Television and attitudes toward foreign countries: A report on a survey of Scandinavian children

Children of all ages are more likely to use electronic sources of information such as television and radio-than they are print sources-such as newspapers and magazines-according to a variety of studies. This study examines whether this tendency continues if the children are forced by their primary and secondary school teachers to use multiple news sources-of their own choice-to follow an election campaign. Based on responses from an extraordinarily large sample of 24,348 children, this study focuses on media use by participants in the Kids Voting USA civics education program. Study results demonstrate that even when seeking campaign information in 1994, a non-presidential election year when the emphasis was more on state and local races, children overwhelmingly preferred television and radio as sources of information. Newspaper usage trailed both electronic forms even when a child's family subscribed to a paper. The study found no significant difference between White and non-White children in their choices and uses of information sources. The large sample size also allowed for a detailed look at often neglected subgroups such as Native American children (n = 1,114) and Asian-American children (n = 768).     

高职会计专业《经济法》教学模式挑战与构建

高职会计专业《经济法》课程的教学模式直接影响会计专业应用型人才的培养质量。当前高职会计专业经济法教学存在一系列挑战:缺乏适合高职财会专业的特色教材;考证应试效应给实践教学增添巨大压力;教师缺乏实践经验等。因此,以教师"双体验"为切入点构建新型教学模式:以趣味性和操作性为起点,抓好导入关;以考证和实践相结合为重点,抓好质量关;以教师培养和使用为关键,抓好育人关。     

Making space for space

This article explores the effectiveness of appeals to ‘active citizenship’ as an answer to the ‘neoliberal’ political vocabulary of consumer choice and market freedom. It does so through a case study on recent reforms to post-compulsory education in Australia. A common response to education and social welfare policy is to expect government to accord with ideals of citizenship such as self-determination, participation and equality. However, the case study suggests that the governmental rationalities of modern mass-education systems are irreducible to these abstractions. Reference to the social rights of citizens is embedded in the rationales of social and education policy. Nevertheless, this should not be construed as the recognition or misrecognition of an absolute ideal or principle. Instead, the negotiation of social rights can be seen as the product of the mass school system's own capacity to apply common norms to a population and to use these norms in maintaining the settlements negotiated within expanding social welfare systems.     

African Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Human Rights: Implications for Higher Education,Based on the South African Experience

ABSTRACT

Africa has rich traditions and knowledge systems founded on the principles of caring for one another and the spirit of mutual support embedded in the African philosophy of Ubuntu. These collective values tend to be marginalised in international human rights standards built on western values. The standards were developed without broad-based consultation of the different value systems in Africa. Therefore, in order to inspire sustainable implementation among diverse cultures, dialogue to develop universal human rights and obligations based on the diversity of cultures and ways of knowing is needed. Using South Africa's experience at two universities, the extent to which these institutions have attempted to incorporate African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) and human rights into the higher education curriculum is investigated. The implications for higher education and the human rights and development paradigms built on western knowledge systems are investigated. North-West University has been the pioneer of integrating AIKS into higher education in South Africa and is the only higher education institution in South Africa with an accredited IKS Teaching Programme at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels – which has been notably successful, albeit with some challenges. AIKS has also been integrated into research and teaching at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has registered significant successes since 2012. The need to embed AIKS in the curriculum of higher education institutions is affirmed.     

Corruption and Policy Implementation in the Philippines: A Comparative Analysis of the Teacher Training and Textbook Delivery Programmes

Corruption is a perennial obstacle to the Philippines’ pursuit of development. The Department of Education (DepEd) is considered to be one of the most corrupt agencies in the Philippines. However, there are two DepEd programmes with different levels of effectiveness in controlling corruption. The Textbook Delivery Programme has been ineffective while the Programme on Basic Education has been successful. The article explains the different levels of implementing these programmes by using local perspectives via the ‘narratives of implementation actors’. Apart from providing insights on the challenges facing the evolving educational bureaucracy in the Philippines, this article also demonstrates the utility of network actor perspectives in appreciating the many concerns that determine and impede implementation performance and discusses the causes and impact of corruption and policy implementation on two public educational programmes.     

Actively Cultivating Policy Similarity. A Regional Strategy in Education Policy in France and Germany

Regionalization processes across Western Europe have triggered analyses of regional policy divergence. Yet, in a number of cases, regional governments appear to have deliberately strived to achieve policy conformity. Previous research tends to emphasize exogenous explanations of regional policy convergence. In contrast, this paper addresses the issue of regional policy convergence by focusing on endogenous explanatory factors. Its objective is to carry out an investigation of when, how, and with what effect a ‘desire for conformity’ arises, and contends that regional governments may actively cultivate policy similarity as a strategy to develop or secure their policy capacity. Specifically, the paper argues that the adoption of this strategy is contingent upon two requirements that may or may not be met, and that its outcome is the convergence on targeted dimensions of regional policies. The two requirements are: (i) a countrywide public preference for policy uniformity in the policy area of concern, and (ii) the presence of a threat posed to regional policy capacity by various political entrepreneurs, including the central state, who blame regions for providing divergent policies on particular dimensions. This paper is based on the comparison of two case studies where regional governments deliberately pursued policy conformity on targeted dimensions of their education policy: school-building policy in France and curricula policy in Germany. The two case studies also present dissimilar features that make it possible to investigate the effects of institutional setting and policy distribution on the adoption and operation of the active-cultivation-of-policy-similarity strategy.     

高等学校学生处分权研究——以教育仲裁为视角的考察

学生处分权是高等学校教育管理权内容,是高等学校依据法律、法规或大学章程对违犯国家法律、法规和学校纪律的学生实施惩戒的权力。高等学校处分权特殊性质和我国以和为贵的传统文化,都与教育仲裁机制相契合,这为我国构建教育仲裁纠纷解决机制打下了坚实的基础。     

信息网络时代国防生思想政治教育新探

当今社会处于信息网络时代,在此时代背景之下,信息网络正对人们的工作、学习、生活、思维等生存方式的方方面面产生着广泛而深刻的影响,它必然也会对国防生思想政治教育产生一定的影响。其中,国防生的心里动态、思想信念、政治理想受到的影响尤为明显。针对新情况、新问题,探寻出新的思想政治教育对策,就显得十分迫切与重要。     

高职院校“基础”课教学考核与评价方式改革研究

《思想道德修养与法律基础》作为高职院校思想政治理论课的入门课程,承担着对大学生进行思想政治教育的重任。目前,该课程在教学实践中存在着教学形式僵化、考核评价方式死板等问题。为改变这一现状,可以在推行课堂教学改革、落实课程实践环节的基础上,通过完善考核内容、调整分数比例、设置教学评价等级等方式,进行考核与评价方式的改革。     

浅谈高校辅导员应具备的人格面貌

高校辅导员作为对大学生进行思想政治教育、塑造其健康人格的重要力量,其人格面貌状况直接影响大学生的人格成长,通过对高校辅导员政治人格、道德品质、业务知识、应时能力及人生态度等人格面貌的探讨,能够更好地发挥其思想政治教育的生力军作用。