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"This article presents an overview of the perceived importance and accelerated spread of English language education, both formal and informal, in three East Asian countries (i.e. China, Japan and South Korea) against the backdrop of globalisation and emergent ideological, sociocultural and educational trends. It begins with a review of the recent developments in English language education in each of the countries, the ostensible reasons for English language education and the ideological issues contributing to the recent English language education initiatives. This is followed by a discussion and a critique of the common trends and themes manifested in the three countries' recent initiatives to reform and improve English language education. The article concludes with a number of policy recommendations for English language education in East Asia and other countries, where English does not have an institutional role to play."

"This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith's development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for research that has at its centre a concern to understand the social and institutional processes that enable, support and discursively prepare for significant educational reform. Working with and between these two eminent contributions to sociological enquiry, our paper explores the ways in which research can trace educational governance through the production, reproduction and subsequent enactment of generations of policy texts even before they are officially released for use in schools. In particular, we suggest that examination of the day-to-day processes involved in policy production shows how policy texts are progressively invested with institutional meanings and come to instantiate and govern institutional relations. The methodology we are developing foregrounds the creation and dissemination of discourses that support specific orientations to educational practice and governance, as well as the institutional practices that embed the logics of the field."

"Research exploring the means by which new media technologies can shape development within marginalized communities worldwide has began to move away from discussion limited to technical and infrastructural, to consider the interactions, beliefs, and values of local communities. Yet most projects continue to focus on enabling communities to access external information, rather than on the possibility of using media to catalyze community reflection and thereby developmental activity from within. This article shows how this promise can be actualized by providing an overview of an experimental project that made available a set of video cameras to a carefully selected group of community members in a ritualized, largely nonliterate village in Andhra Pradesh, India. It concludes that policymakers, researchers, and practitioners would benefit from considering the possibilities that reflective media hold to generate collective action and consensus building, and that these possibilities can synergize with the need to develop scalable projects."

The purpose of this article is to examine the authors' experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community's own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as mistrust of 'university people': legacy of the conventional outside-in and top-down research procedures for working in communities; power struggles with community 'gatekeepers', including 'building keepers'; and bureaucratized project-driven community work. I consider that under the current neoliberal educational policies that are plaguing the world, for example, No Child Left Behind in the USA, self-development projects promoted through PAR can be viable ways to defy these policies and their fatalist thinking. School children's parents and their communities are nowadays in a better position than teachers to fight for reclaiming local control of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

"In universities, the need for education associated with sustainability is widely accepted and it is increasingly being introduced. However, the associated concepts and terms are contested-education for sustainable development and education for sustainability represent increasing levels of change required in curricula, while achieving sustainable education will require even greater change. A transformative pedagogy underlies and contributes to the extent of the change, as more argue for a range of analytical and context-related skills to be developed in students."

Examining the historical trajectory of these two "models" and the transformative practice that produced relatively high human development outcomes, the article identifies some common elements behind their success, highlighting the centrality of public act

Reflection is generally acknowledged as an important part of teacher education and a central activity in teacher development. The close connection between reflection and identity development has been noted in literature on teacher education. This paper will focus on the interplay among the concepts of reflection, identity and the ideal, and will report the results of a pilot study which attempted to elicit from student teachers their reflections on an ideal identity for their future lives as teachers. The implications of such reflection for teacher education programmes will be indicated.

Armenia is in the midst of major educational reforms in which teacher professional development is a key component. Much of the energy devoted to developing education in Armenia is targeted towards enhancing student-centred teaching, especially cooperative

A feature of language teaching in recent decades has been the development of process-oriented approaches. This orientation towards processes encourages us to facilitate learner choice and individual development. However, it is challenged by the current ed

This article considers humanities teaching as a vital space where students might develop their capability as 'practical reasoners'. The importance of this for self-development, but also for society and democratic life, is considered, while the economic pu

Premised on the basis that we all need to unlearn our socialisation from within an oppressive society as we develop ourselves as instruments for social justice, this article presents a framing model for facilitating the growth and development of educators

More than 65 million youth (ages 15-29) live in the countries that make up Mercosur: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Despite the socioeconomic situation, they have projects, dreams and an enormous capacity to contribute to human development in th

The modern city is torn by conflicts and contradictions, marked by serious environmental problems (pollution, waste, traffic, etc.), and by large areas of human and urban blight, because its profound changes and the inhabitants of cities meet in a very fractured and parcelled out relationship; the contacts may take place face to face, but nevertheless are impersonal, superficial, and transitory. The critical approach to environmental education and sustainability is to target the inequalities, the wasting of resources, and the arrogance of human domination over nature, but its contribution to appropriate urban development is nevertheless still weak. It is therefore necessary to develop the research on the educational approach to the urban environment. Critical thinking, participation, the ability to imagine future scenarios, and a shared and free access to knowledge are essential elements of the necessary social change toward sustainability.

