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The present study aims to reveal common and diverging trends in the development of pedagogical competences of vocational education and training (VET) teachers and trainers in Italy and Lithuania.

A structured survey was administered to Italian and Lithuanian teachers. The collected data were analysed and compared.

Results show that there are many common challenges and problems in the development of pedagogical competencies of the VET teachers in both countries; e.g.: the marginalisation of the VET teacher's work and working conditions, especially the dissatisfying wages and poor career opportunities, and the absent or weak institutionalisation of the VET teacher's qualifications and training.

The emerged results can be useful for directors of VET-centres and VET-schools to manage training and pedagogical growth of teachers both in Italy and in Lithuania. Moreover, the outputs can be considered as a set of suggestions also by the policymakers both at national and European level.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between educators' professional competence, pedagogical competence and the entrepreneurial behaviour of students in higher education as well as the role of entrepreneurial literacy in mediating these variables.

The study involved a sample of 361 students from several universities in Indonesia. A probability sampling method approach with cluster sampling was applied to collect the data, which aims to ensure the representation of each region in Indonesia. The data were retrieved through self-administered questionnaires and structural equation modelling was employed to analyse the relationship between each variable.

The results revealed a positive and significant relationship between educator competencies and students' entrepreneurial behaviour: professional competence (β = 0.26, p < 0.001) and pedagogical competence (β = 0.27, p < 0.001), indicating that higher educator competencies levels were associated with greater students' entrepreneurial behaviour. The mediation analysis showed that entrepreneurial literacy was partially mediated for professional competence (LL = 0.42; UL = 0.460, p < 0.008) and fully mediated for pedagogical competence (β = 0.021; β = 0.375, p < 0.058).

A study solely concerned with a specific group of educators and students in a particular region as well as a cross-sectional study, may lead to generalisations of the findings. Future studies could expand the sample size and include a more diverse group of participants to increase the external validity of the results.

It offers valuable insights for educational institutions, policymakers and educators themselves, who can use the findings to design effective entrepreneurship education programmes and initiatives.

This study contributes to the field of higher education by emphasising the importance of educators as catalysts for entrepreneurship and by providing guidance on how to enhance their competencies and literacy in fostering entrepreneurial behaviour among students.

This chapter analyses the structure, content and development trends of the system of postgraduate teacher training in Russia. It is shown that the system of postgraduate training in Russia has a long history and consists of postgraduate and doctoral levels. The trends that influenced the dynamics and essence of the modernisation processes of Russian postgraduate education are revealed. The content, logic and shortcomings of the not quite successful attempt to standardise the process of training higher-qualified personnel in postgraduate studies are substantiated. Changes in the nomenclature of scientific specialties, which are used to award academic degrees in pedagogy, are revealed.

The main part of the material is devoted to the general characteristics of the current pedagogical postgraduate programmes in Russia. It describes the peculiarities of the admission procedure and the organisation of training for graduate students, the nuances of the choice of supervisor, the definition of the thesis topic, and the current, intermediate, and final certification of graduate students. The essence of co-doctoral studies as a form of dissertation preparation is revealed. The requirements for the preparation, design and defence of candidate dissertations in pedagogy are outlined. The form of advanced training of scientific and pedagogical staff for the preparation of doctoral dissertations is briefly described.

This study aims to understand better the student awareness and knowledge on how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are used in higher education institutions (HEIs) to motivate students’ learning on sustainability. It is essential to consider students’ understanding of sustainability at the end of their studies to assess whether they feel prepared to apply sustainability in their daily work life.

The study has a quantitative case study design, and the specific method used is an online survey with masters’ students using the university student platform EvaSys. The study assesses approaching how students perceive the overall education integrating sustainability into programs and curricula.

The results showed that work-integrated learning (WIL) projects learning and real-life experiences as part of their studies enhanced the students’ understanding of sustainability. Moreover, the study showed that integrating an understanding of the SDGs in teaching offers universities a way to frame students’ key competencies in ways that allow them to develop their interpersonal competencies as ambassadors for sustainability in their future work life.

This study supports the argument that WIL and real-life university experiences enhance students’ key competencies critical for sustainability.

The pedagogical approach advanced in this paper addresses how WIL and real-life experiences might develop students’ key competencies on sustainability. This approach indicates that working with SDGs in teaching encourages students to promote their interpersonal competencies for sustainability.

