IBN SINA’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNITY: INTEGRATING MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY, NEUROPHILOSOPHY, AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT AND CIVILISATION

What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative Approach

Schools in Indonesia are currently under tremendous pressure to increase student academic achievement levels. Ongoing educational reform initiatives place responsibility for change and improvement directly upon individual schools; all provinces have implemented standards-based education to provide schools with specific academic goals that they must meet.Teacher performance is closely related to the overall process of managing and using resources effectively and efficiently in achieving educational goals. School performance is a multidimension in that its improvement does not only depend on a single factor, but a multiplicity of them, teachers is viewed from their professional activities like lesson planning, learning teaching activities of monitoring and assessing pupils progress (Rizvi, Meher & Bob Elliott, 2005).Bogor regency is facing many educational challenges like poor grades of students and low quality teachers, and because teachers play a significant role in the educational system, their quality needs to be improved if educational goals are to be realized in all high schools in Bogor, research findings indicates that teachers quality and professionalism is still below average based on key indicators of lesson planning, action research, assessment and evaluation and monitoring leaners progress.The teaching profession requires specific skills for effective and efficient performance. Teachers have a duty of teaching, educate and counsel leaners through continuous value development among staff and students. To teach means to continue and develop the science and technology related to the cognitive domain. To train means to develop skills related student psychomotor domain. A teacher is required to bear in mind the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domain of the learner. Based on the findings from (Departemen Pendidikan Nasional, 2012) at some schools in Bogor, it was discovered that lesson planning as being the primary function of teachers still very low, figures recorded as follows 30% for preparing teaching learning materials, 50% for lesson planning, and 60% assessment and evaluation, therefore, these figures calls for immediate attention if educational standards are to be improved in Bogor regency.Scholars like Santrock (2007) hold that low teacher performance is influenced by both internal and external factors. Teacher's attitudes correlate with their performance at school; teachers are required have basic skills as educators, counselors and have content knowledge in pedagogy, positive personality and social skills. The quality of education depends on creativity and innovation of teacher's attitudes which are reflected in the key indicators of education.The literature indicates that levels of a school's teacher motivation can negatively or positively affect school academic outcomes. Researchers found that high levels of teacher motivation strongly and directly correlate with significant improvement in student achievement (Davis & Wilson, 2000). Motivation may affect the ability of teachers to acquire the new skills and knowledge needed to comply with educational reform guidelines.The application of motivational theory to academic settings is a major challenge for school leaders. According to Lunenburg and Omstein (1991), school administrators must learn to appropriately initiate motivation in the school climate. Principals promote a climate of excellence by providing a framework for teacher motivation for the express purpose of maximizing teacher performance while promoting teacher professional growth and change.Work motivation of teachers has a relationship with the working force in implementing the main functions of the teachers. Motivation is a positive mechanism that moves and directs teachers to use their power and potentials to achieve successful predetermined goals. High motivated teachers make efforts to manage their classroom properly, and make teaching plans. …

The running of learning institutions should be a partnership between the teaching staff (the professionals) and the community. The mechanism for creating such a partnership will be a board of trustees. (Picot, p. xi) The process of contemporary educational reform in New Zealand has been fast and furious. Officially, the process of reform was initiated when a taskforce to review education administration headed by Brian Picot was appointed by the Fourth Labour Government in July 1987. The taskforce released its findings, Administering for Excellence: Effective Administration in Education (otherwise known as the Picot Report), 10 months later in April 1988. Government made a gesture of seeking public opinion about this report, but the turn-around time was rapid and the Government’s own response, Tomorrow’s Schools, was published 5 months later in August 1988. After the recommendations were implemented (1 October 1989), a review of the reviews entitled Today’s Schools (the Lough Report) appeared with further reform recommendations. Meanwhile, the Business Roundtable had commissioned a report (the Sexton Report, December 1990) which appeared to influence government thinking. The National Government, after coming to power in October 1990, carried out its own series of educational reviews which were released with a major publication, Education Policy: Investing in People, Our Greatest Asset, at the time of its first Budget in July 1991.This was heavily influenced by Sexton and resulted in further modifications to the structure of education reform, creating a system which is a far cry from the Picot intentions of the above quotation. For the past five years, then, there has been an ongoing series of changes and reassessments that has caused chaos, confusion and massive insecurity throughout the education sector. This paper, through a small and continuing ethnographic survey based on interviews with fourteen teachers in four different Wellington-Wairarapa schools, reports on some aspects of this insecurity.

