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We report the findings from two global panel ���conversations��� that, stimulated by the exceptional coronavirus pandemic of 2020/21, explored the concept of resilience in geographic science teaching and learning. Characteristics of resilient teaching, both in general and with reference to GISc, are listed and shown to be essentially what might in the past have been called good teaching. Similarly, barriers to resilient teaching are explored and strategies for overcoming them listed. Perhaps the most important conclusion is a widespread desire not to ���bounce back��� to pre-COVID ways, but to use the opportunity to ���bounce forward��� towards better teaching and learning practices.

From Plato onwards many of the great Western thinkers have explored the nature of the arts, their contribution to society and their role in education. This has often involved a discussion of the potentially negative impact of the arts. The recurring message has been that the arts can warp judgment, elevate emotion at the expense of reason, distract people from attending to their own lives, diminish autonomy and authenticity, and create a damaging culture of fame. This “case against the arts” has been associated with the wish to control their contents and restrict their use in education. The views of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Rousseau and Tolstoy are considered in turn and distinctions made about the extent to which each writer’s “case against the arts” is a “case against the arts” per se or only against certain kinds of arts. Four implications for arts education are discussed: the avoidance of hyperbole with regard to the benefits of arts education; the role of cognition in responding to the arts; the ...

This article focuses on the ideology of international education as it developed during the twentieth century and analyses it into three elements: core beliefs about internationalism; the characteristics of a virtuous and worthy human being; and a set of pedagogical principles, based on enquiry, collaboration and debate. The idea, encapsulated by the International Baccalaureate (IB), of a universally available and applicable programme of international education is examined and the contrast drawn between the period in which the IB first emerged, when its target audience was mainly international schools for expatriate communities, and the current situation where the vast majority of IB programmes are taught in state and private “national” schools. The idea of a universal educational programme is seen as having its origins in the Enlightenment project whose key features are analysed. The principles of the Enlightenment have been under attack in recent decades as a result of developments in philosophy and the ...

Taking as its starting point that the adjective international is an inadequate, but unavoidable, label to describe the content of a contemporary international education, this article sets out to explore some of the issues facing international education in a post-international world. It draws mainly on writings in French as a deliberate counterweight to international education’s over-reliance on anglophone sources. The article’s main theme is that the practice of international education is determined, in ways of which we are often unaware, by the social, cultural, political and ideological context in which we live. It tries to identify some of the areas in which the impact of this context is most apparent. The first part of the article focuses on the continuing role of the nation state and on education for citizenship and multiple identities, stressing that citizenship education cannot be subsumed within ‘education for inter-cultural understanding and respect’ and drawing attention to Amartya Sen’s warning about the dangers of ‘plural monoculturalism’. The remainder of the article explores other areas in which hidden and sometimes unexamined presuppositions influence thinking and practice in ways that would benefit from challenge. These include the following: the impact of western utopianism; the balance between reason and emotion and the need for ‘an intelligent heart’; the pitfalls of service education and education for rights; the balance between contemporaneity and transmission; and attitudes towards happiness, adversity and language.

Due to the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels and the upwards trend in energy costs over time, many countries—especially in Europe—have begun to modify their energy policies aiming to increase that percentage obtained from renewable energies. The EAGLE (FP7 program, European Commission) has developed a web-based platform to promote renewable energy systems (RES) in the public and private sectors, and to deliver a comprehensive information source for all interested users. In this paper, a comprehensive quality assessment of extracted roof planes suitable for solar energy installations (photovoltaic, solar thermal) from height data derived automatically from both LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and aerial images will be presented. A shadow analysis is performed regarding the daily path of the sun including the shading effects of nearby objects (chimneys, dormers, vegetation, buildings, topography, etc.). A quality assessment was carried out for both LiDAR and aerial images of the same test sites in UK and Germany concerning building outline accuracy, extraction rate of roof planes and the accuracy of their geometric parameters (inclination and aspect angle, size). The benefit is an optimized system to extract roof planes for RES with a high level of detail, accuracy and flexibility (concerning different commonly available data sources) including an estimation of quality of the results which is important for individual house owners as well as for regional applications by governments or solar energy companies to judge their usefulness.

This paper is a speech given at King’s College, University of London, where Dr Tate asks us to review current rationales for teaching and learning in schools. He outlines his own view which states that it is a liberal humanist project in the tradition of Arnold through to Gramsci which seeks to bring civilisation and values to the population. His paper surveys how this answer plays out in other countries as well as what this means for educationalists and education policy makers. He ends by asking the government to look at the big picture and the big idea which education is.