The Bologna Process, recently implemented in Portugal, has brought many changes to higher education institutions. One of these changes refers to a law that enables mature students (23 years and older) to gain special access to higher education, taking into account their professional experience and other biographical elements. The numbers of…

After Deng Xiaoping's 1978 reform and opening, foreigners had a chance to see adult education in China. As a result, many met Yao Zhongda, Chief of the Bureau of Workers' and Peasants Education. From 1921 onwards, adult education has been a vital corollary of Communist revolution. Although Yao's biography was extremely relevant to what foreigners…

After 1880, the Upstate of South Carolina found itself in the midst of a textile boom. As families migrated from the mountains and failing farms to find employment in one of the many textile mills, relations re-established roots within the confines of the company-owned mill village. Paternalism, the absence of child labor laws, and the lack of…

This article examines the commitment of Hong Kong teachers in the decade after the political transition in 1997, when large-scale education reforms were launched. The life history method was employed to investigate teachers' self-appraisal of their commitment levels in their career course and factors contributing to such trends. Findings not only…

This is a self-study of my professional and cultural biography and identity, a history which directed me first toward the work of urban teaching and then into teacher education and research into comparative educational issues of racial and national identity. I use this inquiry to demonstrate how biography and identity influences the lived…

This integrative review uses two of Asa Grant Hilliard's books, "SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind" and "The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays on African American Community Socialization", to discuss aspects of his scholarly legacy in teaching, history, and psychology. His scholarship is provocative. Hilliard rejected the supremacy of the…

Drawing on a single case study in the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC-FE) project, discussed in the introduction to this volume, this article explores contrasting perspectives of tutors' and students' experiences of a General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ). The "case in point" is an Intermediate level…

Henry Barnard was "one of the men who revitalized the American common-school system", and as such, he is clearly worthy of a biography. Not only was his service a noted one to elementary education, but as college president and as the organizer of the United States Bureau of Education his activity also touched other parts of the country's…