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This book promotes the idea that professionalism among teachers should be marked by democratic relations, rather than by managerialism and performance management. It provides a thorough investigation of issues around the participation of trainee teachers in the Lifelong learning Sector, by reflecting on their experiences and questioning how well initial teacher education prepares teachers as professional practitioners in the sector. The reflexive nature of the book promotes a deep discussion of the nature of professionalism, drawing upon the works of John Dewey, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, and places initial teacher education in the Lifelong learning Sector firmly within the policy and ideological context of regulation, audit and control. It also illuminates pertinent discussions around teacher agency through a consideration of confidence, excellence, and routinised practices. Finally, the book takes us 'through the looking glass' to reveal the tensions within the teacher education curriculum as it prepares trainee teachers for a ready-made world, whilst at the same time attempting to encourage principles of social justice, inclusive practice and education as a democratic endeavour. It will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in Education and Sociology, particularly those with an interest in lifelong learning and teacher training. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018.

Context: This report describes the community context, concept and mission of The Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Memorial), Canada, and its 'pathways to rural practice' approach, which includes influences at the pre-medical school, medical school experience, postgraduate residency training, and physician practice levels. Memorial's pathways to practice helped Memorial to fulfill its social accountability mandate to populate the province with highly skilled rural generalist practitioners. Programs/interventions/initiatives: The 'pathways to rural practice' include initiatives in four stages: (1) before admission to medical school; (2) during undergraduate medical training (medical degree (MD) program); (3) during postgraduate vocational residency training; and (4) after postgraduate vocational residency training. Memorial's Learners & Locations (L&L) database tracks students through these stages. The Aboriginal initiative - the MedQuest program and the admissions process that considers geographic or minority representation in terms of those selecting candidates and the candidates themselves - occurs before the student is admitted. Once a student starts Memorial's MD program, the student has ample opportunities to have rural-based experiences through pre-clerkship and clerkship, of which some take place exclusively outside of St. John's tertiary hospitals. Memorial's postgraduate (PG) Family Medicine (FM) residency (vocational) training program allows for deeper community integration and longer periods of training within the same community, which increases the likelihood of a physician choosing rural family medicine. After postgraduate training, rural physicians were given many opportunities for professional development as well as faculty development opportunities. Each of the programs and initiatives were assessed through geospatial rurality analysis of administrative data collected upon entry into and during the MD program and PG training (L&L). Among Memorial MD-graduating classes of 2011-2020, 56% spent the majority of their lives before their 18th birthday in a rural location and 44% in an urban location. As of September 2016, 23 Memorial MD students self-identified as Aboriginal, of which 2 (9%) were from an urban location and 20 (91%) were from rural locations. For Year 3 Family Medicine, graduating classes 2011 to 2019, 89% of placement weeks took place in rural communities and 8% took place in rural towns. For Memorial MD graduating classes 2011-2013 who completed Memorial Family Medicine vocational training residencies, (N=49), 100% completed some rural training. For these 49 residents (vocational trainees), the average amount of time spent in rural areas was 52 weeks out of a total average FM training time of 95 weeks. For Family Medicine residencies from July 2011 to October 2016, 29% of all placement weeks took place in rural communities and 21% of all placement weeks took place in rural towns. For 2016-2017 first-year residents, 53% of the first year training is completed in rural locations, reflecting an even greater rural experiential learning focus. Lessons learned: Memorial's pathways approach has allowed for the comprehensive training of rural generalists for Newfoundland and Labrador and the rest of Canada and may be applicable to other settings. More challenges remain, requiring ongoing collaboration with governments, medical associations, health authorities, communities, and their physicians to help achieve reliable and feasible healthcare delivery for those living in rural and remote areas. © James Rourke, Shabnam Asghari, Oliver Hurley, Mohamed Ravalia, Michael Jong, Wanda Parsons, Norah Duggan, Katherine Stringer, Danielle O'Keefe, Scott Moffatt, Wendy Graham, Carolyn Sturge Sparkes, Janelle Hippe, Kristin Harris Walsh, Donald McKay, Asoka Samarasena 2018.

