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This paper aims to determine educators' perceptions about the benefits of contact with nature for children's mental, emotional and social health.

The approach was exploratory using qualitative methods. Face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with school principals and teachers as well as professionals from the environmental education industry. Interviews focused on the perceived benefits for children's health from school activities involving hands‐on contact with nature.

Hands‐on contact with nature is perceived by educators to improve self‐esteem, engagement with school and a sense of empowerment, among other benefits. Different types of activities are perceived to have different outcomes. A model is proposed to illustrate the findings.

Activities involving hands‐on contact with nature may have significant health outcomes for children. Further empirical work is needed to determine the extent of the benefits and provide further evidence.

Findings support the value of activities involving nature and provide further incentive to include such activities in teaching curricula. Activities involving hands‐on contact with nature at school may be a means of promoting children's mental, emotional and social health at a crucial time in their development.

This paper addresses two gaps in current knowledge: much research on contact with nature and health and wellbeing has focused on adults not children; despite the popularity of nature‐based activities in schools there has been no investigation into the potential of these activities to promote children's mental, emotional and social health.

Transformation of academic, student and administrative management is a key element in the institutionalisation of Internet/intranet‐based (networked) education in higher education. The distributed nature of networked education demands distributed models of academic, student and administrative management. Some argue that networked education is essentially an alternative delivery mode and its management is thus no different from that of other modes. Others posit that networked education is a new educational paradigm and a response to the educational needs of the emerging information society, in the same way that the traditional class was a response to the educational needs of the industrial society. Management of networked education is therefore fundamentally different from conventional educational management and correlates with new forms of private enterprise management including management of the learning organization, the information‐based organisation and the networked organisation. Proposes a new form of higher educational management for the operations of networked education: networked educational management. Discusses the following dimensions of networked educational management: its distributed nature, managing convergence, its adaptability and transitory character.

This chapter provides an historical perspective on the evolution of educational marketing both as a professional field within the management and leadership of educational organisations and as a research field for academics and practitioners. It weaves together three important strands of analysis:•The evolution of the political, economic and social ideologies which have created the context in which marketisation of education has occurred.•The development of approaches to educational marketing in schools, colleges and universities.•The development of the research arena focused on marketisation and marketing in educational institutions.

The analysis considers the challenges that market-based concepts have brought to the existing hegemonies within both education and academic research, and also the politics and sociology of academic research. This provides a perspective on the challenges of developing a ‘new’ research field as a valid and significant area of study. The chapter concludes that educational marketing has evolved very significantly over the last 30 years, but has a done so in a context of substantial intellectual and sociological challenge. Resistance to its development has at times reflected resistance to the underlying concepts of marketisation rather than a concern that its approaches and findings are not important.

During the late 1980s New Zealand, in common with a number of other nations, underwent a controversial restructuring of its public sector, including education. The radical nature of education reform was to be epitomised in the documents Administering for Excellence (the Picot report), and the Labour Government's official response, Tomorrow's Schools. The publication of these documents, however, tended to polarize New Zealand's education sector and the public at large into opposite and opposing camps. This paper aims to address these issues.

In producing a step‐by‐step analysis of the techniques of persuasion employed during a crucial period of New Zealand's educational history, it will be shown how many of the arguments presented during this time have continued to shape the way we view the educational reforms and their impact more than 20 years later.

It will be demonstrated that the nature and style of propaganda on both sides was highly sophisticated, expressly aimed at building a constituency that was either supportive or hostile to reform.

This paper is perhaps the first to critically examine the nature and role of propaganda in both promoting the educational reforms and in galvanizing resistance to them. In utilising the very considerable amount of hitherto un‐cited documentary material now available, this paper makes a major contribution to education policy research.

This paper aims to identify criteria for assessing the viability of institutional strategies for enterprise education and to develop models that describe methods of organising enterprise education.

The paper identifies and explains a number of key criteria including: educational impact, financial sustainability, academic credibility, human capital, structural embeddedness, context and infrastructure, alignment with institutional strategy and policy, community engagement, and alignment with policy context and funding. The paper then considers a number of models. These models are separated into two clusters: single department‐led models and campus wide models. The evaluative criteria are applied to each model to explore the impact of particular strategies and the criteria are used to assess the long‐term viability of each model. The paper concludes by making judgements about each criteria and their usefulness for helping understand long‐term sustainability of enterprise education.

The paper shows that different models may be valuable in different higher education contexts and illustrates the temporal nature of the relationships between the models.

This is principally a conceptual paper that can be developed further by the application of the evaluative criteria empirically. The models developed can be tested and analysed further through reference to observations of practice.

The paper makes a valuable contribution to knowledge in this subject area by describing and analysing the various models of organisation that could be used to support enterprise education in higher education institutions.

