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The aim of this study is to identify the most prolific countries in the field of special education and to discuss the widespread impact of their papers by taking into account the country's h-index. Through a bibliometric analysis, the data were collected in the Web of Science Core Collection category "Education, Special" in the Social Science Citation Index during 2011-2020. The 25 most prolific countries in the field of special education were determined in terms of paper productivity, and it was seen that the leading country was undisputedly the USA (54.42%). Meanwhile, a strong positive correlation was found between the h-index and the number of papers published by the countries (r=0.864). On the other hand, when the ranking in terms of the number of papers was reconfigured by the h-index, it was relatively changed. The possible reasons for this change for the countries with the most changing rankings were discussed by considering some definitive criteria such as the journal quartiles, the percentage of international and domestic, and the percentage of open access papers. This study reports a positive correlation between the quality and quantity in the field of special education for the publications of countries. It has been shown that where the positive correlation deviates, then especially, the journal quartiles, the percentage of international collaboration and the percentage of open access papers have a significant effect. The bibliometric findings may be useful to enrich the discussion about the widespread impact of papers and debate whether the use of h-index is acceptable for cross-national comparisons.

Using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, this paper compares the earnings premium and employment share of jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) across 11 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results reveal that the STEM wage premium is higher in the United States than in any of the other comparison countries, despite the fact that the U.S. has a larger share of workers in STEM jobs. We also find evidence that the premium varies significantly across STEM sub-fields and education levels, and that the premium tends to be higher in countries with lower unionization rates, less employment protection, or a larger share of employment in the public sector.

This study explores the relation between risk of job automation and participation in adult education and training (AET) and examines variation in that relation across welfare regimes distinguishing between situational and institutional barriers. Using microdata of PIAAC, we analyze participation in formal or nonformal AET for job-related reasons in relation to the risk of automation of the respondents' occupation after controlling for main sociodemographic characteristics. Logistic regression models are run on respondents from 14 European countries representing different welfare regimes: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Scandinavian countries); Italy, Greece, and Spain (Southern European); Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland (Central and Eastern Europe), Belgium, France, and Germany (Continental); and United Kingdom and Ireland (Anglo-Saxon countries). Our findings confirm that workers in occupations at high risk of automation were found to be consistently less likely to participate in job-related AET, quite irrespective of welfare regime. [The paper was presented at XIII Conferenza Espanet Italia--Il welfare state di fronte alle sfide globali (Venezia, 17 September 2020).]

This study aims to identify the literacy skills of individuals whose highest level of education was in the field 'teacher training and educational sciences'. The study sample comprised 10,618 individuals in the field of teacher training and educational sciences, selected from 31 countries (participating in the International Adult Skills Assessment Programme during the 2014-2015 survey) using a multi-stage sampling method. The study employed multi-level latent class analysis and three-step analysis in order to determine both the number of multi-level latent classes of educators' literacy scores as well as the selected independent variables' success in predicting those latent classes. The analysis revealed that educators in Germany constituted the group with the highest literacy skills while educators from Singapore comprised the group with the lowest literacy skills. [This study was presented at the 9th International Congress of Educational Research. Ordu University, Ordu, Turkey.]

Communication skills are highly sought after by employers, as industry reports repeatedly show. At the same time, those reports also reveal that many employers are dissatisfied with their newly hired graduates' communication skills. In addition, increasing globalisation has led to the call for 'global graduates' who can function well in culturally diverse contexts. Considering both aspects, it is important, to explore which factors help foster students' global communication skills. This paper investigates this issue, testing the impact of potential factors identified from previous literature. Data was collected from 2359 students in seven different institutions located in five different countries. A linear regression model was tested to identify those factors which most contribute to global communication skills development. Results show that motivation to improve communication skills and the experience of social and academic integration into the campus community made the most significant contribution to participants' higher levels of global communication skills development. Besides, students who were presented with relevant opportunities and support from their respective institution and those engaged with foreign languages also demonstrated higher levels of global communication skills development. The paper concludes that for students to acquire the communication skills needed for working successfully in diverse contexts, and hence to become 'global graduates', it is essential that they venture out of their comfort zones and engage with the diverse campus community. At the same time, this engagement requires universities' guidance and support to help maximise the learning gains from such intercultural encounters.

While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.

In this work, a bibliometric analysis of the investigations of the last 54 years focused on the teaching of topology and its applications in the learning of other areas of knowledge was carried out. The articles that appear in the SCOPUS database were taken into account under the search criteria of the words topology and teaching, connected with the Boolean expression AND in the search field ABS. As a result, 329 articles were obtained which, based on the PRISMA methodology, were reduced to 74 papers. In them publication trends, impact of publications, citation frequencies, among others, were compared. In addition, its use was identified for learning topology at different levels of training, areas of knowledge where this discipline is most applied and strategies used to teach these applications.