Liberal educators have taken a rather optimistic posture on some aspects of the past 10-15 years of educational reform in the United States. This is particularly evident, perhaps, in those individuals and groups who are concerned primarily with curriculum, with the knowledge that gets into schools, and who have either witnessed or participated in the growth of discipline-centered curricula throughout the country. The position is often taken that school people, scholars, the business community, parents, and others, all somehow working together, have set in motion forces that have increased the stock of disciplinary knowledge that all students are to get. Supposedly, this process of increased distribution of knowledge has been enhanced by comparatively large amounts of funding on a national level for curriculum development, teacher training and retraining, and so on. Success may not have been total-after all, it almost never is-but better management and dissemination strategies can be generated to deal with these kinds of problems. Given this posture, we have tended to forget that, often, what is not asked about such widespread efforts at "reform" may be more important than what we commonsensically like to ask. Who benefits from such reforms? What are their latent connections to the ways inequality may be maintained? Do the very ways we tend to look at schools and especially the knowledge and culture they overtly and covertly teach (even ways generated out of a fairly radical perspective) cover some of the interests that they embody? What frameworks have been and need to be developed to generate the evidence which answers to these kinds of questions require? In what follows, I shall outline some approaches for dealing with these issues, approaches which incorporate some of the current economic criticisms of schooling but which also respond to the complex functioning of schools that even some of the analysts of the political economy of education may tend to gloss over. Only when we can see this complex functioning, some of which embodies clear economic The analysis on which this article is based is expanded in Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, in press). @ 1978 by the Comparative and International Education Society. 0010-4086/78/2203-0001$01.72

This paper presents an initial case study assessment of cross-border capacity building approaches to educational reform in Vietnam. Three educational projects will be profiled, each linking Portland State University to the tertiary educational system in Vietnam. Two case studies center on the Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, and address the challenges of urban environmental education and computer science curriculum reform; the third is an effort led by Intel Corporation that links tertiary education in Vietnam to workforce development. As part of its review of the history and current status of each project, the paper assesses the challenges and opportunities inherent to each. Market forces related to globalization, industrialization and urbanization are clearly at work in each cross-border capacity building effort to reform higher education in Vietnam. Yet, the diffusion process under review represents initiatives with different definitions of educational reform, accountability standards, and measures of success.

Thailand in the 1990s faced rapid changes in the era of globalization.In order to cope with these changes, Thailand needed to raise its science and technology standard and equip Thai people with international competitive competence.The Thai economy underwent stunning growth which caused imbalanced development. The financial crisis in 1997 underlined the urgent need for reform in education. The new 1997 Constitution provides challenging guidelines for education reform. It mandates 12 years of basic education for all children (Section 43). The 1999 National Education Act is the first law of its kind in Thai history and serves as master legislation on education in the country. In accordance with the new Constitution and the National Education Act, the 2001 Basic Education Curriculum was formulated.This study is aimed at examining 1)government policies on education reform; 2) characteristics of basic education reform as viewed from legislative and curriculum reforms; 3)the process of basic education reform through empirical analysis; and 4) issues and challenges for basic education reform.It is hoped that this study will clarify how the country copes with such a crisis by looking at basic education reform in Thailand as a case study.

DETA CONFERENCE 2009 PROCEEDINGS Foreword The Distance Education and Teachers’ Training in Africa (DETA) Conference is a biennial conference that was initiated to provide a platform for educationists in Africa to meet and deliberate on educational issues in Africa. Since its inception, it has enabled educationists to exchange knowledge and enhance their capacity to engage with opportunities and challenges in education on the continent. DETA’s major objectives are to contribute to the debate on teacher training in Africa and to build capacity for the delivery of teacher training programmes in Africa. These objectives represent ways in which the conference can support NEPAD, various protocols on education and training in Africa, the Millennium Development Goals, and some of the recommendations of the All-Africa Education Ministers’ Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education. The conferences are co-hosted by the organisers and other educational institutions and organisations. The 3rd conference, co-hosted by the University of Pretoria, the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana, was held at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, from 3 to 6 August 2009. The theme was "Issues and challenges in education in Africa – The need for a ‘new’ teacher". Subthemes included the following: - Distance education in teacher education - Teacher education, and curriculum studies and development - Special needs education and education management, law and policies, and technology in education in Africa - Mathematics and science education, language and literacy education, religious and moral education, and HIV and AIDS education More than 200 delegates from 14 African countries (Botswana, the DRC, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe) and three other countries (Canada, the UK and the USA) attended the conference. Fifty papers were read.

