This commentary reflects the author's impressions of Continuing Medical Education (CME) Congress 2012, a provocative international conference on professional development and quality improvement in the health professions that took place in Toronto, Ontario, last spring. The sessions he attended and conversations he had with other attendees were…

Contemporary global transitions are remaking education as a social institution and re-positioning educators in a lifelong learning political order. In this paper, I reflect on a research project that investigated the teaching occupation in learning societies in order to explain the concept of "educational work": the form of labour that…

This article presents the author's response to the reviews of his book, "The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice." He begins by highlighting some of the main concerns of his book. He then offers a brief response, doing his best to address the main criticisms of his argument and noting where the four reviewers (Charlene…

This article focuses on how confession operates in contemporary discourses on reflective practices. By revisiting and mobilising Foucault's genealogy of confession in relation to how reflective practices are mobilised in an in-service training programme for healthcare assistants (HCA) in elderly care, it is argued that the HCAs are shaped as their…

Since ethical issues in the contemporary delivery of health care involve doctors, nurses, technicians, and members of other health professions, the authors consider whether members of diverse health care occupations might benefit from studying ethics in a single classroom. While interprofessional courses may be better at teaching the ethics of the…

What is it to learn for an unknown future? It might be said that the future has always been unknown but this question surely takes on a new pedagogical challenge in the contemporary age. Generic skills may seem to offer the basis of just such a learning for an unknown future. Generic skills, by definition, are those that surely hold across…

For the 25th anniversary issue of "English Teaching Forum," published in 1987, the author wrote about the diversification of the language teaching field. Her point then was that during the preceding years from 1962 to 1987, the language teaching field had diversified: Where earlier there had been a unified approach to language teaching, by 1987,…

In this article, the author discusses what life will be like in 2035, and what its implications will be for the way in which health education is practiced. He states that in the next 25 years health educators will have to leave their comfort zones and take a calculated risk with some radical and more creative approaches to health behavior change.…

Japan's Basic Law on Food Education (Shokuiku kihonho) was enacted in June 2005 as a response to various concerns related to food and nutrition, such as food scandals, an increase in obesity and lifestyle-related diseases and an assumed loss of traditional food culture. The Law defines food education (shokuiku) rather vaguely as the acquisition of…

Adult education will have an important role to play in addressing the challenges facing the world in the wake of the Copenhagen climate change talks. What can providers do to make a difference--and what is already being done? In this article, the authors give their perspectives.

Economists may be biased in ways that are not apparent to many. A widely espoused theory in economics is that regulators' decisions often become biased in favor of the industries they regulate; to use economic jargon, they become "captured." Economic incentives encourage even the best-intentioned regulators to cater to the interests of the…

The job market on North American campuses may be heading for the deep freeze, but hundreds of positions are opening up in the Persian Gulf as American universities scramble to set down roots in those petrodollar-rich states. The combination of money and opportunity on offer may seem hard to resist. But academics who trade the rich intellectual…

This article presents the author's response to Hall and Gunter who accuse the author of trying to mount "a stout defence" of New Labour's reforms of the teaching profession. Hall and Gunter go further and accuse the author of "triumphalism" in his use of the title "Tony Blair's big prize". Their second and more…

In the December 2008 special issue of the "Oxford Review of Education" John Furlong focused upon Tony Blair's modernisation of the teaching profession and associated attempts to harness teacher professionalism to a broader reform agenda. This article responds to Furlong's contribution through an examination of the evidence base used to…

This article explores how contemporary professional associations employ discourses of knowledge as a means of promoting professionalism. By analysing policy documents from the Norwegian associations for teachers, nurses, engineers and accountants, we reveal dominant knowledge discourses and discuss how they serve to position the associations in…