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This chapter focuses on pedagogies of working with diversity centers on West-East reciprocal learning through a Reciprocal Learning Program in preservice teacher education between a Canadian university and a Chinese university. By presenting our initial analysis of fieldwork with our Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program participants through excerpts from newsletters, surveys, and interviews, we explore how participants from both China and Canada made sense of their learning from the other cultural and educational system through the Reciprocal Learning Program within broad educational, social, and cultural contexts. We argue that both global and multicultural dimensions are cultivated in reciprocal learning that infused the lived experiences of both Canadian and Chinese preservice teacher candidates. We discuss the pedagogic implications for working with diversity and believe that reciprocal learning can take place while working with people from different cultures with an attitude of mutual respect and appreciation and an appetite for learning in our increasingly interconnected world.

The purpose of this paper is to form good cutting qualities in glass-epoxy material for opening flexible areas of rigid-flex printed circuit boards (PCB) by ultraviolet (UV) laser cutting.

The cut width and cut depth of glass-epoxy materials were both observed to evaluate their cutting qualities. The heat affected zone (HAZ) of the glass-epoxy material was also investigated after UV laser cutting. The relationships between the cut width and the parameters of various factors were analyzed using an orthogonal experimental design.

The cut width of the glass-epoxy material gradually increased with the increment of the laser power and Z-axis height, while cutting speed and laser frequency had less effect on the cut width. Optimal parameters of the UV laser process for cutting glass-epoxy material were obtained and included a laser power of 6W, a cutting speed of 170 mm/s, a laser frequency of 50 kHz and a Z-axis height of 0.6 mm, resulting in an average cut width of 25 μm and small HAZ.

Flexible areas of rigid-flex PCBs are in good agreement with the cutting qualities of the UV laser. The use of a UV laser process could have important potential for cutting glass-epoxy materials used in the PCB industry.

Although scholars in strategic management have identified innovating and exit as firms’ two sequential strategic responses to long-run crisis, the potential interdependency has yet remained implicit. Specifically, in the context of Chinese Privately Owned Enterprises (POEs), this study investigates the interrelationship of these two strategic responses during long-run crisis. Building on resource redeployment perspective, the authors propose that firms tend to simultaneously leverage innovating and exit responses.

The authors use the data from the 2010 Chinese POEs survey to verify how firms in the long-term crisis made strategic responses after the 2008 financial crisis. Besides, the authors utilize Probit regressions as the basic analysis and further employ bivariate Probit regressions to conduct robustness tests.

This study provides empirical evidence confirming that firms in the long-run period of the crisis tend to adopt both exit and innovating strategies at the same time, that is, the strategy of resource redeployment. Moreover, this study further finds that government subsidies, the degree of marketization and firm’s organizational capability could all accentuate the decision-making of firms’ resource redeployment.

The authors thus contribute to the study of strategic responses to crisis in strategic management by dynamically find out the interdependency of two responses and enrich the research on resource redeployment perspective by identifying three influential positive antecedents, adding to the ongoing investigation on positive drivers of resource redeployment.

The objective of this paper is to empirically test and verify the influence of information and communication technology (ICT) capability on environmental performance (EP) of manufacturing, as well as the moderating effect of heterogenous factors and the mediating effect of ambidextrous innovation in the context of the Chinese manufacturing firms.

The data come from the World Bank Enterprise Survey of China conducted from December 2011 to February 2013. The logistic regression is applied with Stata 15, and the robustness test by three methods is employed to verify the reliability of the results in this paper.

The research results suggest that the positive relationship between ICT capability and EP is moderated by two heterogenous factors, including main market and industry attributes. Meanwhile, the positive relationship between ICT capability and EP is mediated by ambidextrous innovation.

This work highlights ICT capability as an important, yet underexplored antecedent in improving the EP of manufacturing firms. This research further uncovers the moderating role of main market and industry attributes, as well as the mediating mechanism by introducing ambidextrous innovation in the relationship between ICT capability and EP.

The purpose of this paper is to examine public–private partnership (PPP) approaches for the construction of rental retirement villages in Australia and to allocate the investment proportions under a certain project return rate among three investors which are the government, private sectors and pension funds. The apportionment will achieve a minimum overall investment risk for the project.

Capital structure, particularly determination of investment apportionment proportions, is one of the key factors affecting the success of PPP rental retirement villages. Markowitz mean-variance model was applied to examine the investment allocations with minimum project investment risks under a certain projected return rate among the PPP partners for the construction of rental retirement villages.

The research findings validate the feasibility of the inclusion of pension funds in the construction of PPP rental retirement villages and demonstrate the existence of relationships between the project return rate and the investment allocation proportions.