The study analyzed the Curriculum Reforms in Namibia’s progress, derailments, and possible solutions for a competitive future. Educational reform and curriculum revision are crucial to redressing apartheid colonialism’s inequitable and fragmented education system in Namibia and building a responsive curriculum that prepares students for a better future. While noticeable progress is observed regarding access to education, policy development, and curriculum reform, many challenges remain. Thus, this study aimed to review literature from Postcolonial Namibia to determine the causes of Namibia’s basic education responsiveness and transformation before and after independence. The paper argues that implementing a responsive curriculum is critical for many reasons. This study employed a qualitative approach encased in a phenomenological interpretive framework with the literary analysis of Namibia’s curriculum reform. Additionally, the paper was couched by Moll’s Curriculum Responsiveness Theory to determine whether Namibian curricula at various epochs were responsive to learners’ and societal needs. The study reveals that curriculum reform is the dominant of politically driven, overly ambitious aspirations in the reform process. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education preaches access to education and curriculum reform without providing adequate teaching resources; classrooms and teachers expected to teach the new curriculum were not trained in content and pedagogy. The study recommends that curriculum revision be aligned with social congruence and not add to the country’s education sector’s problems.

Industrial art education entered nineteenth century Massachusetts schools as an educational reform, but was not completely successful for a variety of reasons. Key factors contributing to this failure included, first, conflicting rationales used in advocating art education. Second, discrepancies between authoritative taste and early consumer choice in art reproductions threatened the power of reformers, notably Walter Smith. Third, differing assumptions about art among art specialists and classroom teachers, compounded by growing distinctions between men’s and women’s sphere of action, made it difficult for teachers to fully participate in the reform process. Late twentieth century reform policies may also fail without recognition of multiple justifications, with over‐reliance on top‐down expertise, or with lack of attention to teachers’ beliefs and needs.

The twentieth century may indeed be called the century of “scientific revolutions,” evidently, depending on how one understands the notion of “revolution.” Yet, apart from the debate on terminology, advances in medicine, computer science, and communication technology have indeed been astounding. Even more remarkable are the revolutionary changes in computer science and information technology that have taken place in the first 16 years of the twenty-first century. In particular, one area that has experienced promising developments is the field of robotics and AI—Artificial Intelligence. The science of AI itself has been active for many decades now; at least ever since advances in computer programming have helped the fields of “robotics” achieve some promising results. In this context, a number of philosophers have raised the question of whether the human mind could be mirrored by a computer program. More specifically, can scientists replicate—via a computer program/robot—the mechanisms and operations that run the human brain? This debate has given birth to a number of collateral questions about the nature of human intelligence, self-awareness, and the phenomenon of consciousness. In other words, philosophers and scientists have been interested in knowing whether advances in science can produce an artificial mind, or the “mind” is a unique human entity that cannot be recreated. In this essay, we will review the issues of the debate on Artificial Intelligence and argue in favor of the view that the human mind is a far too complex and elusive entity for the claim of “complete reproduction” to be valid.

The subject of the article is the phenomenon of educational reforms. This phenomenon is one of the basic elements of pedagogical processes. In each historical period, all the educational reforms have their etiology and are characterized by specific consequences or the partial or total lack of them. The aim of the research on the above issue is to establish the general reasons for their conducting, to describe and explain the factors determining their process, making a typology of educational reforms and the rules for their implementation. All of these elements can significantly determine their quality. It is known, that this affects the effectiveness of school teaching and educational process. The school as an educational institution fulfills a social function having in mind the increase of the level of consciousness and pedagogical culture of each local environment, regional and national community and state. The basic methods that have been applied in the research were: the historical-comparative method and progressive method. The first enabled to implement the synthetic generalizations depicting mainly the etiology of educational reforms. The second method, in turn, was used to propose a typology of educational reforms and the formulation of the rules for their implementation. The research of these issues and the findings of them can be used for in-depth reflection and discussion on the searching for the conditions that optimize the processes of educational reforms and their effects.

