose a more rigorous and work-learning specific understanding of the concept of negotiation. This framework enables workers' personal work practices and their contributions to the personal, organisational and occupational changes that evidence learning to be viewed as negotiations enacted and managed, within contexts that are in turn sets of premediate and concurrent negotiations that frame the transformations on and from which on-going negotiations of learning and practice ensue. The book does not seek to supplant understandings of the rich and valuable concept of negotiation. Rather, it seeks to develop and promote a more explicit use of the concept as a socio-personal learning concept at the same time as it opens alternative perspectives on its deployment as a metaphor for individual's learning in work.

In this book Fulya Apaydin argues that labor responses to dramatic technological change are influenced by the political institutions of the Global South more than any other factor. In addressing vocational education programs - which are highly relevant in understanding how labor unrest is governed in developing settings - she makes two important contributions. Firstly, she offers a new theoretical framework to understand labor mobilization and de-mobilization patterns, rethinking vocational education as a key transmission belt for manufacturing labor consent. Secondly, she provides a systematic comparison of skill formation schemes and their implications on labor mobilization in federal and unitary systems. With a focus on Argentina and Turkey, two case studies are provided in which technology has provoked differing levels of strikes, walkouts and extended protest.

This book focuses on a renewed interest in work based learning in higher education. Due to an increased emphasis on employability in the graduate population, supported by wider policy changes, work based learning is becoming an increasingly pressing issue in higher education. The authors detail innovations from a breadth of UK universities, where academics have creatively addressed changes in work based learning structure, pedagogy and support systems. These changes in turn recognise the impact of real-life learning experiences on student progression, on both an academic development and a personally transformative level. Encompassing a wide variety of topics, the examples within the book are supported by theory and carefully detailed practice pedagogy. This valuable edited collection will be of interest to practitioners and scholars of work based learning and higher education, as well as a useful practical guide for academic developers.

This volume sheds light on debates about personalised learning in teacher education by exploring the popular emergence of personalising learning in education and hence its significance in teacher education in the 21st century. It examines personalising learning theory and explores the tenets of this theory and its recent trends in international settings. The theory is explored in relation to both general and higher education pedagogy, and in a range of examples within a teacher education context. The examples from practice provide insights into maximising the potential for personalising learning theory to enhance teaching, learning and assessment in teacher education. The book includes case studies involving pre-service teachers working in communities of practice with one another, with schools and with the wider community. Examples of technology for personalising learning are also described. All the case studies demonstrate how the learner is made central to the teaching and assessment approaches adopted and contributes to a lifelong learning continuum. Providing insights into a new pedagogy for teacher education that leads to an enriched student experience, the book presents a model for personalising learning in teacher education that offers support for 21st century teacher educators.

This book assesses the influence of the international organization UNESCO on the development of national Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) systems in the Southern African Community Region (SADC), focusing particularly on Botswana and Namibia. Designed around UNESCO's Better Education for Africa's Rise (BEAR) project, the study is an excellent example of applied policy research. Analysis is from the perspective of key stakeholders including UNESCO headquarters and field offices, Ministries of Education and of Labor, employers and employees, education and training institutions, international partners and more. Both qualitative and quantitative evidence are used to provide a comparative overview, and the author also reveals the current state of data on skills. Readers will discover common goals and challenges across the nations but also a common lack of action to measure the impact and influence that UNESCO's programs have had at a national level, prior to this study. Were the newly implemented educational policies successful or not? If the public policies failed, why was that? These chapters shed light on such questions and how UNESCO's contribution influenced the national development processes, in the context of globalization processes and trends of global mass education. The book has much to offer for both scholars and those working in UN agencies or national governments who seek to develop education systems and better link them to the world of work.

This book discusses the developments in policy and practice in the field of formal, non-formal and continuing vocational education and training in Spain since 1970. It describes how VET has been transformed and become one of the country's main areas of pedagogical innovation, and also examines current developments, such as the role of non-formal vocational education and training, the accreditation of vocational qualifications acquired in the non-formal system, and the adoption of dual apprenticeships that bear little resemblance to central European dual systems. Written by respected researchers in these fields, the first section is informative and analytical, offering a description of the system and comments based on academic literature and research. The second section illustrates the research on relevant issues, portraying empirical data from different regions in Spain, as well as nationwide data. Explaining and interpreting data on the basis of the authors' different theoretical frameworks, the book provides a comprehensive, updated and accurate overview of VET and relevant research in Spain, as well as their relation to European and global developments.

