One of the core outcomes of the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) held in 2009 was the Belém Framework for Action (BFA). Its signatories committed to monitoring the most recent development stages of adult learning and education (ALE) worldwide on a regular basis, and to present and assess results in a global report.…

The term Inclusive Excellence (IE) is being applied to many efforts in higher education to address past exclusionary practices. IE is more than a term, it is a vision of what could be. It is a deliberate set of actions to ensure that all students, especially those who have historically been underserved by the fragmented attempts in higher…

Thirty years ago Boyer's report "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate" (1990) inspired the launch of the 'SoTL movement' which sought to raise the status of learning and teaching in higher education. In this paper we argue that despite its honourable intentions the SoTL movement has been a thorn in the flesh of…

Early research on the returns to higher education treated the postsecondary system as a monolith. In reality, postsecondary education in the United States and around the world is highly differentiated, with a variety of options that differ by credential (associates degree, bachelor's degree, diploma, certificate, graduate degree), the control of…

This article examines the challenges that an epistemic account of deliberative democracy, according to which democratic deliberation has 'truth-tracking' capacities, encounters in contemporary polarized societies, and then discusses how these challenges could be addressed through democratic education. The focus of the article is especially on two…

It is through education that communities and governments can tackle political, economic, social and geographic inequalities and ills in the continent of Africa. It is for this reason that policies like the Universal Primary Education were adopted. Children have the right to basic quality education as espoused in several agreements such as the…

The most recent efforts to promote inclusive education have acknowledged the various contexts in which it takes place, moving away from a placement-focused conceptualization of inclusion. Acknowledging that inclusive education may take place within multiple types of early childhood education programs necessitates the consideration of context as a…

This paper is the first publication from a project focused on the quality of teaching, learning and assessment practices in the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia -- what we understand these to be and how they might be measured. Based on a review of the literature, this paper explores current definitions of quality in VET,…

School inspections are a common feature of many education systems. These may be informed by quantitative background data about schools. It is recognised that there are pros and cons of using such quantitative information as part of the inspection process, though these have rarely been succinctly set out. This paper seeks to fill this gap by…

The authors of this article investigate the economic knowledge of Czech high school students using a database of 18,589 participants from the 2019 to 2020 Czech Economics Olympiad. Czech high school students show solid comprehension of basic economic concepts and principles of international economics but understand substantially less about…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to redefine quality in the context of "access" providing higher education institutions (HEIs), through a theoretical lens, in order to find solutions to the wicked problem of access vs quality and "inclusiveness vs excellence" debate in higher education (HE). Design/methodology/approach:…

"Improvement in Action," Anthony S. Bryk's sequel to "Learning to Improve," illustrates how educators have effectively applied the six core principles of continuous improvement in practice. The book highlights relevant examples of rigorous, high-quality improvement work in districts, schools, and professional development…

Failing to recognize the role of leaders in quality and equitable schooling is unfortunate and must be redressed. Leadership is fundamentally about organized agency and collective vision, not managerialism, since it is an organizational quality, not merely a positionality attribute. Most important, if change is to be systemic and transformative,…

Suellen Shay's research focused extensively on both the challenges of creating socially-just higher education curricula and the knowledge and practices of the field of educational development. Shay's work highlights the important ways in which curricula define what it means to be educated and the importance of socially-just curricula that provide…

In transnational policy, directives on how to improve "quality" through auditing flourish. However, more research is needed about how these quality audits affect school personnel in local contexts. This paper has scrutinised the discursive effects of how "quality" is construed in school personnel's comments during a quality…