Many technical universities in Taiwan face a challenge on students lacking interest in traditional classroom learning. This article presents the preliminary results of the course transformation for the freshmen Physics class at Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology. The class STUST 2025 is a pilot class that aims to provide students with a more hands-on approach to acquire knowledge by performing team-based learning and project-based learning approach for various courses and project courses every semester. Participants for this special class included 50 students who were divided into 10 groups and assigned specific Physics topics as a guideline for their projects. Students are required to discuss and submit a proposal during the midterms and the final project and report at the end of the semester. Students are evaluated base from their performance in making the projects and the contents of the submitted documentation. The pilot course showed that although this course change breaks away from the student’s traditional learning environment, they were able to learn to work in teams and learn from their respective projects. learning includes the challenges of working with others in accomplishing a project together. It also provided students a deeper understanding of theories and its applications in actual settings through studying differences in the results of the theoretically calculated values and the actual experimental values. However, in order to have a more holistic learning approach, improvements on the current practice will be done such as providing additional homework and short quizzes. Eventually this kind of practice will be implemented university wide. © 2018, Khon Kaen University,Research and Technology Transfer Affairs Division. All rights reserved.

This is one of the first studies to examine the educational entrepreneur in K-12 public schools and the first to present an instrument designed to measure entrepreneurial thinking among teachers using a type of reasoning, effectual reasoning, which has been proposed in the business literature on entrepreneurs. This study situates entrepreneurial thinking within the K-12 education arena and examines the relationship between high school and middle school teachers’ use of effectual reasoning and their corresponding implementation of high, medium, or low levels of innovation in STEM areas within their classrooms, districts, or across districts. Our findings correlated higher use of effectual reasoning, a component of entrepreneurial thinking, with higher levels of implementation of innovations among teachers within an NSF grant, Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and learning, which centered on deeper content, reform-oriented pedagogies, and entrepreneurial thinking. We found that high innovators viewed uncertainty’ differently than low innovators by associating it with more positive cognitive structures and that innovators at different levels hold distinct notions of what constitutes high and low risk innovations. Contrary to the common notion that entrepreneurs are high-risk takers, results reveal that the types of innovations perceived by high innovators as low risk are viewed as high risk by low innovators. Furthermore, the results are consistent with the idea that entrepreneurs do certain types of things to lower/manage the risk of innovations before and, if necessary, during the implementation of an innovation. NSF: Award 0831820. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

The global economic crisis of the past decade and the accruing shifts in labour market policy, coupled with the rapid advances in technology have resulted in a far less certain future employment horizon than ever before [1]. In response, Higher education institutions (HEIs) are best positioned to advance knowledge and produce work ready graduates with the requisite skills for the future economy [2]. In this paper, the current understanding regarding the role of HEIs, the academic-student partnership, graduate employability, industry collaboration and research led teaching are merged into a framework entitled P-PAC (Partnership in Pedagogy, Accreditation and Collaboration). This framework encourages and embeds a partnership approach between academia, students and industry with the goal of promoting collaboration, facilitating relevant curriculum and pedagogy practise and accrediting achievement in order to effect deeper and more engaged learning and teaching, so that students are better equipped with the necessary skills for both employability and global citizenship. The P-PAC framework is validated using a 5 ECTS Lean Systems module. The authors also define Threshold Concepts-major as those concepts (identified by the academic) which are inherent in a module and which need to be achieved by the student, in order to attain mastery of the subject matter. Threshold Concepts-minor are defined as those intermediate concepts identified by the student in their mastery of Threshold Concepts-major. Examples of both concept types are presented in this paper. © 2018 Polish Academy of Sciences. All Rights Reserved.

This research is aimed to analyze entrepreneurship pedagogy needs of Technology and Vocational Education in higher education. This needs analysis explored deeply the importance of entrepreneurship pedagogy of Technology and Vocational Education including curriculum aspects, instructional materials, pedagogy, and instructional materials needs. The type of the research is descriptive with survey methods. Technique of data collection was spreading questionnaire and interview. The sample is students of Technology and Vocational Education, lecturer of entrepreneurship course, and entrepreneurs. Technique of data analysis used in this research was quantitative and qualitative. Based on the result of needs analysis which is done quantitatively and qualitatively, it can be concluded that (1) there are needs disparity between students and entrepreneurship lecturer, especially in the aspect of learning models (methods, approaches, materials, modules and other instructional materials used), and (2) entrepreneurs hope that there is a curriculum which can enhance the creativity and innovation of the students by considering input from experts in the curriculum preparation. Besides, this research revealed that the students of Technology and Vocational Education, lecturer of entrepreneurship course, needs a development of learning model which supports entrepreneurship pedagogy especially in Technology and Vocational Education.

