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The purpose of this paper is to improve future teacher training by assessment of university graduates’ satisfaction with their preparation in Basic Education teaching.

This descriptive study employed a self-administered survey questionnaire to a representative sample of 235 graduates between 2014 and 2016 from three universities in Chile. The questionnaire generated information about the graduates’ background (age, gender, parents’ education and prestige of secondary school attended); an evaluation of three dimensions of their degree program (instructional quality, infrastructure and employability), and experiences in the labor market (including salary). Analysis of variance was used to assess relationships between satisfaction, and other variables.

In general, graduates were satisfied with all aspects of their training. Satisfaction levels were higher from those assumed to have lower expectations. Contrary to this hypothesis, university prestige is not directly related to satisfaction. Instead, expectations and employability moderate the effect of prestige.

The sample is not representative of the 59 universities in Chile nor of the many other degree programs offered in those universities.

Program directors concerned about improving the public reputation or prestige of their program will benefit from efforts to improve the quality of the program and its infrastructure, and relevance for entrance into the world of work.

This study provides information not previously available about graduate satisfaction in teaching degree programs in Chile.

Despite dealing with special educational needs (SEN) students, many teachers feel unprepared for this task. This situation reveals the urgent need for studies in different areas, directed toward the inclusion of students in regular classrooms. Therefore, a diagnosis about the situation of inclusive education and the resources available in schools offering regular teaching becomes of paramount importance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present the results of an investigation that sought information on pedagogical work in inclusive education and in the use of support materials by teachers of basic education in Brazil and Portugal.

In order to carry out this investigation, a questionnaire was developed by a partnership between researchers from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil and the University of Minho, Portugal, and applied to mathematics teachers. The study participants consisted of 197 mathematics teachers, working in primary school, secondary school and young people and adult education. Data collection was carried out through a questionnaire, available online and designed in Google Forms, with 48 questions (both open and closed formats).

From the results obtained, there is a clear need not only for promoting initial and further teacher training that takes into consideration the profile of this teacher, but also for promoting the development of support materials (games, software, devices and assistive technology) in a collaborative way, involving users, teachers, engineers in a way to ensure a good usability and adequate adaptability. Thus, the inclusion of SEN students in schools must not take place only with their physical integration, but also must consider their integration at social, emotional and educational levels.

It is understood that the teacher should receive a solid training in successful inclusion experiences in terms of technological, educational and didactic experiences. Another problem that seems to be recurrent is that support materials have been developed in a way that is somehow disconnected from the reality of the classroom. The context in which the support material is inserted is fundamental to the success of its utilization. What is more, it cannot be isolated from the individuals who will use it. It thus becomes urgent to prepare the school environment for the reality of inclusion. This involves aspects from changes in infrastructure and development of assistive technology to assist the student with SEN in their learning, to the establishment of public policies that involve teacher initial and further training, specialized support and curricular discussions.

The purpose of this study is to assess the perceived satisfaction of Advanced Certificate in Teaching students and facilitators regarding online library services offered by the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa.

The study adopted a quantitative approach with open-ended questions that generated some qualitative data. Data has been presented using descriptive statistics in the form of tables, graphs and charts and thematic content analysis for some qualitative data.

All learners in this study were adults between 45 and 55 years of age. Of the respondents, 13% lacked online experience, while about 85% had never used online library services and 35% indicated that Google was their primary source of information. The majority of respondents indicated information literacy as a core function of the academic library. High data cost in South Africa came out as one of the major issues affecting distance learners as well as login and password frustrations. The study confirmed computer anxiety, physical discomfort, information overflow and prompt response as some of the perceived challenges and levels of satisfaction respectively of Advanced Certificate in Teaching students and facilitators regarding online library services offered by the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa.

The study revealed that a distance learning library policy is of the essence because it helps to put in place rules and regulations that guide the delivery of distance library services.

The offering of online and distance library services is a fairly new concept to the UFS library. This study bridges the gap between theory and practice regarding the perceived satisfaction of distance users on online library services and how to improve the current practice.

