The book explores the state of social studies education within selected East Asian societies and provides some insights into distinctive classroom practices. In an increasingly volatile and unpredictable world, the education of young people who both understand the contexts in which they are growing up and see the need for engaging with them is a top priority. This task falls to social studies education which carries the responsibility for inducting young people into their social world and helping them to see the role they can play within it. This is particularly important in East Asia where strong economic growth, long held cultural values and diverse political systems create an environment that challenges young people on multiple fronts. This book, with its team of regional authors, shows how different societies in the region are dealing with these challenges and what can be expected from future citizens. The book will appeal to policy makers, researchers and teachers interested in the current state of social studies education in East Asian societies.

The education of young people is context bound. This edited volume explores the contexts that characterise South and South East Asia and their influence on social studies education. There is not a single context across this broad geographical expanse, rather different religions, different political systems and different values exert influences that create distinctive programmes that characterise different countries. Yet there are also commonalities such as the post-colonial nature of most of the countries portrayed in this book, determined efforts at establishing new national communities and multiple value systems that lead to distinctive local priorities. There are also voices of resistance in these chapters, recognising the realities of local contexts but also recognising the need for change. Social studies education in these contexts may well be descended from its origins in North America, but in South and South Asian contexts, it has taken on new purposes, new forms and new values. Education researchers, policymakers and postgraduate students in comparative education will find the volume useful in its exploration and comparison of the social studies curricular and reforms that shaped them.

This book examines both history textbook controversies AND teaching historical controversy in Asian contexts. The different perspectives provided by the book’s authors offer numerous insights, examples, and approaches for understanding historical controversy to provide a practical gold mine for scholars and practitioners. The book provides case studies of history textbook controversies ranging from treatments of the Nanjing Massacre to a comparative treatment of Japanese occupation in Vietnamese and Singaporean textbooks to the differences in history textbooks published by secular and Hindu nationalist governments in India. It also offers a range of approaches for teaching historical controversy in classrooms. These include Structured Academic Controversy, the use of Japanese manga, teaching controversy through case studies, student facilitated discussion processes, and discipline-based approaches that can be used in history classrooms. The book’s chapters will help educational researchers and curricularists consider new approaches for curriculum design, curriculum study, and classroom research.

In this collection of essays, we reflect on what it means to practise the social sciences in the twenty-first century. The book brings together leading social scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We argue for the benefit of dialogue between the diverse theories and methods of social sciences in the region, the role of the social sciences in addressing real-world problems, the need to transcend national boundaries in addressing regional problems, and the challenges for an increasingly globalised higher education sector in the twenty-first century. The chapters are a combination of theoretical reflections and locally focused case studies of processes that are embedded in global dynamics and the changing geopolitics of knowledge. In an increasingly connected world, these reflections will be of global relevance

This book examines both history textbook controversies AND teaching historical controversy in Asian contexts. The different perspectives provided by the book’s authors offer numerous insights, examples, and approaches for understanding historical controversy to provide a practical gold mine for scholars and practitioners. The book provides case studies of history textbook controversies ranging from treatments of the Nanjing Massacre to a comparative treatment of Japanese occupation in Vietnamese and Singaporean textbooks to the differences in history textbooks published by secular and Hindu nationalist governments in India. It also offers a range of approaches for teaching historical controversy in classrooms. These include Structured Academic Controversy, the use of Japanese manga, teaching controversy through case studies, student facilitated discussion processes, and discipline-based approaches that can be used in history classrooms. The book’s chapters will help educational researchers and curricularists consider new approaches for curriculum design, curriculum study, and classroom research.

The countries of East and Southeast Asia, taken as a whole, display a laboratory of social and political conditions, with individual countries presenting a variety of political, cultural and social characteristics. Some with one-party state systems, others with stable liberal democracies and yet others with more fragile democratic systems. As such the region presents a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between diverse national environments and social work education regimes. In this book, social work educators and theorists from around East and Southeast Asia provide accounts of the social work programs within the higher education systems of their respective countries and compare them to those of their neighbours. This is the first book to offer a structured account of how social work and social work education have emerged and finds their present place in the historical, economic, political, urban/rural and higher education contexts of Southeast Asia and East Asia. Experts from the region assess the extent to which these countries’ systems possess a collective coherence, while examining the diversity among them.