This study aims to explore students' learning effectiveness in energy education that integrates STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) activities and PBL (project-based learning). The subjects of experimental teaching were 32 junior engineering students enrolled in a project-based course in a Taiwanese university, and this study held a 9-week activity - "STEM & PBL Activities for the Innovative Design of Fuel-efficient Vehicles". In the activity, the integrated thinking emphasized by STEM plays a dominant role when combined with project-based learning strategies. The students took the main role in the course, while the teacher provided guidance to the students in learning and monitored their learning progress. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were adopted in this study: the qualitative analysis focused on students' projects, and interviews were conducted to understand students' opinions on the teaching activities; the quantitative results were analyzed and discussed. The STEM & PBL energy course covers various disciplines, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, yielding a significant positive effect on learning effectiveness in the field of energy education. The teaching mode of the course includes four aspects: the students discuss real energy problems to deepen their integrated STEM knowledge and abilities; the students work on actual fuel-efficient projects, with focus on integrated STEM learning; the students implement the project based on the STEM knowledge they learn from the energy education course; and the teacher promotes the learning portfolio of STEM and energy education. Based on the above conclusions, this study offers suggestions for teaching and future studies. © 2017 TEMPUS Publications.

A course on spatial geometry has long been a requirement of first-year students studying Industrial Design. However, given the aptitude of today's students to operate 3D modelling software, teaching spatial geometry as has been traditionally done seems increasingly less relevant. An experimental method based on learning-by-doing has been developed to help students acquire understanding of three-dimensional objects. A principal activity is based on: study of the spatial geometry of familiar objects (bottles) through observation, analysis, and deconstruction to reveal their visual vocabularies; and consideration of these visual vocabularies to reconstruct new objects three times larger in scale than the originals (to disassociate their initial functions). This method has been applied the past three years (2012-15), involving sixty-five to seventy students each year. The learning process takes fourteen full days over seven weeks. Students use freehand drawing and apply model-making techniques with basic materials. Through trial-and-error changes in scale, students develop ability to understand objects in three-dimensional space and appreciate that design is an iterative process. Moreover, students learn about composition, structure, balance, and harmony. Focus is on the learning process of students. Research results lead to the conclusion that students express new mental constructs and develop deep sensitivity to three-dimensional forms necessary to design products. © Common Ground Research Networks, Zahedi, All Rights Reserved.

Transferable skills are skills that are relevant and helpful across different situations and areas of life. Such skills are often seen as a crucial factor adding to the employability of individuals. It is often assumed that transferable skills can be reused after transition to a new situation. In this chapter, these assumptions are being discussed. Important questions are: ‘What is the value of transferable skills?’, ‘What restricts the transferability of transferable skills?’ and ‘How can transferable skills be fostered through education and training?’. The chapter starts with an overview of the manifold definitions of ‘transferable skills’, which are used in research, practice and policy. It will be argued that transferable skills play an important role in the recruitment and selection process, as well as during organizational entry. The assumption that transferable skills are (easily) transferable will be questioned, as this transfer depends on individual and contextual factors. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how transferable skills can be developed in school based and company based education and training. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017.

Korea’s development over the past 50 years has been remarkable. Many foreigners have ventured to the Peninsula to learn how this country has become so successful in such a short time. The love and passion for learning, supported by the Korean education system, has also attracted researchers from other countries to learn the “successful formula” to the country’s stride forward in economic performance (Fouser and Koehler 2014). Koreans have a deep respect for education that is shown by the amount of money spent by the average household on educating their children through various “cram” schools (Barber 2010). This amount is a higher percentage of household income than their counterparts in many other nations. However, since these schools are fee driven, and not accessible to everyone, a growing inequality in society is fostered leading to a noticeable gap in a society that values an egalitarian ethos. The Korean Vocational Education and Training Sector has been the backbone to Korea’s sustained economic development. This is serviced by a dedicated and militant-like training system that has brought about the “chaebols,” a Korean word for the country’s main conglomerate companies whose impact on the overall success of the country is significant. However, without proper policies to support learning and training in a globalized world, where more collaboration with stakeholders within the country and beyond is needed, Korea faces the challenge of not having skilled manpower to drive key industries forward in the twenty-first century. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.