There has been much debate in recent times about the factors that improve the quality of teaching in higher education (HE) institutions. This has been especially fueled by the increasing importance attached to Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) qualification. To fill the existing gap in the current literature in this regard, this study aims to investigate whether HE teachers (lecturers) who undergo pedagogical training (PT) in addition to obtaining PhD qualification possess higher knowledge and pedagogical competencies (PCs) than those that relied only on having PhD qualification without further teaching qualifications.

Drawing upon data collected through a structured questionnaire administered to 1,174 Nigerian HE teachers in various disciplines from 39 HE institutions, in addition to two focus groups, the study adopts a mixed-methods research. The quantitative data were analyzed descriptively while qualitatively data were coded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed thematically.

This article proposes that teachers who undergo PT in addition to obtaining PhD tend to have more PCs and perform better than those that have not undergone any form of PT. Also, it found a statistically significant difference between PCs of HE teachers who have undergone PT in addition to PhD qualification from those without PT. The implication is that teachers who have undergone PT are more effective in facilitating teaching and learning than those who have not completed PT.

Despite the merits of the mixed-methods research, a major limitation of this study is the failure to compare students' achievements or successes based on the two distinct samples. However, the limitations create opportunities for further studies into the subject matter.

This study is timely, given that Nigeria (like many African countries) has a low quality HE system and low graduate outcomes (related to knowledge, employability, and skills). More so, research into pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and practices are rare or nonexistent in the literature related to Nigeria and other African countries' HE system.

Global governance has granted international organizations a political role of utmost importance. As the search for research-based best practices is the spearhead of these nongovernmental organizations, national decision-makers tend to accept their recommendations willingly. The way decision-makers use research-based evidence has been amply investigated, but few researchers have interrogated how the same international organizations, that claim to establish a bridge between research and policy, use such evidence. This prompted us to analyze the pedagogical discourse of UNESCO, an organization that recently reminded the international community that improving teacher quality is now a major issue for all those who are preoccupied with improving the quality of education (UNESCO, 2014). Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all. EFA global monitoring report. Paris, France: UNESCO). How does UNESCO deal with the issue of teaching practices? What is the content of its pedagogical discourse? To answer these questions, we analyzed the Organization’s publications on teachers in the past 15 years (N = 45) and conducted interviews with a number of its strategic members (N = 5). The results of our analyses of this dataset indicate a tension between the content of the publications and what the interviewees had to say. While the publications timidly but recurrently promote learner-centered constructivist approaches, the interviewees argued that pedagogical orientations are a matter of national sovereignty; that UNESCO should not cross this line. As an intermediary between research and policy and a think tank, UNESCO seems caught in this contradiction. In matters of pedagogy, shouldn’t the Organization be more forceful in counseling its member States by referring to research-based evidence on teaching effectiveness?

To describe a Swiss Virtual Campus project in which an internet‐based computer‐assisted learning (CAL) package for students in economics and in dentistry was developed.

A case study account of a CAL package implementation against a rigorous and well‐thought‐through pedagogic framework.

The paper shows that it is possible to use a CAL package effectively to promote information literacy both on campus and to a distance learning community of students as an accredited form of learning activity, thus showing how e‐learning is suitable for the promotion of information literacy both to full‐time students and to those engaged in lifelong learning in the context of professional practice.

The case study approach gives a useful structured account of the development process of a library CAL package, with implications for the application of well‐developed pedagogic models in other e‐learning contexts.

The paper offers a clear model for the successful implementation of e‐learning models in information literacy practice.

The paper establishes the value of having a clearly developed pedagogical framework together with sophisticated technical e‐learning platforms as practical means of effectively promoting and enhancing student use of information resources across a virtual campus.

The voice of school principals represents the principals' thoughts and experiences because of their as teachers' evaluator. It provides principals' perception on making sense the teacher evaluation. In qualitative research, voice can provide the truth and meaning of principals' experience in teachers evaluation. Their voices in the qualitative interviews are recorded and transcribed into words (Jackson and Mazzei, 2009 and Charteris and Smardon, 2018). By listening to the voices of principals in five provinces in Indonesia, this study, a qualitative research, intends to explore the principals' sensemaking in teacher evaluation.