For over two decades now, the application of Citizen Science to Education has been evolving, and fundamental topics, such as the drivers of motivation to participate in Citizen Science projects, are still under discussion. Some recent developments, though, like the use of Artificial Intelligence to support data collection and validation, seem to point to a clear-cut divergence from the mainstream research path. The objective of this paper is to summarise the development trajectory of research on Citizen Science in Education so far, and then shed light on its future development, to help researchers direct their efforts towards the most promising open questions in this field. We achieved these objectives by using the lens of the Affordance-Actualisation theory and the Main Path Analysis method.

Despite existing empirical work that explores the multiple ways in which students develop a sense of belonging in higher education, there is a dearth of comparative research about the extent to which the concepts of community and belonging are central to what it means to be a student and how students in different national contexts (beyond Anglophone countries) construct community and belonging. Drawing on qualitative data from students from six European countries, we provide an account of conceptualisations of community and belonging. Specifically, this paper extends discussions around community and belonging in higher education through comparative inquiry. Notwithstanding the individualised and consumerist framing of students accompanied by market reforms in higher education across Europe, it shows that the notion of community and/or belonging features prominently in students' narratives. We also demonstrate how a sense of community and belonging is experienced on different levels. Crucially, the emphasis placed on community in students' sense of belonging varies by the country, pointing towards the continued influence of distinctive national traditions, structures and norms of higher education. Our analysis contributes to wider debates about the development of a European Higher Education Area and its impact on European homogenisation.

Academic libraries, apart from their main function, which is to provide information services to academic communities, may also perform a number of social roles in the broad meaning of the term. Accordingly, they now tend to serve as the third place offering inclusion and animation activities to academic as well as local communities (including potential students) and to groups in risk of social exclusion (immigrants, persons with disabilities, senior citizens, etc.) or in need of various kinds of care and support. However, for libraries to be able to fulfil those tasks, they need properly trained staff who not only have the required competencies but also the right social attitudes. The paper presents an analysis of the social attitudes of academic librarians from twenty countries across the world as compared to the personnel of other types of libraries. The level of individual social capital, activity in social networks, aspirations in life and social and civic engagement were investigated. It was noted that the respondents tend to undervalue the importance of the work done by libraries for local communities. At the same time, the research showed that academic librarians have a somewhat lower level of individual social capital and trust than public librarians and less extensive social networks. Nonetheless, they are open to relationships with others, which enables them to engage in various social projects.

This paper explores the mobilisation of crisis response and related rhetoric in contemporary European teacher education. Using a critical vertical case analysis of illustrative national, regional, and institutional crisis-mediation settings (Switzerland, Germany, Ireland), we examine how crisis-informed policy response addresses global challenges like teacher shortages and digitalization. Employing an assemblage approach, we foreground how such responses exemplify moves to rethink, remake and redesign teacher education systems and programmes. Our discussions underscore the potential and the problematic aspects of crisis-based policy action to reshape teacher education and emphasize the role of universities and administrative institutions in fostering sustainable change. The study reveals particularly the influence of local contexts and cultures in shaping policy solutions and the dangers of excluding key actors within university teacher education from these conversations and actions. This discussion aims to inspire innovative and culturally-responsive transformations in teacher education practices and policies within Europe, and beyond.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity to examine the initial policies developed by Australian, Canadian, English, German, Greek and Irish governments to limit the spread of the virus. This has revealed governments' conceptualisation of the early childhood sector and its workforce. This paper argues that neoliberal ideology and neoliberal imaginaries have already influenced the early childhood sector globally. During the pandemic, the choices that governments made at the outset of the pandemic has allowed their priorities and underlying ideology to be more transparent. Using an ethnographic methodology, early childhood researchers from each of the six countries, examined their individual governments policy responses and the effects on the early childhood sector during its initial months (between March and June 2020). The authors consider the extent to which this may have implications for the sector in how it should continue its ongoing pursuit of professionalisation of the sector.

The growing need to improve the quality and efficiency of translation by using technology has stimulated the practice of and research into translation technology teaching (TTT). Naturally, there is a need to analyse the state of the art and development of TTT from a quantitative perspective, because such research is still very scarce. This paper uses the bibliometric technologies, CiteSpace and VOSviewer in particular, to delineate the publication information of TTT-related research mainly in two citation databases, i.e., Web of Science (WoS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), from the year 1999 to 2020. It finds that China is gaining importance in TTT-related research, that international English-language publications pay more attention to the teaching of MTPE, while Chinese-language publications focus more on corpus-based TTT, and that English publications tend to use empirical methods, while Chinese publications tend to adopt non-empirical methods. The differences between the two publication communities in research methods and focuses call for contact and exchange between the two communities.

