The collection of chapters in this book results from ongoing scientific discussions on teaching, learning and curriculum studies in Europe. Didactics as a research field and area of knowledge deals with questions about teaching, learning and educational content. Didactics explores institutionalized teaching and learning processes that are fundamental to allow people living together and acting as citizens. It connects curriculum issues to classroom practices and student’s learning experience in a unique manner that goes beyond the field of curriculum studies and the field of the learning sciences. Focusing on different research traditions for conceptualizing the relationships between learning and teaching through the educational content learnt, the book presents advanced research in field of “Didactics - teaching and learning” that addresses the new challenges faced by the teaching profession. The collection of chapters in this book supports the continuous growth of comparative research on classroom practices and addresses in a novel manner the need for including international perspectives on Didactics in teacher education programs and graduate schools in education worldwide. Part 1 highlights the recent advances in the theoretical development of Didactics and more particularly the development of comparative didactics. Part 2 illustrates the diversity and complementarities of theoretical and methodological approaches for the empirical study of classroom practices. Part 3 maps certain societal challenges that didactic research faces in a changing world.

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Learning is the foundation of the human experience. It begins at birth and never stops, a continuous and malleable link across life stages of human development. Disparities in learning access and outcomes around the world have deep consequences for income, social mobility, health, and well-being. For international development practitioners faced with today's unprecedented environmental and geopolitical pressures, learning should be viewed as a touchstone and target for those seeking to truly effect global change. This book traces the path of international development work—from its pre-colonial origins to the emergence of economics as the dominant discipline in the field—and lays out a new agenda for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners, from early education through adulthood. Learning as Development is an attempt to rethink international education in a changing world.

A Pedagogy of Place offers an alternative vision for outdoor education practice. This timely book calls into question some of the underlying assumptions and ‘truths’ about outdoor education, putting forward alternatives to current practice that are responsive to local conditions and cultural traditions. In this renewal of outdoor education philosophy and practice, the emphasis is upon responding to, and empathising with, the outdoors as particular places, rich in local meaning and significance. Current outdoor education theory and practice is influenced by cultural ideas about risk and adventure, and by psychological theories of personal and social development. However, in recent decades the professional discourse of outdoor education has made a noticeable shift to include education for the ‘environment’ and ‘nature’. This has resulted in a mismatch between theory and practice: traditional notions of proving oneself ‘against’ the challenges of the outdoors are antithetical to the development of an empathetic relationship with outdoor places, which growing concern with today’s environment demands. This book is the first of its kind to articulate a renewal of philosophy and practice for outdoor education that is in keeping with the educational needs of today’s young people as they grapple with considerable social and ecological changes in a rapidly changing world. The authors draw extensively on international, national and local literature and provide compelling case studies drawn from the Australian and New Zealand contexts.

"What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995? Can you honestly say that your school's curriculum and the program you use are preparing your students for 2015 or 2020? Are you even preparing them for today?" With those provocative questions, author and educator Heidi Hayes Jacobs launches a powerful case for overhauling, updating, and injecting life into the K-12 curriculum. Sharing her expertise as a world-renowned curriculum designer and calling upon the collective wisdom of 10 education thought leaders, Jacobs provides insight and inspiration in the following key areas: * Content and assessment: How to identify what to keep, what to cut, and what to create, and where portfolios and other new kinds of assessment fit into the picture. * Program structures: How to improve our use of time and space and groupings of students and staff. * Technology: How it's transforming teaching, and how to take advantage of students' natural facility with technology. * Media literacy: The essential issues to address, and the best resources for helping students become informed users of multiple forms of media. * Globalization: What steps to take to help students gain a global perspective. * Sustainability: How to instill enduring values and beliefs that will lead to healthier local, national, and global communities. * Habits of mind: The thinking habits that students, teachers, and administrators need to develop and practice to succeed in school, work, and life. The answers to these questions and many more make Curriculum 21 the ideal guide for transforming our schools into what they must become: learning organizations that match the times in which we live.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

This open access book presents the results from the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). Using data from 24 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, the study investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21st century. It also responds to the enduring and emerging challenges of educating young people in a world where contexts of democracy and civic participation continue to change. New developments of this kind include the increase in the use of social media by young people as a tool for civic engagement, growing concerns about global threats and sustainable development, as well as the role of schools in fostering peaceful ways of interaction between young people. Besides enabling the evaluation of a wide range of aspects of civic and citizenship education, including those related to recent developments in a number of countries, the inclusion of test and questionnaire material from the first cycle of the study in 2009 allows the results from ICCS 2016 to be used to examine changes in civic knowledge, attitudes and engagement over seven years.