The word' partnership' is pervasive within debates about participatory global governance and the idea of partnership acts as an underwriting principle within both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Paris Declaration. However, there remains general ambiguity about the meaning of the idea of partnership and how its conceptualisation is meant to normatively guide a more co-ordinated move from theory to practice. Indeed, the idea of partnership remains an impoverished theoretical and practical appeal, which is under-defined, poorly scrutinised and unconvincingly utilised as a normative tool in applied practice. This article will provide a more theoretical examination of what an appeal to ideas of partnership means and explore what a normative commitment to a robust conceptualisation of partnership might look like within the MDGs. To do so, it will examine the underwriting normative language of partnership as it is found within the MDGs, theoretically explore the principles inherent within this normative language, and locate present gaps within the MDGs between its normative theory and applied practice. By doing so, it will be possible to outline some additional principles and commitments that are normatively required to satisfy the underwriting spirit of the MDGs in order to bring them in line with said spirit's own normative values.

The prospect for the MDGs cannot be reduced to the sum of the eight goals, divorced from international dynamics, the hard interests of states and the global dynamics that impact on both, or from the complexities and intractability of widespread poverty and its consequences. The legacies and controversies of previous international development initiatives also beset perceptions of, and support for, the MDGs. However, the wholly inclusive nature of the goals give them a unique normative standing and momentum; and the quantitative measures of progress ensure that there is more to the goals than lofty ideals. In addition, the thematic linkages between each of the goals is mutually reinforcing. While not discounting either structural difficulties or the lack of adequate progress in some specifics, it is important not to overlook the political consensus, abundant goodwill and normative momentum that have already been generated in the ten years to date. The answer to the question, 'How promising is the promise of the MDGs?' has not yet been answered definitively: there remains good reason for cautious optimism for progress up to 2015-and through revitalized commitment and persistent engagement, well beyond that date.

This article introduces a forum of response articles to the edited volume Masculinities in Text and Teaching. The forum features two scholars of English in a transatlantic conversation and then a response by the editor of the volume. The forum develops, from the edited collection, the theme of pedagogical uncertainty in studies of masculinity and the ways those conversations can be used to help students develop their own humanistic ethics in the classroom. Employing two styles of doing work on teaching from the perspective of textual scholars, the author of one article reads her own experience and classroom moments to build an argument about the high stakes of doing work around gender for students and the profession. The other author reads from both classroom experience and from a text she teaches to open up new pedagogical possibilities. These techniques are echoed in the collected volume. A key argument throughout is that classroom struggles around texts and identities - which often provoke feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty for both teachers and students - can be deployed in conversations that enable students to learn about both the humanities subject and themselves.

In this special issue we are also particularly concerned with the take up of neoliberal forms of globalization in schooling and higher education in cities, in both the Global North and South. There is a troubling inadequacy inherent in denoting the Global South and Global North, related most clearly to the invocation of a uni-directional, mostly paternal and exploitative set of relationships; whether these be of capital, of resources, of people, and so forth. Alternatively, following critical development studies, we might see the North and South in both politico-economic terms, pertaining to development, and in geographical terms (Riggs, 2007). As such an important conceptual framework for dealing with ideas of the North and South is the mutually constitutive nature of notions such as the global and local (Massey, 2005; M.P. Smith, 2001), especially the relationship to neoliberalism and space (Peck & Tickell, 2002). Understanding contemporary challenges to education in a globalized world requires attendance to space and place, and to scale; the global, national, regional, local (Robertson, 2000; Thiem, 2009), and to concepts and phenomena such as transnationalism that complicate understandings of and relations between space and place, global and local (Jackson, Crang, & Dwyer, 2004). The papers in this special issue, while not explicitly taking up spatial theorizing, nonetheless speak to a complicating of the global as producing the local, and correspondingly of the local (usually conflated with place) as always the 'victim' of the global (Massey, 2005). The papers in this special issue provide empirical and conceptual interventions that speak more to complex, relational understandings of neoliberal globalization. A relational understanding posits that: local places are not simply always the victims of the global; nor are they always politically defensible redoubts against the global. Understanding space as the constant open production of the topologies of pow

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which neoliberal globalization is produced through educational restructuring and new modes of urban development. Neoliberal globalization, however, is a variegated process wherein local social hierarchies articulate with state policies and global capital. This study shows how caste and class relations in the education sector in Andhra Pradesh are instrumental to forming Hyderabad's connection to the global economy. The contradictions of these regional realignments of education, geography and economy are manifest in the uneven development of the region and the rise of new socio-political struggles for the right to the city.

This article examines a teacher educator's implementation of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in an adolescent literacy course. The purpose was to foster pre-service teachers' knowledge and dispositions to enact multiliteracies pedagogy. This article synthesizes the theories of multiliteracies pedagogy and Third Space to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by key learning experiences for pre-service teachers' development of knowledge about and dispositions towards multiliteracies pedagogy. This article argues that emphasizing the Situated Practice and Critical Framing components of multiliteracies pedagogy can promote pre-service teachers' productive negotiations of the conflicts they experience in developing dispositions towards multiliteracies pedagogy.

"The time dimension has become increasingly important in organisational management studies. Various concepts have been developed: temporary work, temporary systems, projectification and temporary organisations. Many aspects have already been studied; for example, relationship structures, the characteristics of projects that temporary organisations (TOs) intend to implement and develop, legal forms, the different sectors in which TOs have been disseminated, and the degree to which they have been formalised. However, one aspect that has still not been studied in depth is the specificity of their temporariness and the specificities of the organisational, social and learning systems that this encourages."