This paper provides a quantitative approach for determination of the investment proportions among PPP partners to enrich the theory of PPP in relation to the construction of rental retirement villages. This has implications for PPP partners and can help these stakeholders make vital contributions in developing intellectual wealth in the PPP investment area while providing them with a detailed guide to decision making and negotiation in relation to investment in PPP rental retirement villages.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis of the literature in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education over the past 15 years, with a specific focus on global distribution and research trends.

This study collected 1,718 documents from the Web of Science (WOS) database and analyzed their timeline distribution, geographical distribution, research topics, subject areas, learning stages and citation burst using a bibliometric approach with VOSviewer and Citespace.

Results indicated that: overall, STEM education has increasingly gained scholarly attention and is developing diversely by emphasizing interdisciplinary, cross-domain and regional collaboration. In terms of global collaboration, a collaborative network with the USA in the center is gradually expanding to a global scope. In terms of research themes, four key topics can be outlined including educational equity, pedagogy, empirical effects and career development. Social, cultural and economic factors influence the way STEM education is implemented across different countries. The developed Western countries highlighted educational equity and disciplinary integration, while the developing countries tend to focus more on pedagogical practices. As for research trends, eastern countries are emphasizing humanistic leadership and cultural integration in STEM education; in terms of teachers’ professional development, teachers’ abilities of interdisciplinary integration, technology adoption and pedagogy application are of the greatest importance. With regards to pedagogy, the main focus is for developing students’ higher-order abilities. In terms of education equity, issues of gender and ethnicity were still the hottest topics, while the unbalanced development of STEM education across regions needs further research.

This study provides a global landscape of STEM education along the timeline, which illustrates the yearly progressive development of STEM education and indicates the future trends.

This chapter restates the purpose of the three-volume series and discusses themes that reoccur in chapters and sections of Part B, which first appeared in chapters and sections of Part A of the series. While Part A of the three-book set focused on pedagogies of teacher selection, reflection, narrative ways of knowing, identity, and mentoring and mediation, Part B of the three-volume series centers on pedagogies of preservice teacher leadership, diversity, parents and family, social justice, and technology. Ideas having to do with traveling stories, the theory-practice split, and the praxical nature of pedagogies are taken up. To conclude, the model for traveling pedagogies, which was first proposed in Part A of the series, once again appears, with a few sub-themes added from International Teacher Education (Part B), which support the already identified framework in International Teacher Education (Part A).

Targeting public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the purpose of this paper is to help decision makers fairly allocate financial risk between governments and private investors through a properly designed length of concession period.

On the one hand, the length of the concession period should be long enough to help private investors to achieve their expected profits. On the other hand, the length of a concession period cannot be decided without agreeing on an upper limit, since an overlong concession period takes too much time for governments to recover their investment and leads to an overly lucrative condition for private investors. Following this logic, the concession period decision range is decided, which defines the lower and upper limits for the length of the concession period. The net present values (NPVs) for governments and private investors are estimated via Monte Carlo simulation to better reflect the uncertainties. To further decide on the optimal length of the concession period, the principle of fair risk allocation between governments and private investors is adopted. The concession period, as an important project parameter, should help to minimize the financial risk gap between governments and private investors.

The developed concession period determination process is validated using a numerical example of a PPP transportation project. The analysis outcomes show that the proposed methodology is capable of determining the length of the concession period so as to control private investors’ profit within a reasonable range while achieving a fair allocation of financial risk between governments and private investors. The outcomes also indicate that, before determining the optimal length for the concession period, governments may need to make a choice between better financial risk allocation or stringent profit control for private investors.

The determination process developed here may be inapplicable to social infrastructure PPPs where the income stream is less predictable. In addition, the data analysis targets a highway project with a capital subsidy provided by the government. To strengthen the effectiveness of the proposed determination process, further research should apply the model to PPPs with other kinds of government support.

The concession period for a PPP project is an important parameter and it is a common practice for governments to predetermine the length of the concession period before inviting tenders. The existing models for determining the concession period focus too much on the simulation of NPVs for project parties and neglect the importance of risk allocation in signing and maintaining a long-term contract. There is also a lack of research to evaluate the influence of governments’ preferences on the length of the concession period. To overcome the limitations of the existing models and enrich the methodology for concession period determination, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge by developing a concession period determination process which can help governments to make better decisions. The financial risk is expected to be more evenly shared between governments and private investors with the concession period derived from the proposed process. This determination process is also capable of evaluating the influence of governments’ preferences on the length of the concession period.