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Sloyd, a Swedish handwork programme for schools, beginning in the late years of the 19th century, was influential in Sweden but almost immediately it began to influence teachers and educators from other countries. This influence is explored in this paper. Using transnational historiography, the sites of influence, and the flow of people and texts, is explored. The focus here is on the circulations of ideas and practices between states, and in particular, between Sweden, the US, the UK and India, and the particular ways in which this flow and embedding of Sloyd occurred.The paper is about Sloyd and about the conditions underlying its influence in other countries, broadly from the 1890s to the 1930s, although its effects continued to roll out across the world after this period.

This paper explores the ways in which education funding questions relate to key policy issues facing contemporary governments. It demonstrates how decisions about the level and distribution of expenditure have different implications for national education systems, institutions and students. Following a general discussion of social investment in education, the paper identifies some specific policy considerations in recent attempts to improve the compulsory and post-compulsory sectors. Drawing in particular on British experience, the impact of decisions about expenditure and funding mechanisms on access and performance is considered. We conclude that funding issues cannot be resolved in purely technical terms, but are contingent upon ideological perspectives about broader economic and social priorities.

The tension between cultural pluralism and social cohesion is perhaps the single most resonant moral paradox for contemporary democracies. The challenge is no less daunting for public education. In the past forty years North American projects for Inter-cultural and Anti-racist education have had limited success. This paper argues that such projects have suffered from an unclear moral vision and from a pedagogical indifference to the developmental stages of children and adolescents as learners. This paper describes two distinct moral aims of education for democratic citizenship. It argues that the tension between the two approaches can be resolved by reference to the developmental needs of various groups of learners. A developmental approach to Inter-Cultural, Anti-racist Education is outlined.

This paper explores the gendered landscape of vocational education and training in England and Wales. At the start of the 21st century, young people in England and Wales can still choose between leaving school at the age of 16 or remaining in full-time education. Having made that key decision, however, they then face a further bewildering set of choices, for each route then sub-divides into a number of pathways. For some young explorers, the journey will be straightforward, whereas many will face obstacles and setbacks along the way due to the effects of their gender, ethnicity or social class. The paper examines the extent to which young people can exert agency when determining their futures given the continuing power of structural determinants. To this end, the paper maps the routes which young people can take after compulsory schooling and analyses the relationship between post-compulsory provision and the labour market. The paper concludes that we need to properly understand this landscape in order to help young people in their decision making.

The present study investigates hope in the context of a 4 year vocational training. The theoretical framework combines the theory of hope with core ideas of self-determination theory. The main hypothesis predict a positive relationship between general hope and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs in the learning environment at the workplace. The analysis of cross-sectional questionnaire data from 450 trainees and 58 trainers integrate the perspectives of the trainees at the individual and group levels, as well as their trainers using multilevel modeling. The results show that a substantial amount of variation in individual hope is associated with the learning environment, and provides empirical support for the hypothesized positive relationship between hope and the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs (relatedness, autonomy and competence) in the work environment. The paper concludes by recommending the creation of autonomy-supportive work environments to facilitate the satisfaction of basic psychological needs and nurture hope.

The paper investigates recent transnational and trans-disciplinary knowledge trajectories on the basis of scholarly journals by focusing on the contemporary relationships, commonalities and differences between education research and educational psychology in three European countries: Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. We investigate how education research and educational psychology are composed regarding authors, research topics and methodological standards. We also are interested in analysing how these disciplines are formed according to their mutual recognition and their specific communication patterns. The investigation is based on 70 more recent volumes of eight journals of education research and educational psychology, which are analysed according to social and disciplinary affiliation of authors and the methodological focus of articles. As a preliminary result of work in progress we identify different research patterns regarding nations and cultures on the one hand and regarding disciplines on the other.

This article looks at the growing importance placed on activities to prepare school le- aders in correspondence to their central role for de-veloping and assuring the quality of schools and the ever-increasing responsibilities they are facing. In many countries, this has led to the design and implementation of extensive programs. In this paper, an overview of predominant approaches in use across Europe, Asia, Aus-tralasia, and North America is provided, and international trends in school leader development are identified. It becomes obvious that the aims of school leader development pro- grammes should be grounded on a more broadly defined understanding of leadership, adjusted to the core purpose of school, and based on educational beliefs integrating the values of a democratic society.