There is a growing body of scholarship on how students see themselves, and also on how they are conceptualised by other social actors. However, what has been less explored is how students believe they are seen by others, and how this impacts them. Drawing on focus groups with students across Europe -- and particularly plasticine models students made to depict how they felt they were seen by relevant others -- this paper will illustrate how the four most common ways in which students felt they were constructed were as hedonistic and lazy; useless and a burden; clever, hardworking, and successful; and a resource to be exploited. It will argue that such stereotypes had significant material impact on students' lives and how they experienced being a student. Finally, it will analyse how specific national contexts accounted for a range of variations in how students articulated these constructions.

The Eurozone's export-oriented policy regime and pursuit of trade surpluses remains thoroughly puzzling. Rooted in overly strict fiscal policies, inequality and underinvestment; undermining growth and contributing to trade tensions– it defies economic self-interest. This paper develops an analytical framework to confront this puzzle. It argues that these policies are self-harming, but are nonetheless pursued, because of three fallacies that obscure the cost-benefit calculus attached to them. These fallacies are rooted in the empirical problem of observational equivalence: the same observed surplus can be driven by different underlying processes, and its net benefit will depend on our assumptions about these drivers. The first fallacy is mistaking external enablers for domestic competitiveness—interpreting export success to be linked to domestic reform, when it was largely explained by better links to faster growing trading partners. The second fallacy is mistaking weak imports for strong exports—interpreting surpluses as 'winning', even when they are not driven by superior exports but sluggish imports. The third fallacy is mismeasuring multinational firms' contributions to national exports—interpreting profit shifting and assets stashed in low tax jurisdictions as export performance. Germany and Ireland, as paradigmatic 'success cases of austerity', are used to expand the argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the push to strengthen European defence cooperation, the topic of whether a European strategic culture is emerging has become widely contested. Since convergence between member states is the key that would unlock the way to a European strategic culture, this paper examines how they perceive crucial aspects of strategic culture and in what aspects they have converged and diverged. This study selected Germany, Poland, and Ireland as cases of the EU-27 member states. It compared the three national strategic cultures in three aspects: strategic environment, cooperation patterns, and strategic goals and means, by conducting a computer-based content analysis of strategic documents and official speeches of high-level national policymakers between 2000 and 2020. This study found that despite the persistent divergence in strategic goals and means, the three countries have shown greater convergence in their perceptions of the strategic environment and that while their preferences on cooperation patterns are largely unchanged, they seem to be accepting the EU as a legitimate and favourable platform for security and defence cooperation. These findings suggest that the prospects for the emergence of a European strategic culture and further developments of the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy are both challenging and promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many (remote) rural areas of Europe and the world, rural communities are facing various challenges. One response is residents leaving their communities. However, there are also many empirical examples of residents staying, launching project initiatives, developing new solutions and experimenting with new practices. This is what we call social innovation. What experiences do actors have in these processes? Can we speak of empowerment? To what extent can such initiatives have an impact on community development? In this article, we explore these questions, for which there is little related empirical research. By applying a multi-sited individualising comparison to case studies in three European countries (Germany, Ireland and Portugal), we obtain empirical evidence of the following dimensions of empowerment that Avelino et al. outline conceptually: the achievement of autonomy, competence and relatedness and also impact, meaning and resilience. Often, however, it is not the individual actors for whom such effects can be reported. Rather, the social initiative as such or the local administration has acquired new skills and autonomy. Regarding community development, 'pathways to impact', such as infrastructure improvements and/or the creation of new employment opportunities and/or the influx of new residents, could be identified. However, this development often depended on both opportunity and the cooperation and goodwill of many stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of climate change, coastal areas around the world face multiple interrelated challenges. A range of 'international best practice' approaches have been proposed to address these, including concepts such as integrated coastal zone management, ecosystem-based management and managed retreat. However, such supposedly mobile and transferable approaches often fail to properly account for the differences between local contexts, leading to implementation failures. In response, this paper mobilises the conceptual lenses of 'situated practices' and 'path dependencies' to demonstrate how the emergence and evolution of approaches to planning in coastal communities can generate policy trajectories that constrain the latitude for alternative options. The paper explores the trajectories of coastal planning on the island of Sylt in Germany and Castlemaine Harbour in Ireland. It identifies important path dependencies associated with institutional inertia, collective memories of past hazards and management strategies, the legacies of previous coastal management measures and of coastal development, and the importance of property relations. Overall, the analysis highlights the importance of appreciating the local and historical distinctiveness of coastal areas and communities. It shows that critical attention to context and creating inclusive fora for debate is required to advance climate change adaptation measures that offer opportunities to unlock historically anchored path dependencies which hamper flexibility and reduce resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the results of an EXARC funded 2019 Twinning project exploring the production and use of an Irish early medieval ard. In this, the project partners researched the evidence for early ploughs and ards, made bloomery iron, produced an ard share, and worked wood to form the frame of the ard. This paper also includes the results of scientific analysis and reflections on ploughing using specially trained draft animals. Ultimately, this provided details about this crucial agricultural technology and its place within early medieval society. This project is also a case-study, showcasing collaborative, practical research strengths between leading centers for experimental archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]