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Are the educational systems in Europe becoming more similar or more different? This book deals with the issue of divergence and convergence in relation to systems, learning environments, and learners in vocational educational training (VET). 18 VET researchers from eight countries contribute to the examination of 'divergence and convergence' at three levels: At the national level this volume deals with the following questions: What are the consequences of the European policies that aim at converging the VET systems in Europe? What is the impact of globalization on the national systems? At the level of institutions the central issue concerns the relation between learning environments. What is the coherence between school-based education and learning in the work-place, and how can they connect? Finally at the third level of the learners and their identities the focus is on the role of vocational educational training in the formation of biographies and identities. The book thus covers the central issues on the agenda in relation to future vocational education.
Despite more than half a century of psychological research on creativity we are still far from a clear understanding of the creative process, its antecedents and consequences and, most of all, the ways in which we can effectively support creativity. This is primarily due to a narrow focus on creative individuals isolated from culture and society. Rethinking Creativity proposes a fundamental review of this position and argues that creativity is not only a psychological but a sociocultural phenomenon. This edited volume aims to relocate creativity from inside individual minds to the material, symbolic and social world of culture. It brings together eminent social and cultural psychologists who...
This book presents a variety of narratives on key elements of academic work, from data analysis, writing practices and engagement with the field. The authors discuss how elements of academic work and life – usually edited out of traditional research papers – can elicit important analytical insight. The book reveals how the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that often occur in research life, the ‘detours’, can potentially glean important results. The authors introduce the process of ‘writing-sharing-reading-writing’ as a way to expand the playground of research and inspire a culture in which ‘accountable’ research methodologies involve adventurousness and an element of uncertainty. Written by scholars from a range of different fields, academic levels and geographic locations, this unique book will offer significant insight to those from a range of academic fields.
Adults were once children, yet a generational gap can present itself when grown-ups seek to know children's lives, in research. In A Younger Voice discloses how qualitative research, tailored to be child-centered, can shrink the gap of generational unintelligibility. The volume invites and instructs researchers who want to explore children's vantage points as social actors. Its suggested tool kit draws from both academic and applied research, based on the author's lifelong career as a child-centered qualitative researcher. World round, research in knowing children has grown recently in anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, cultural psychology and a host of applied fields. This book ...
This volume is about ecclesiology and ethnography and what really matters in such academic work. How does material from field studies matter in a theological conversation? How does theology, in various forms, matter in analysis and interpretation of field work material? How does method matter? The authors draw on their research experiences and engage in conversations concerning reflexivity, normativity, and representation in qualitative theological work. The role and responsibility of the researcher is addressed from various perspectives in the first part of the book. In the next section the authors discuss ways in which empirical studies are able to disrupt the implicit and explicit normati...
The interventions have ranged between benevolent exchanges to powerful influences as well as military domination. Although interpersonal and group influence has been an important domain of study in Social Psychology, we propose to take a fresh look at these phenomena from the specific orientations provided by the discipline of Cultural Psychology. In this perspective, meaning making processes becomes a key for understanding the everyday experiences of the receivers and agents of intervention. In this volume, we see how attending to meaning-making processes becomes crucial when researching or intervening within cultural encounters and global everyday life. It is through listening to the foreign other, to attend to their immediate experiences, as well as exploring how meaning may be mediated and co-constructed by them in everyday life through organizational structures, informal peer network, traditional rituals or symbols, that collaboration can be created and sustained.
An incisive study of situated learning, analyzed through a critical theory of social practice as transformational change in everyday life.
“Modern Trends in Research Methodology: Techniques and Applications” examines the transformational influence of recent research methodology advances on scientific inquiry. This book reviews modern methods, highlighting their advances and their implications for other research fields. The material is carefully selected to meet academics’ and practitioners’ changing requirements, providing theoretical and practical advice. From sophisticated quantitative methods to new qualitative ones, the book covers them all. Each chapter discusses technique development, application, and advantages. Real-world examples and case studies demonstrate how these strategies may be used to answer challengin...
Crafting Feminism develops a dynamic study of craft and art-making in modern and contemporary feminist writing. In evocative readings of literary works from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, this book expands our sense of transartistic modernist scholarship to encompass process-oriented and medium-specific analyses of textile arts, digital design, collage, photography, painting, and sculpture in literary culture. By integrating these craft practices into the book's enlightening archive, Elkins's theoretical argument extends a reading of craft metaphors into the material present. Crafting Feminism demonstrates how writers have engaged with handiwork across generations and have undertaken the cra...
In this extended meditation, Jean Lave interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of her research on those tailors in the late 1970s. In so doing, she provides both a detailed account of her apprenticeship in the art of sustained fieldwork and an insightful overview of thirty years of changes in the empirical and theoretical facets of ethnographic practice. Examining the issues she confronted in her own work, Lave shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows. As ethnography takes on increasing significance to an ever widening field of thinkers on topics from education to ecology, this erudite but accessible book will be essential to anyone tackling the question of what it means to undertake critical and conceptually challenging fieldwork. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice explains how to seriously explore what it means to be human in a complex world—and why it is so important.