This article explores aspects of the relationship between professional standards for teachers and the curriculum for teacher education in the lifelong learning sector in the United Kingdom. Drawing on an analysis of different editions of three core textbooks for teacher education in the lifelong learning sector, which are positioned as acting as…

The author has been asked to discuss the relevance, or lack of relevance, for "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies" (Sarason, 1972) for community psychology today. She appreciates this assignment, as one of the first books she read in graduate school was "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies." After that, she was exposed…

An important element of open educational resources (OER) is the permission to use the materials in new ways, including revising and remixing them. Prior research has shown that the revision and remix rates for OER are relatively low. In this study we examined the extent to which the openly licensed "Flat World Knowledge" textbooks were being…

In this article, the authors analyze evidence regarding the dissemination of mistaken ideas concerning the presence and function of pine trees ("Pinus halepensis") in a Mediterranean archipelago: the Balearic Islands (Spain). The main errors concerning the natural vegetation that are disseminated among citizens by the forest management…

If one puts together "China Is Unhappy" and the book "China Can Say No" of 13 years ago, one is quite likely to get the impression that "China's nationalism is heating up." "China does not wish to lead anyone, and should only think of leading itself"--those are the words printed on the back cover of…

The book "China Is Unhappy" that made the list of best sellers not so long ago is blowing like an icy wind in spring and is poisoning the nation's mental state as though laden with a virus of unhappiness. Those who are most susceptible to it are groups of underage persons with mentalities that are still fragile and young people who have…

The disturbances that took place across English towns and cities in 2011 raised significant debate and discussion about their causes and the motivations of the "rioters". Media and official explanations citing criminality and opportunism, repeated the now familiar narratives of cultural deficit, blaming absent fathers, poor parenting and…

Adult education curricula such as literacy textbooks present blueprints for living, including different ways of being and relating as men and women. However, educators and scholars seldom consider the underlying assumptions about gender in literacy workbooks, especially in international settings. This study used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)…

Technology has long been employed to improve teaching and learning, although not always so efficiently and cleverly as one might wish. Advances in the teaching paradigm have sometimes reinforced outmoded, obsolete, and simply incorrect practices and prevailing understanding of the organization of knowledge. Today, technology presents education in…

This study sought to evaluate a newly created information resource book for parents of children newly diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder entitled "Autism Spectrum Disorder: Information for Parents." A purposive sample of 13 participants (comprised of mothers of children with ASD and ASD service providers) participated in 1 of 3…

In 1996 the author conducted an intensive study of twenty current family textbooks published in the United States, the results of which appeared in an academic journal article and a nonacademic report in 1997. The study included practical "functionalist" marriage and family textbooks and more academic sociology of the family books; these…

Language educators argue that foreign language learning in the United States should increase students' intercultural competence (IC), which will allow them to see relationships among different cultures, mediate across cultures, and critically analyze cultures including their own. Qualitative research investigating students experiences with such…

The present study is based on the theoretical assumptions that frequency of characters and their structural components, as well as the frequency types of structural components, are important to enable learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) to discover the underlying structure of Chinese characters. In the CFL context, since reliable…

Knowledge about ecology and environmental education (EE) constitutes a basic tool for promoting a sustainable future, and was a target area of the BIOHEAD-Citizen Project. School textbooks were considered as representative sources of evidence in terms of ecology and environmental education, and were used for comparison among the countries…

Over the past decade in the United States, levelled texts, or "little books" with finely graduated levelling of text difficulty, have regained their status as a literacy staple for beginning readers. Despite their resurgence, questions remain regarding the reliability and quality of these books. In this study, we conducted a detailed…