Pensar la docencia desde la complejidad educativa. Esta obra reúne una serie de capítulos en los que se abordan temáticas relacionadas con la educación superior desde una mirada académica, destacándose como premisas el pensamiento complejo, las TIC, así como el trabajo estratégico que desempeña el docente como facilitador de procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje a nivel universitario. Para ello, se toma como contexto la llamada «sociedad de la información y el conocimiento», en donde se ha definido una nueva ordenanza global que deviene en marco de referencia para entender los procesos de transformación que se les requieren a las universidades, en términos de políticas educativas, para la innovación de su currículo, los modelos educativos, como la transformación de las prácticas pedagógicas de sus académicos. Lo obra integra una serie de textos en donde se analiza el fenómeno educativo, con énfasis en el papel que jueganlos docentes en la configuración de ambientes educativos que contribuyan al aprendizaje de sus estudiantes, para lo cual se proponen tres capítulos: «Perspectivas en la educación y el pensamiento complejo», «Comunicación, diversidad y mediación educativa» y «Sujetos de la educación y ámbitos emergentes para la enseñanza». Cada uno de los cuales se compone de textos que, en lo particular, abordan temáticas que permiten ampliar el horizonte desde el cual pueden se comprendidas problemáticas que caracterizan a la educación contemporánea en el nivel superior.

Education in Mexico, Central America and the Latin Caribbean examines the development and practice of education in México, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panamá. The chapters, written by local experts, provide an overview of the structure, aims and purposes of education in each of these ten countries with very different socio-economic backgrounds. The authors present curriculum standards, pedagogy, evaluation, accountability and delivery, discussing both how the formal systems are structured and how they actually function. The volume explores the origins of proposed reforms and their implementation, emphasising the distinctiveness of each country and attempting to locate new practices that could lead to better education. Including a comparative introduction to the issues facing education in the region as a whole and guides to available online datasets, this book is an essential reference for researchers, scholars, international agencies and policy-makers.

Seeds of Freedom is a remarkable case study of liberating education in the remote Guatemalan Maya indigenous village of Santa Maria Tzeja in the four decades since it was first settled in 1970. Clark Taylor's account begins at a time in which the majority of the village consisted of illiterate landless and land-poor peasant farmers working in conditions close to slavery. With the help of a Catholic priest, the village's founding pioneers were granted land, settled the village, established a school for their children, and began to prosper. By 2010 the village's emerging professionals were filling increasingly important social change roles at the local, regional, and national levels and nearly all children are educated with many to a university level. As such Santa Maria has come to exemplify the theory and practice of liberating education. The book tells the history of this remarkable community and reveals the transformative potential of the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and others. Santa Maria has thus become an example of dynamic liberating education, and its history has much to offer educators, students and solidarity activists throughout the world.

This open access book presents a comparative study on how large-scale professional development programs for teachers are designed and implemented. Around the world, governments and educators are recognizing the need to educate students in a broad range of higher order cognitive skills and socio-emotional competencies, and providing effective opportunities for teachers to develop the expertise needed to teach these skills is a crucial aspect of effective implementation of curricula which include those goals. This study examines how large-scale efforts to empower teachers for deeper instruction have been designed, how they have been implemented, and their outcomes. To do so, it investigates six programs from England, Colombia, Mexico, India, and the United States. Though all six are intended to broaden and deepen students’ curricular aspirations, each takes this expansion of curricular goals in a different direction. The ambitious education reforms studied here explicitly focus on building teachers’ capacity to teach on a broader set of goals. Through a discerning analysis of program documents, evaluations, and interviews with senior leaders and participants in the programs, the book identifies the various theories of action used in these programs, examines how they were implemented, and discusses what they achieved. As such, it offers an indispensable resource for education leaders interested in designing and implementing professional development programs for teachers that are aligned with ambitious instructional goals.

Medium of instruction policies in education have considerable impact not only on the school performance of students and the daily work of teachers, but also on various forms of social and economic (in)equality. In many multiethnic and multilingual countries, the choice of a language for the medium of instruction in state educational systems raises a fundamental and complex educational question: what combination of instruction in students' native language(s) and in a second language of wider communication will ensure that students gain both effective subject-content education, as well as the second-language skills necessary for higher education and employment? Beyond this educational issue of choice of language(s) of instruction, medium of instruction policies are also linked to a range of important sociopolitical issues, including globalization, migration, labor policy, elite competition, and the distribution of economic resources and political power. The contributors to this volume examine the tension between the educational agendas and other social and political agendas underlying medium of instruction policies in different countries around the world, and unravel the connections between these policies and the related, critically important educational, social, political, and economic issues. Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? is intended for scholars and specialists in education, language policy, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and language teaching, and is intended for use in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on language education and language policy.

Part of the International Library of Policy Analysis series, this book provides the first detailed examination of the practice of policy analysis in Mexico. Whilst shaped by the legacy of the Mexican state’s colonial history as well as by recent social, economic and political developments, the study of policy analysis within Mexico provides important comparative lessons for other countries. Contributors study the nature of policy analysis at different sectors and levels of government as well as by non-governmental actors, such as unions, business, NGOs and the media, promoting the use of evidence-based policy analysis, leading to better policy results. The book is a vital resource for academics and students of policy studies, public management, political science and comparative policy studies.