Critical Needs In International Education

International students are often taken for granted in higher education institutions in the United States. Many college and university administrators are unaware of the initiatives of other nations to attract international students and of the need to support these students. Higher education journals have not focused much attention on international students. International Students: Strengthening a Critical Resource argues that U.S. institutions of higher education must increase their awareness of international student issues. Andrade reviews related research and highlights creative solutions and programming for the successful support of international students. The book provides practical, hands-on, broadly applicable solutions to addressing international student issues. Additionally, it serves as a practical guide for identifying and adopting best practices for serving international students.

This insightful book offers a critical stance on contemporary views of international students and challenges the way those involved address the important issues at hand.

In recent years there have been significant changes in education across the globe, largely as a result of changing demographics, technological developments, and increased globalization. Relatedly, the changing needs of societies and families, along with new research findings, provide new directions in early childhood education. Consequently, early childhood teachers today are faced with higher and more complex expectations to help ensure that their students achieve their full potential. Such expectations suggest that early childhood teachers should be professionals who are able to draw on a robust knowledge base in making educational decisions. It follows that teacher education programs should develop and implement innovative programs that can potentially enhance the quality of our future teachers. An awareness of pressing issues in the field of early childhood teacher education led the editors to develop this volume. The chapters in these two volumes bring together scholars from across the US and the globe who are interested in improving the quality of early childhood teacher education. The chapters present their experiences, perspectives, and lessons learned as they addressed some of the challenging issues concerning the education and preparation of future early childhood teachers. The various issues and perspectives from different states in the US or countries across the globe provide insights into current issues and dilemmas facing the field. The contributions of these scholars should inform the discourse on early childhood teacher education and help those who work with preservice teachers improve the quality of their work.

Critical Perspectives on Education Policy and Schools, Families, and Communities offers scholars, students, and practitioners important new knowledge about how current policies impact families, schools, and community partnerships. The book’s authors share a critical orientation towards policy and policy research and invite readers to think differently about what policy is, who policymakers are, and what policy can achieve. Their chapters discuss findings from research grounded in diverse theories, including institutional ethnography, critical disability theory, and critical race theory. The authors encourage scholars of family, school, and community partnerships to ask who benefits from policies (and who loses) and how proposed reforms maintain or disrupt existing relations of power. The chapters present original research on a broad range of policies at the local, state/provincial, and national levels in Canada and the USA. Some authors look closely at the enactment of specific district policies, including a school district’s language translation policy and a policy to create local advisory bodies as part of decentralization efforts. Other chapters reveal the often unacknowledged yet necessary work parents do to meet their children’s needs and enable schools to operate. A few chapters focus on challenges and paradoxes of including families and community members in policymaking processes, including a case where parents demonstrated a preference for a policy that research demonstrates can be detrimental to their children’s future education opportunities. Another set of chapters emphasizes the centrality of policy texts and how language influences the educational experiences and engagement of students and their families. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of the research for educators, families, and other community partners.

In the current economic climate, more than ever, international students provide an important income to universities. They represent much-needed funds for many institutions, but they also come with their own diverse variety of characteristics and requirements. This insightful book offers a critical stance on contemporary views of international students and challenges the way those involved address the important issues at hand. To do this, the authors focus specifically on giving voice to the student experience. In particular, the authors show how international student experience can be a ready asset from which to glean valuable information, particularly in relation to teaching and learning, academic support and the formal and informal curriculum. In this way, the issues affecting international students can be seen as part of the larger set of difficulties that face all students at university today. Integrating contributions from a academics and student voices from a range of backgrounds issues raised include: Academic Writing for International Students The Internationalisation of the Curriculum Identities: The use of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes International Students’ Perceptions of Tutors, and The system in reverse, English speaking learners as 'international students'. This book will be of interest to education management and administrators, higher education professionals, especially those working or training to teach large numbers of international students, to which it offers a unique opportunity to understand better the students’ point-of-view. Because of this the book will likely appeal to academics in all English speaking countries that recruit significant numbers of international students, as well as the growing number of European universities which teach in English and those in the Indian sub-continent that send large numbers of international students to the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

An essential guide to incorporating critical research into higher education scholarship. Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award of the Post-secondary Education Division of the American Educational Research Association Critical theory has much to teach us about higher education. By linking critical models, methods, and research tools with an advocacy-driven vision of the central challenges facing postsecondary researchers and staff, Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education makes a significant—and long overdue—contribution to the development of the field. The contributors argue that, far from being overly abstract, critical tools and methods are central to contemporary scholarship and can have practical policy implications when brought to the study of higher education. They argue that critical research design and critical theories help scholars see beyond the normative models and frameworks that have long limited our understanding of students, faculty, institutions, the organization and governance of higher education, and the policies that shape the postsecondary arena. A rigorous and invaluable guide for researchers seeking innovative approaches to higher education and the morass of traditionally functionalist, rational, and neoliberal thinking that mars the field, this book is also essential for instructors who wish to incorporate the lessons of critical scholarship into their course development, curriculum, and pedagogy.