Places of Inquiry identifies basic conditions and trends in modern systems of higher education that link or dissociate research, teaching, and student learning (“study”). The book is structured in two major parts. Part I, “Distinctive National Configurations of Advanced Education and Research Organization”, in five chapters organized by country, contrasts the national arrangements of the basic elements in the five major nations of Germany, Britain, France, United States, and Japan. These chapters give play to historical determination of national peculiarities and unique arrangements. Chapter 1 particularly highlights the preeminent role played in the construction of the modern research university by nineteenthcentury developments in the German system. Emerging disciplinarians learned by trial and error to use the laboratory and the seminar in a framework of university institutes. In “the institute university”, the academic research group was born, with Humboldtian thought serving as a useful covering ideology.Chapter 2 portrays English universities, in contrast, to be focused historically on elite preparation of undergraduates—a “thin stream of excellence”—in the small worlds of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Here, in this model, against the grain of the structure, research-centered academics learned to use the apprenticeship model for a very limited number of “research students” who were supported for advanced study toward a late-developing Ph.D. “The collegiate university” has been very different from the German configuration.Chapter 3 presents the highly unusual historical arrangements in the French setting where the universities became in effect the party of the third part, caught between the elite nature of the grandes ecoles and the domination in research of a nonuniversity research establishment. An outside set of research institutes has provided the main research base, and university research-oriented activities had to be brought into alignment with it. The genetic imprints of the system, in contrast to both the German and the British, have been one of subordination of the university, with much broad structural separation of research activity from university teaching and the university education of students. A picture of historic subordination is also found in the case of Japan (Chapter 5), where much displacement to industry has taken place. Students graduating from first-degree study have been snapped up by industry and offered better opportunity, including in research, than what the university could offer. Advanced education at universities became severely constrained. In Japanese terms, Japanese graduate schools, although formally modeled after the American structure, became “empty show windows.”The chapter on the United States traces the development of a highly competitive system of higher education in which a graduate level, separately organized within universities from undergraduate programs, provided a broad foundation for small-group laboratories and seminars in which research activity could be a means of teaching and a mode of study. Peculiar American conditions of weak secondary schooling and generous admission to higher education left much general or liberal education to be accomplished in the undergraduate years, preempting specialization. Emerging disciplinarians tried repeatedly in the mid- and late-nineteenth century to build their new research interests into the undergraduate realm. It did not work. The emergent solution was a vertical one, to add a formal graduate school on top, with its arms in the graduate programs of the departments making it “the home of science.”This major internal differentiation, in comparison to the other four major international models, made the American university a “graduate department university,” with extensive provision developing in the last half of the twentieth century for research-based teaching and learning. What the German system had been able to do on a small scale in the nineteenth century, in the context of elite higher education, the American system developed systematically the capacity to do on a much larger scale, in the context of mass higher education on the road to universal higher education.Part II of the volume, entitled “The Research-Teaching-Study Nexus,” offers a conceptual framework for understanding how modern systems of higher education do or do not effectively bring research into alignment with advanced university teaching and advanced student training. The concept of a research-teaching-study nexus serves as leitmotiv. In Chapter 6, devoted to “forces of fragmentation,” adverse conditions for this nexus are largely subsumed under the twin concepts of research drift and teaching drift, with certain interests of government and industry strengthening inherent tendencies, already stimulated by mass enrollments and great growth in knowledge, for research on the one side and teaching and learning on the other to drift apart.But the nexus survives, often with great resilience and strength, and, in Chapter 7, the central part of the conceptual analysis takes the form of an explanation of how a modern integration is most strongly effected. Supporting conditions and processes are identified at three levels: whole national system, where differentiation, decentralization, and competition serve as broad enabling elements; the individual university, where diversified funding and deliberate organization of advanced education play an increasingly large determining role; and the basic unit (departmental) level within universities, where the activities of research, teaching, and study are located. At the base, operational conditions are captured in the twin concepts of research group and teaching group, each dependent on the other and closely intertwined in a veritable double helix of linkage and interaction. These twin settings for professors and students permit the linked transmission of tacit and tangible knowledge.As both the tacit and the tangible components of specialized knowledge bulk ever larger, they cannot be suitably conveyed by undergraduate or first-degree teaching programs alone, or by historic mentor-apprentice relationships alone. The research-teaching-study nexus is increasingly enacted by operational units of universities that bring together an advanced teaching program and the learning-by-doing of research activity. In this organizational nexus we find the heart of the graduate school phenomenon.The concluding chapter (Chapter 8) goes beyond analysis of the research-teaching-study nexus by offering three broad conclusions for the understanding of modern higher education: first, that inquiry remains the central activity, the dynamic element, in the university complex; second, that complexity and contradiction in university activities are inevitable and will continue to grow, ruling out simple solutions to long-term problems and placing a premium on how individual universities go about organizing themselves; and third, that research and teaching have an “essential compatibility.” Research activity itself is a compelling and rich basis for teaching and learning, primarily in graduate education in the arts and sciences but also secondarily in both advanced professional education and undergraduate or pre-advanced education. The much-voiced view that research and teaching are incompatible is short-sighted and regressive. The incompatibility thesis should give way to a more fundamental understanding in which research activity is seen both as a compelling form of teaching and as a necessary method of learning.For all modern and modernizing systems of higher education, the book emphasizes the great importance of organizing master's and especially doctoral work so that the activities of specialized research groups interact with structured teaching programs.In sum: Places of Inquiry concentrates on graduate (advanced) education, a level of higher education that has been rarely studied. It depicts distinctive configurations of academic research and advanced training in the five major national systems of higher education of the late twentieth century. It highlights research activity as a basic for teaching and learning. And it identifies generic conditions that pull research, teaching, and study apart from each other, and conversely and most important, focuses attention on the structures and processes that work to keep these central university activities closely linked.