The main aim of this chapter is to discuss the conceptualization of comparative pedagogies within Continental European and Anglophone traditions, and to discuss the importance of comparative pedagogy within the contemporary comparative educational research as such. The chapter opens with the issue of naming and translation of the key terminology, notably pedagogy, comparative pedagogy, and vzgoja (Erziehung in German and vospitanie in Russian) – a concept which implies the teacher’s intentional guidance of children in their moral, personal, social, aesthetical, physical, and spiritual advancement. The chapter presents a brief history of the development of pedagogy as a distinctive science, and proceeds with the discussion on pedagogy’s identity. Due to multifaceted understanding of pedagogy in Continental Europe, the chapter focuses on the academic tradition in Slovenia and wider area of former Yugoslavia. Further, the role of comparison in different contemporary historical periods of pedagogy’s development is explained. The chapter shows that comparative pedagogy has different meanings in different academic traditions. The main difference between that Continental Europe and the Anglophone world is in the knowledge base they built on (pedagogy vs. other social sciences), and the focus they place on endogenous and exogenous factors influencing the nature of education systems and pedagogical processes. The author finally proposes a new definition of comparative pedagogy; a definition which takes pedagogy as its knowledge base, but is also informed with a long tradition of comparative education research based on other social sciences.

As online education proliferates, little attention has been given to understanding non-cognitive success factors, such as wellness, in online graduate student success. To begin to address this gap in understanding, this paper aims to explore the experiences of doctoral student wellness within the context of online distance education. Doctoral students, and their instructor, in an advanced qualitative research course sought to use collective autoethnography to address the following questions: How do the authors perceive the wellness as doctoral students engaged in distance education, and how do the authors understand the influence of the doctoral program cultures on the perceptions of the own wellness?

This paper emerged from a 12 week advanced qualitative research course where students opted to engage in a poetic arts-based collective autoethnography to reflect on and analyze their experience of wellness as doctoral students taking online courses. Data collection included the use of reflective journaling, creation of “My Wellness Is” poetry, and weekly group debriefing. Journals and poems were analyzed individually, then collectively. First and second cycle coding techniques were used, with the first cycle including process and descriptive coding and second round coding involving pattern coding.

Through first and second round coding, three primary themes emerged: positionality as an element of wellness, the role of community in maintaining wellness and awareness and action regarding wellness.

Due to the inherent nature of qualitative research, and specifically autoethnographic methods, the findings of this study may be difficult to generalize to the broader online graduate student population. Future research on this topic may use the experiences explored in this study as a basis for the development of future quantitative studies to measure the extent of these findings in the broader population.

This paper includes implications for the development of interventions that may support wellness in graduate students in online environments including support interventions from faculty advisors, leveraging academic curriculum to promote wellness, and suggestions for building community among online graduate students.

As technology advances, online education is quickly becoming a leading mechanism for obtaining a graduate education. Scholarship in this discipline has primarily focused on academic outcomes of online students and has largely focused on undergraduate populations. This paper broadens the conversation about online education by illustrating a non-cognitive dimension of the student experience, i.e. wellness, through the perspective of graduate students.

This paper addresses a gap in the current understanding of online graduate student experiences and outcomes using methods that provide vivid illustrations of the nuanced experience of online doctoral students.

To provide insight into young people’s attitudes toward community, place, and public discourse on youth and the environment, and to constructively situate the concept of “a sense of place” within these insights for critical pedagogy and community development.

This project utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify salient themes in young people’s expressions of place relationships through poetry. About 677 poems about “local watersheds” written by youth aged 5–18 for the River of Words Poetry Contest between 1996 and 2009 are analyzed using poetic and content analysis.

Findings include the importance of place experiences that employ risk-taking and play, engage central family relationships, and provide access to historical and political narratives of place for the development of constructive place relationships. We also present findings regarding emotions in the sample, showing changing levels of hope and idealism, sadness, pessimism, and other emotions as expressed in the poems.

Using poetic analysis to study attitudes, values, and feelings is a promising method for learning more about the perceptions and values of individuals that affect their self-efficacy and agency.

Engaging youth as active participants and empathetic knowledge-creators in their own places offers one opportunity for critical reflective development in order to combat and reframe disempowering public discourses about young people and their relationships to nature and community. Educators can use this research to adapt contextually and emotionally rooted methods of place-based learning with their students.

The paper uses a nontraditional, mixed methods approach to research and a unique body of affective data. It makes a strong argument for reflective, experiential, and critical approaches to learning about nature and society issues in local contexts.

After insisting on the strong coupling between education and society, this paper aims to detect the symptoms of a crisis in education and present the reasons of pathology that testify to the failure of the actual paradigm of thinking.

Casting doubt on the economic model approach adopted in recent decades as being inappropriate for the educational field, the author goes from the peripheral question about students' outcomes and schools' effectiveness to the central question of societies' well‐being, arguing that the ultimate goal of education should be to lead individuals to understand how the world functions and help them find new ways to make the world.

This paper draws on research in literature on school populations (teachers, students). It is suggested that the inappropriateness of the paradigm of thinking adopted has altered education's nature and goals.

Exposing the main misunderstandings and confusions that has led to the above crisis, two epistemic transpositions are proposed as a way towards a new era.

It is higher education’s responsibility to continuously challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio‐scientific disputes. The ill‐defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and reality constructions meet. This makes sustainability – its need for contextualization and the debate surrounding it – pivotal for higher education. It offers an opportunity for reflection on the mission of our universities and colleges, but also a chance to enhance the quality of the learning process. This paper explores both the overarching goals and process of higher education from an emancipatory view and with regard to sustainability.