This book seeks to offer the most up-to-date and relevant sample of contemporary research on Latin American education, by inviting the reader to understand the complexities, heterogenetics, nightmares, dreams, crisis and promises of education in the region.

Al-Bataineh and Nur-Awaleh's (both education, Illinois State U.,) text is designed for undergraduate and graduate students who want to improve their understanding of educational systems, formal school institutions, and educational reform worldwide. The text compares and analyzes systems and reforms in both developed and developing countries in several Islamic, Latin American, and African countries, and covers a number of themes, including the current systems, contemporary reforms, the historical development of educational policy and schooling, the role of national and international agencies in education, and post-public education in the developing world. Also suitable as a reference for researchers, educators, governmental and educational agencies, and university international studies programs. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook fully explores the field of alternative education on an international scale. Alternatives to mainstream schooling and education are becoming increasingly recognised as pertinent and urgent for better understanding what really works in successfully educating children and adults today, especially in light of the increased performance driven and managerially organised economic modelling of education that dominates. For too long we have wondered what “exactly” education done otherwise might look like and here we meet individual examples as well as seeing what alternative education is when a collection becomes greater than the sum of parts. The Handbook profiles numerous empirical examples from around the world of education being done in innovative and excitingly democratic and autonomous ways from Forest Schools and Home Education through to new technologies, neuroscience and the importance of solitude. The book also sets out important theoretical perspectives to inform us why seeing education through an alternative lens is useful as well as urgently needed. Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Education Policy, Sociology and Philosophy as well as educational practitioners.

This invaluable Encyclopedia presents an interdisciplinary and comprehensive overview of the field of social innovation, providing an insightful view into potential future developments both practically and theoretically. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This book is concerned with action research as a form of teacher professional development. In it, John Elliot traces the historical emergence and current significance of action research in schools. He examines action research as a "cultural innovation" with transformative possibilities for both the professional culture of teachers and teacher educators in academia and explores how action research can be a form of creative resistance to the technical rationality underpinning government policy. He explains the role of action research in the specific contexts of the national curriculum, teacher appraisal and competence-based teacher training.

A pious young woman grapples with a loss of memory—and of faith—in this sharp, witty novel by the author of 1984 and Animal Farm. Dorothy is the daughter of the Reverend Charles Hare, rector of St. Athelstan’s in Depression-era Suffolk, England. She serves as a dutiful housekeeper, performs good works, cultivates good thoughts—and pricks her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. But even as she toils away making costumes for the church school play, she is haunted by thoughts about the poverty that surrounds her and the debts she can’t afford to pay. Then, suddenly, she finds herself in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket, and cannot remember her own name . . . This novel of a woman thrust into a strange journey, struck by amnesia and grappling with questions of faith and identity in a world of unemployment and hunger, is a masterful work of satire by one of the great writers of the twentieth century.