BUSINESS SCHOOL GRAFFITI is a highly personal and revealing account of the first ten years (1965–1975) at Britain’s University Business Schools. The progress achieved is documented in a whimsical fashion that makes it highly readable. Gordon Wills has been on the inside throughout the decade and has played a leading role in two of the major Schools. Rather than presuming to present anything as pompous as a complete history of what has happened, he recalls his reactions to problems, issues and events as they confronted him and his colleagues. Lord Franks lit a fuse which set a score of Universities and even more Polytechnics alight. There was to be a bold attempt to produce the management talent that the pundits of the mid‐sixties so clearly felt was needed. Buildings, books, teachers who could teach it all, and students to listen and learn were all required for the boom to happen. The decade saw great progress, but also a rapid decline in the relevancy ethic. It saw a rapid withering of interest by many businessmen more accustomed to and certainly desirous of quick results. University Vice Chancellors, theologians and engineers all had to learn to live with the new and often wealthier if less scholarly faculty members who arrived on campus. The Research Councils had to decide how much cake to allow the Business Schools to eat. Most importantly, the author describes the process of search he went through as an individual in evolving a definition of his own subject and how it can best be forwarded in a University environment. It was a process that carried him from Technical College student in Slough to a position as one of the authorities on his subject today.

Few people with special educational needs (SEN) had access to higher education in Brazil until the 1980s, mainly due to their lack of access to basic education and a lack of specific public policies for this population. It was only in 2003 that the Brazilian government implemented strategies for the dissemination of the factors referring to inclusive education. The objective was one of the support for the transformation of educational systems into inclusive educational systems. As these policies are recent; few studies have been carried out in Brazil. According to Brazilian statistical data, the number of enrollments connected to special education in regular basic education classes, in 2015, was almost 751,000 students, while in higher education in diverse graduation courses the number was 38,000. In this sense, this chapter aims to unveil and discuss Brazilian public policies for the access and permanence of SEN students in higher education. Reflections will also be presented related to the evolution of the number of enrollments of students with specific SEN (visual, physical, hearing, and intellectual) in basic and higher education, as well as the implementation of public policies focused on this population in a Brazilian context.

The aim of this paper is to reveal and investigate differences in how Finnish student teachers understand entrepreneurship education and how critical they are of it. The research question is: what kind of critical understanding do student teachers reveal in their conception of entrepreneurship education?

A qualitative research approach termed content analysis was used to investigate student teacher’s conceptions. The data were collected from essays written by 257 student teachers at the University of Turku’s, Rauma teacher education department during 2010-2012.

The conception of entrepreneurship education is, in many ways, related to how much one already knows about entrepreneurship education or how one reacts to it. It seems that most student teachers’ conceptions of entrepreneurship are positive, but even those in favour of it, in principle, do not necessarily want to see entrepreneurship education included in the basic education curriculum. Nevertheless, they think that enterprising pedagogy is useful and that the way of thinking about teaching is inspiring. They also feel that both teacher education and basic education benefit from some kind of entrepreneurship component, but do not take entrepreneurship education for granted. On the basis of this study, it is proposed that teacher education should incorporate more teaching that supports critical thinking in all study modules.

The findings of this study illustrate that there is much more to do in teacher education and its curricula. Teaching situations and learning situations are always social situations and both learners and teachers have a vital role to play.

This chapter discusses whether or not there is congruence between the assessment and pedagogical approaches used when teaching natural science and technology education in South Africa. According to the South African Department of Basic Education’s Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, student assessment is integral to the teaching and learning process. This chapter draws from a research project undertaken in a large province in South Africa. The main participants were grade 4 teachers who taught natural science and technology education, which is science education. Data collection was through semi-structured interviews conducted as well as classroom observations. Guiding the chapter were the following questions: (1) What are teachers’ common understanding and rationale for assessment? (2) What were the common assessment approaches in the observed classrooms and their alignment with pedagogical approaches used by the teachers? (3) How did teachers determine the assessment method that resonated with the used pedagogical approaches for their lessons? The analysis of data followed the iterative approach as suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994). This chapter reveals the lack of congruency between pedagogical and assessment approaches used in teaching, showing a clear lack of wholistic thinking about both teaching and learning process. What further emerged was that assessment was mainly utilised for compliance purposes and not to quality assure the teaching and learning of the students. Thus, the author argues that there is a need for congruence between pedagogical approaches and assessment methods in order to benefit teaching and learning processes. The author cautions that the danger of tick-box compliance without considering the lifelong implications on the students as programme beneficiaries. The author views the tendency to please authorities as nullifying the whole purpose of teaching and learning, which should benefit students by developing them to critical thinkers, problem solvers and productive future citizens of the country.