This study adopted a qualitative approach, as it was principally concerned with capturing participants' direct experiences in their natural setting as both the teachers' evaluator and school leader (Patton, 2002). The qualitative interview and content analysis were used in this study. The qualitative interview is a type of conversation used to explore informants' experiences and interpretations; in this study, the headmaster (Mishler, 1986; Spradley, 1979 in Hatch, 2002). Researchers used the interviews to uncover the structure of meaning used by principals in making sense the policies that determine teacher evaluations and that are used to carry out evaluations within principal's local authority. The implicit structure can be discovered from direct observation, and the qualitative interviews can bring this meaning to the surface (Hatch, 2002). Therefore, by applying the qualitative interviews, it is expected that information or “unique” interpretations from the principal can be obtained (Stake, 2010). Content analysis is a research technique for making valid conclusions from oral texts into a research context. This analysis can provide new insights, improve researchers' understanding of certain phenomena, or inform other practical actions through the use of verbal data collected in the form of answers to open interview questions (Krippendorff, 2004).

There are three important findings relating to principals' sensemaking of teachers' evaluation; they are teachers' length of service, principals' perceptions of teacher evaluations and consistency in teacher performance improvement. The principals' perception greatly influences their beliefs and sensemaking of teacher evaluation. In essence, teacher evaluation has not been used to identify high-quality teachers. Principals focus more on the improvement of teachers' welfare than teacher actual performance.

Future research should explore principals' attitude toward the stakeholders when student achievement is not in line with the consistent increase in teachers' performance ratings. And, it is also necessary to investigate the policy makers response to see the consistent improvement in teacher's evaluation is not in line with student achievement. Finally, how to eliminate the culture of joint responsibility without causing frictions in the school environment.

The authors hereby declare that this submission is their own work, and to the best of their knowledge, it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material that have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma any other publishers.

This paper aims to examine multinational companies’ (MNCs) international transfer strategies of German vocational education and training (VET) and examines the dynamics in the subsidiaries.

Methodologically, the study is based on expert interviews conducted in German headquarters. To complete the picture, the study also includes insights from expert interviews in subsidiaries in Mexico, India and China.

There is a mix of country-of-origin and geocentric strategic orientation. VET is “boiled down” and adapted in its contents, but headquarters and expats maintain the spirit of VET, i.e. its national agenda of technical hands-on competencies and pedagogical competencies. To achieve this MNCs introduce general guidelines. Convincing takes place by means of role models.

The effects in the emerging economies differ regionally; these regional differences are not the subject of this contribution.

VET transfer comprises the implementation of its core spirit which produces participatory and emancipatory dynamics.

Intercultural learning has to be sensitive to such dynamics.

The study contributes to research on international strategies of MNCs, focussing on skill development of the blue-collar study.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what key competencies and characteristics of teachers are needed for integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teaching and to investigate teachers’ perceptions on how important those competencies are and how often they are executed.

An exploratory sequential mixed methods approach was used to investigate key characteristics of integrated STEM teaching competencies and the level of their importance and performance as perceived by teachers. By using behavioral event interview technique, qualitative data were collected from professional secondary teachers in science, math and technology subjects. An instrument was constructed based on the result of qualitative research; and a survey was conducted with 48 STEM teachers working in South Korea. The mean values between importance and performance of integrated STEM teaching competencies were compared. A perceived importance level of each item was compared with a practice level by using importance-performance analysis.

As a result of qualitative research, in total 21 items were constructed as detailed characteristics of each domain of integrated STEM teaching competencies, which provide insights about teachers’ perceptions of teaching competencies that are critical for integrated STEM education. A comparison of means between importance and performance of integrated STEM teaching competencies showed that whereas teachers considered each of these items to be of significant importance in their overall evaluation of the integrated STEM teaching competencies, they are not performing at a level that reflects the assigned importance.

This research results provide information for future research on how to implement an integrated STEM education initiative at the secondary school level, for planning teacher training programs, pre-service teacher education and related educational policies.

South Korea has focused on integrated STEM education to raise talented human resources in the fields of science and technology. However, many teachers have experienced serious difficulties and troubles in executing integrated STEM education. It is necessary to figure out key competencies and characteristics of teachers to facilitate integrated STEM teaching.