Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools by Prakash Singh is now available from The Learner imprint.
Better schools prepare better learners! Can anyone dispute this? Hence, innovative strategies in education are presented in this book with the primary purpose of developing better schools. Key areas covered in this book are:
- Organisational effectiveness
- Emotional intelligence
- Collegial leadership
- Fear of failure in education: Tobephobia
- Media-based learning
- Gifted learners
- High risk learners
- Self-regulated learning.
Novel strategies are presented that educators can employ to focus on and to improve practice. The issues discussed in this book are therefore typical issues that educators are faced with daily in their schools. It equips them with useful information to cope with the challenges of being teachers. Also, Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools gives educators the opportunity to introspect critically their professional integrity and status. Ultimately, no matter how much we do in our schools, our learners must be the beneficiaries of quality educational outcomes.
Cathryn Teasley was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference.
Cathryn Teasley is Adjunct Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña, Spain. Her work is focused on cross-cultural justice through education, and is reflected in publications such as Transnational perspectives in culture, policy, and education (Peter Lang, 2008), which she co-edited with Cameron McCarthy.
Cathryn Teasley’s paper Postcolonial Learning in Neocolonial Times has been published as part of The International Journal of Learning.
Abstract: By critically examining four broad dimensions of learning through the postcolonial lens, the aim with this study is to promote alternatives to today’s neoliberal variant on the technical-rational imaginary for learning. Such alternatives are meant to help learners of all ages, origins, and conditions, but especially those belonging to identity groups who regularly experience one or more forms of discrimination, inequality, and injustice, to identify neocolonial cultural and economic dynamics so that they might create a cross-cultural common ground from which to resist such oppression, as a means of empowering and perhaps even emancipating themselves from its damaging effects.
Dr. Denise Newfield’s paper, Pippa’s Song: Multimodality and Pedagogic Praxis, commemorates the contribution of Pippa Stein, professor of language education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 1981 to 2008.
Professor Stein was a much beloved and respected teacher, academic and researcher, a founder member of the Africa Research Network, a member of the international advisory committee of the Learning Conference, and of the editorial boards of numerous academic journals. Her untimely death in August 2008 is mourned by the international academic community.
It is my purpose today to pay tribute to her work in multimodal pedagogies and in democratic education by providing a critical assessment of it.
A Comparative Analysis of Grammatical and Lexical Cohesive Devices in Selected Authentic Texts by K U Ihemere is now available from The Learner imprint.
Despite years of practice in reading, many learners find difficulty in making sense of texts they want to read. A number of reasons have been given for this difficulty in comprehension experienced by foreign learners of English. Ranging from failure to interpret the writer’s cohesive signals as intended; lack of practice in applying “grammatical” knowledge when reading; lack of practice with texts containing a variety of cohesive features; to the tradition of teaching such features as part of the grammatical system and practicing them in isolation and at single sentence level in grammar/or writing lessons. Hence, this book presents the results of a comparative analysis of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in selected British newspaper reports and short stories, identifying the cohesive devices that tend to occur more frequently in these texts. The findings indicate that students’ in reading and writing classes can benefit from the rich lexical contents of short stories as well as the formal style and specialist lexis in newspaper reports. Therefore, EFL teachers will benefit their students by using a combination of these types of texts in reading and writing classes. Additionally, they buttress the view that insights from discourse analysis can help teachers refine their decision-making processes of text selection and the teaching of vocabulary, reading and writing skills. It also offers some possible classroom activities that might be useful in developing students’ reading and writing skills at the intermediate to advanced level of study, based on the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices attested in the study.
The Web of Confucius: Evolution and Revolution in Chinese Higher Education by Nancy L. Street and Marilyn J. Matelski is now available from The Learner imprint.
Chinese schools are thought to have begun in the Western Zhou (11th century to 770 B.C.), and continued through Confucius’ time (551-479 B.C., and far beyond), emphasizing the “six arts”-ritual, music, archery, charioteering, history (including calligraphy), and mathematics.
Extrapolating, adapting, and charting these Confucian ideals through several historic eras, the authors use a systems theory-based web model to demonstrate these cultural influences on Chinese higher education. The authors also argue that this “Confucian” web deeply influenced Deng Xiaoping’s “long march” towards China’s global development. Political, financial, technological, social and cultural imperatives of China’s entrance into the global mainstream have, in turn, further affected the escalating evolution of education in China’s universities.
The authors-professors in both the American and the Chinese higher education systems-also develop an argument for delving deeply into culture, utilizing historical-critical methodology, buttressed by a conceptual understanding useful in analyzing the development of similar systems throughout the world. In addition, they present an historic, multi-faceted view of China’s many incursions into the global world system, to build a truly astonishing higher education system in 2009. This rapid response further illustrates the strong foundation and societal and governmental support-upon which the current Chinese educational system continues to build.
Common Ground Publishing have relaunched The Learner imprint with the following new titles:
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
- individually and jointly authored books;
- edited collections addressing a clear, intellectually challenging theme;
- collections of papers published in The International Journal of Learning.
Books should be between 30,000 words and 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Self Assessment in Action by Dr Betty McDonald is now published and is available at theLearner.
With an ever changing clientele there is urgent need to attempt unconventional, innovative strategies that positively influence what happens in educational institutions. Readers are provided with tried-and-tested models that can be adapted to suit their personal needs. The book aims to energize and catapult readers into a new dimension of innovation and encourages them to experiment in classrooms and reflect on their practices as they seek to improve themselves as professionals.
We are pleased to announce that The International Journal of Learning has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus.
Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database; one of the largest in the world.
We are now in final production for The International Journal of Learning, Volume 15, Number 12. This issue will be published shortly and will be available in the online bookstore.