Among the numerous education reforms initiated in the Asia-Pacific Region (the “Region”) at the turn of the 21st century, there were teacher education reforms that aimed to equip teachers with new competence to help discharge their professional duties and expand their roles and responsibilities, and to implement new education initiatives as change agents. In such context, teacher education involves not only teachers’ pre-service training, but also all kinds of in-service or lifelong professional development and learning. Since the early 2000s, the nine trends of education reform at the macro, meso, site and operational levels have raised various challenges for policy-makers, researchers, and educators who had to re-think the theories, practices, and policies of teacher education reform in their countries and within the Region. Many education systems in the Region have also experienced three waves of education reform that followed different paradigms and had strong implications for teacher education reform. But even though a lot of resources have been invested in these reforms, people in many countries are still disappointed with the quality and performance of their teaching profession and teacher education systems in view of the increasing challenges from globalization, economic transformation, and international competition. Given the complexities of education reform and the serious concerns about teaching quality, an overview of the key reform issues is needed to draw insights for future development of research, policy analysis, and practice in teacher education reform in the Region and beyond. In particular, the issues related to and implications from the nine trends of education reforms, the paradigm shifts across the three waves, the changes in policy concerns, and the decline in education demands in the Region are analyzed.

Madrasah Education in Bangladesh: Contestations and Accommodations Ali Riaz Contemporary Madrasas and Contested Modernities: Educational Reform in Pakistan Shiraz Thobani The Role, Developments and Challenges of Islamic Education in China Charlene Tan & Ke-jia Ding From Jingtang Education to Arabic School: Muslim Education in Yunnan Ma Xuefeng Pendidikan Islami (Islamic Education): Reformulating a New Curriculum for Muslim Schools in Aceh, Indonesia Eka Srimulyani & Sa'eda Buang Crafting a New Democracy: Civic Education in Indonesia Islamic Universities Elisabeth Jackson & Bahrissalim The Hikmah (wisdom) Program: A Philosophical Inquiry for the Teaching of Islamic Education in Malaysia Rosnani Hashim, Suhailah Hussien & Juhasni Adila Juperi. Coming to Grips with Modernization: The Teens aL.I.V.E. Programme and the Teaching of Sadaqah (giving of alms) Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew Confronting and Integrating Modernity: Religious Education and Curriculum Reforms in Turkey Seyfi Kenan Pedagogical Innovations and the Reinvention of 'Old' Pedagogy in Muslim Schools in Russia Aelita Miniyanova

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the responsibilities and opportunities that arise for management education out of the 2008/2009 economic and financial crisis, with a focus on the emerging leadership role of Asian business schools, notably in China.Design/methodology/approachThe paper begins by identifying three fundamental challenges for management education. It then discusses two conceptual issues relating to, first, the contents and systems to be included in curriculum reform and learning, and second, the drivers of change in management education. The paper draws upon conceptual papers advanced by leading business school deans, and identifies conditions which provide Asian business schools with a unique, transformational role.FindingsThe depth, breadth and seriousness of current economic and social problems in emerging economics suggest that the necessary reform and transformation of management education is most likely going to be led by business school deans and management education faculty located in and working with business leaders in emerging markets. China business schools are likely to emerge as thought leaders in the reform process in part due to the quality of scholars, especially “returnees”, now locating there.Practical implicationsThought leadership from Asian/Chinese business schools will change the current academic model, based on one‐way knowledge transfer, to a two‐way learning model. This transformation from industrialized to emerging economies will have far‐reaching consequences for curriculum design, faculty exchanges and international cooperation between business schools.Social implicationsThe shift toward Asia‐ or China‐originated thought leadership is evidence of a wider international social trend.Originality/valueThe paper challenges existing views of management education which are still led by Europe and North America, thus offering a new perspective on the drivers of change in management education.

Whither medical education in the United States?