ABSTRACT

Educational Theories, Cultures and Learning focuses on how education is understood in different cultures, the theories and related assumptions we make about learners and students and how we think about them, and how we can understand the principle actors in education - learners and teachers.

Within this volume, internationally renowned contributors address a number of fundamental questions designed to take the reader to the heart of current debates around pedagogy, globalisation, and learning and teaching, such as:

  • What role does culture play in our understanding of pedagogy?
  • What role do global influences, especially economic, cultural and social, have in shaping our understanding of education?
  • How does language influence our thinking about education?
  • What implications does our view of childhood have for education?
  • How do learners negotiate the transition between the different phases of education?
  • How best can children learn the 'school knowledge'?
  • What is a teacher? And how do teachers learn?
  • How do we understand learners, their minds, identity and development?

To encourage reflection, many of the chapters also include questions for debate and a guide to further reading.

Read alongside its companion volume, Knowledge, Values and Educational Policy, readers will be encouraged to consider and think about some of the key issues facing education and educationists today.

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

From Plato to Monday morning

part |43 pages

How education is understood in different cultures

part |83 pages

The person in education

chapter |14 pages

Students' development in theory and practice

The doubtful role of research

chapter |13 pages

Cyberworlds

Children in the information age

chapter |16 pages

Interrogating student voice

Preoccupations, purposes and possibilities

chapter |17 pages

The transition to school

Reflections from a contextualist perspective

part |3 pages

Teachers and learners

chapter |12 pages

Becoming a teacher

A sociocultural analysis of initial teacher education