An exploratory blended learning case study in corporate finance is presented. A detailed description of the actual use of different training materials (books / simulations / self-assessing) and scenarios (online / offline / individual / group learning) is given. This was one of the first blended learning studies integrating different evaluation methods into a systematic user behavior analysis approach. A sample of one hundred sixty one students filled in a user profile questionnaire, used an online diary after each system log out to describe their user behavior, passed a final exam and answered an exams preparation questionnaire. Furthermore we collected log file data. The results show that students preferred to study during the semester and for the exams preparation with papers, self-assessment tasks and Excel-simulations rather than to use interactive discussion forums. We conclude that future blended learning developments should focus on interactive material, clearly link multiple-choice test tasks with the final exam and train students to use blended learning concepts efficiently.

The link between stratification and educational inequality in empirical research is well documented. Some countries – particularly those that do not follow the model of comprehensive schools – discuss the possibility of increasing permeability between school tracks to reduce inequalities. This paper focuses on the occurrence of permeability in the stratified school system of Luxembourg and examines what this permeability entails for certain risk groups, specifically students from lower social background, male students and migrants. Educational pathways were classified (cluster analysis) on the basis of an administrative panel data set (n=5301); mechanisms behind educational decisions were analysed as a second step by estimating logistic regressions (Boudon, 1974). The findings show that reorientations in Luxembourg are often determined by the students’ social group, and that permeability – as blurred educational boundaries – mainly reproduces disparities in track placement.

This paper offers an analysis of the current state of teacher education research in the United Kingdom (UK). It commences with a brief historical overview of developments over the last century. Some recent «capacity building» initiatives designed to enhance and develop teacher education research are described. There is then a focus on a particular web-based resource that draws together a significant number of publications in UK teacher education research from 2000-2008. This database is then analysed in order to identify in which journals and by which authors this work is produced. The range of methodological approaches and substantive areas of focus that appear to predominate in teacher education research in the UK are reviewed, according to categories within the database. This demonstrates that there are some very real challenges to be faced by teacher education researchers in the years ahead, similar but not identical to those faced elsewhere.

School violence has become a serious public health issue during the last two decades. Consequently, researchers and policy makers have made substantial efforts to understand its causes and consequences and to identify effective methods to reduce its occurrence. While psychologists and other education researchers have long been active in school violence research, the topic has really been explored by economists only in recent years. This paper presents some evidence on this issue drawn from the growing economics literature and related disciplines. It shows that the phenomenon has an adverse effect on the level of educational attainment and labour market outcomes. Hence, reducing violence at schools not only eases life for many students who suffer because of it, but should also lead to more investment in human capital. Finally, some suggestions for future research are provided.

The topic of modularity is a lively issue in eLearning, both concerning the support that new technologies can offer to the implementation of modular programs and the production of technically and didactically sound learning objects. Several authors have proposed a new object oriented learning paradigm, which builds on the possibility to chunk the learning experience into clearly defined and small units of learning. If the analogy with software programming is interesting and stimulating, it is also necessary to consider the big differences between the two of them. The paper introduces both perspectives – from modularity to eLearning and vice-versa – reporting experiences done at the USI and at the ISPFP and providing a broad discussion about learning objects.

Dyadic interaction does not necessarily imply that just two people are present. It is often possible to single out episodes of dyadic interaction in multiparty contexts that we analyse, such as family dinner table conversation. Within such a speech event, multiparty participation framework (variously organized) is the default conversational structure. Consequently, a groundwork(Goffman, 1964) is required for participants to gain space and exclusivity for a dyadic exchange. This paper shows how dyadic framework is made out of the multiparty default interactional structure of a family dinner. Furthermore, we analyze the resources participants deploy to protect the dyadic exchange from anothers intrusion and/or by the risk of desertion of one member of the dyad. Young and older children actively participate in that activity and learn to manage it through diverse dyadic settings. It is not the number of participants that unequivocally determines whether an interaction is dyadic or multiparty. Varying and complex participation frameworks, alliances, and challenges are built and transformed within family dinner conversation; it is in their locus of the interactive organization of ongoing activity in which children are socialized to a complex socio-cognitive activity.

What informs and directs the development of educational research and educational science? This contribution examines, in particular, the effects of a nation’s social requirements on the development of their educational research. Synthesized from pre-existing analyses, the first part works out a theoretical foundation for a description of the process of the «disciplinarisation» of educational science. In the second part, the content of the educational research of the selected six national reports (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland), which were authorized by official agencies, is analyzed. With its intent predominantly heuristic, the paper shows how the social requirements function as regulatory mechanisms and how their influences on the development of educational research are perceived and described. The analysis concludes with a description and discussion of contrasting configurations of educational research based on a reading of the reports, and culminates in a series of theoretical and empirical questions that encourage follow-up research.