This book centres on a broadened view of complexity that will enrich engagement with complexity in the social sciences. The key idea is to employ complexity theory to develop a holistic account of practice, agency and expertise. In doing so, the book acknowledges and builds upon the relational character of reductive accounts. It draws upon recent theoretical work on complexity, emergence and relationality to develop a novel account of practice, agency and expertise in and for workplaces. Biological, psychological and social aspects of these are integrated. This novel account overcomes problems in current views of practice, agency and expertise, which suffer from reductive, or fragmented, analyses, based upon individuals, groups, or networks. In retrieving the experiential richness of human activity - often esteemed as the basis of generative and creative life - this book shows how complexity both emerges from, and is, a non-reductive feature of, human experience, especially in daily work. "...an ambitiously wide-ranging volume, questioning the key tenets of respected approaches ..... and offering ..... 'novel accounts', which draw on features of complexity thinking.... ...But they go further than any of us in their argument that: 'whatever reductive moves are made, they 'flow' from holistic accounts of relationality which have already affectively engaged the purposes of a co-present group.' This is the intellectual contribution that is built consistently and persuasively across the chapters." Professor Emerita Anne Edwards, Oxford University "Hager and Beckett have written a book that will challenge more commonly held notions of agency, practice, skills, and learning. Centering their argument on complexity theory or, as they prefer, complexity thinking, Hager and Beckett argue that it is through relations that we raise questions about, gather data from, and make working sense of the complexity that surrounds us. Groups then, particularly small groups, hold and implement agentive power. And what the authors call co-present groups-ones in which holistic relationality occurs socially, and affectively in distinctive places-"draw us closer to each other, and harness our normativity by enabling negotiability and reason-giving." If your field of study involves anything remotely sociocultural in nature or if you are just interested in the complex ways we engage as humans with our worlds, you should find a place for this book in your library." Bob Fecho, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York NY, USA

There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research, this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical messages, showing how presumptions about theory's relation to practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula. The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal education, and the agency of students and faculty.

This book focuses on the specific traits and nature of entrepreneurial human capital and the extent to which it can be stimulated by entrepreneurship education - especially when these activities combine collaborative practices and innovation. It includes a comprehensive collection of articles on how entrepreneurship education can be structured, providing theoretical reflections as well as empirical evidence. As such it contributes to the ongoing debate on the teachability of entrepreneurial skills and the role of innovation and collaboration in the design of educational programs that aim to spread entrepreneurial human capital.

This book offers a collection of original, peer-reviewed studies by scholars working to develop a knowledge base of teaching and facilitating self-study research methodology. Further, it details and interconnects perspectives and experiences of new self-study researchers and their facilitators, in self-study communities in different countries and across different continents. Offering a broad range of perspectives and contexts, it opens up possibilities for encouraging the collaborative and continuous growth of teaching and facilitating self-study research within and beyond the field of teacher education. The breadth of the scholarship presented expands scholarly discussions concerning designing, representing, and theorising self-study research in response to pressing educational and social questions. By documenting and understanding what teaching and learning self-study looks like in different contexts and what factors might influence its enactment, the book contributes to building a kaleidoscopic knowledge base of self-study research. Overall, this book demonstrates the impact on participants' professional learning and validates the authenticity and generative professional applications of self-study methodology for and beyond teacher education, providing implications and recommendations for practitioners on a global level.

This book examines how law functions in a multitude of facets and dimensions. The contributions shed light on the study of comparative law in legal scholarship, the relevance of comparative law in legal practice, and the importance of comparative law in legal education. The book will particularly appeal to those engaged in the teaching and scholarship of comparative law, and those seeking to uncover the various significant dimensions of the workings of law. The book is organised in three parts. Part I addresses scholarship, with contributors examining comparative legal issues as critique and from a theoretical framework. Part II outlines practice, with contributors discussing the function of comparative law in such comparatively diverse areas as international arbitration, environment, and the rule of law. Part III appraises comparative law in education.

This book demonstrates school-based approaches to primary science teacher education. The models used involve partnerships between universities and primary schools to engage pre-service primary teachers in classroom teaching and learning that effectively connects theory with practice separate to the formal practicum arrangements. The book is a culmination of the research and collaboration of researchers from five Australian universities involved in the Science Teacher Education Partnerships with Schools (STEPS) project, funded by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. While the STEPS project focused on partnerships in primary science teacher education, a key strength of the partnership model (the STEPS Interpretive Framework) developed and explored in this book is its applicability for cross-case, national, international, and inter-state analyses of partnership practices. This is shown through a number of case studies where the STEPS Interpretive Framework is applied and evaluated in the context of other school- or learning-related partnerships. These broad-ranging analyses illustrate the relevance of the model to a range of settings, both within and outside of education.

This book describes, problematises and theorises professional practice research in a range of Australian settings to provide evidence of robust, wide-ranging and contemporary approaches to professional experience in initial teacher education. It presents the latest research and evidence from those currently involved in innovative programmes designed to provide alternatives to meet local challenges during professional experience in teacher education. As the professional experience process is framed quite differently across Australian teacher education programmes, these cross-institutional accounts of collaboration, innovation and success make a major contribution to the field, both nationally and internationally. The book was developed from a research workshop funded by an Australian Association for Research in Education grant and organised by the Teacher Education Research and Innovation Special Interest Group.