Lawrence Angus is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne. Much of his work has been conducted in relation to educational policy and institutional restructuring, which he connects with issues of social formation, culture and equity. Angus’s current interest is in the part played by schools in the construction and legitimation of various forms of culture and knowledge associated with the use of new technologies, and the implications of these for educational practice, inclusion/exclusion and (dis)advantage. Angus has a strong research and publication record in socio-cultural analysis of processes of schooling, and a record of strong policy work including participation in government advisory committees. His analyses of educational processes and practices and what these mean for the conceptualisation of educational policy and educational reform have been especially influential. His most recent book, with Terri Seddon, is Reshaping Australian education: Beyond nostalgia (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2000). He has extensive experience of qualitative research and has published internationally on methodological debates and innovations in critical ethnography.Karin Aronsson is a professor at the Department of Child Studies, Linkööping University. Much of her research concerns multiparty conversations in institutional settings, e.g. family therapy talk, pediatric interviews, and classroom conversations. Other investigations concern codeswitching in bilingual children’s play, and language shift phenomena in relation to sibling caretaking. Several of her studies map the social choreography of talk-in-interaction along specific continua; e.g. formality-informality and alignment-disalignment. A series of recent studies concern classrooms dialogues as arenas for informal learning.Dennis Beach is a senior research fellow and associate Professor at the Department of Education Gööteborg University, Sweden. His main responsibilities are for the development of ethnographic research methods at the department, the supervision of Ph.D. research and teaching within the sociology of education. Together with Marie Carlson from the Department of Sociology at Göötborg University, Beach is currently leading a recently funded Research Council project on the restructuring of adult education and the collective renewal of Swedish For Immigrants Education (SFI). His previous research projects have been in the restructuring of upper-secondary education and of various programmes within university-based vocational education.Shereen Benjamin has worked as a class teacher of young children in primary and special schools, and as a learning support teacher in the secondary school in which her doctoral research was based. Her Ph.D. was completed at the London University Institute of Education, with the support of an Economic and Social Research Council studentship. She is currently lecturing in the Inclusive and Special Education division of the University of Birmingham. She is interested in the intersection of gender/sexuality, social class and ‘special educational needs’, and is researching inclusive school cultures in collaboration with practising teachers and with colleagues from The Open University and Leeds Metropolitan University.Jeff Bezemer (1976), MA, studied Language and Culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 1999, he graduated with a specialisation in Dutch as a Second Language. Since 1999, he is affiliated to Babylon, Center for Studies of Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society at Tilburg University. After having been involved in empirical-analytical studies on school achievements of islamic school pupils, and adult lingua-franca-interaction, he is currently engaged in an international-comparative, empirical-interpretative Ph.D. project on multilingualism and education in a multi-ethnic, Dutch primary school.Diann Eley is currently a Research Associate at Loughborough University in the Department of Physical Education, Sport Science and Recreation Management. Her main research interest is the social-psychology of volunteerism and leadership in young people and sport.Laura Dawn Greathouse received her doctorate, from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2000, for her dissertation dealing with refugee and immigrant students in English for Speakers of Other Languages classrooms. Her research focus remains on inequality and education, especially in linguistic minorities. In her current position as assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, she is responsible for the administration of the credentialing of students with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology to teach at the elementary or secondary educational levels. She is currently working on social acceptance of Middle Eastern descent students in a post-September, 2001 America.Caroline Hudson’s research interests include basic skills provision for offenders; the relationships between basic skills, offending behaviour and social exclusion; school attendance and truancy; evidence-based policy; the effectiveness of basing police officers in schools; and the literacy demands of the secondary school curriculum. Her doctoral ethnography was of young people’s perceptions of the relationships between their family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear and single-parent) and their experience of family and schooling. Formerly a secondary school English teacher, Caroline has worked as a Research Officer at the University of Oxford, and is currently Basic Skills Development Advisor at the Home Office National Probation Directorate.Bob Jeffrey is a research fellow in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University. He was a primary teacher for twenty years before joining The Open University as a project officer on an Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) research project concerned with creative teaching in primary schools directed by Professor Peter Woods. Under the same direction he gained another ESRC research award focusing on the effects of Ofsted inspections on primary teachers. He has continued his research in three areas, creative teaching and learning, primary teacher’s work and research methodology, publishing extensively both individually and with a team within his university faculty. He has also established extensive European connections in the area of creativity and ethnography through the administration of email discussion lists, co-ordinating an ethnography network at the European Conference of Educational Research, submitting European Union research proposals, and organising a Special Interest Group within BERA. He has been invited to give papers at Padua University, Italy and to run methodology workshops in Tallinn, Estonia.Allyson Julé (Ph.D., University of Surrey Roehampton, London, U.K.) currently teaches in the TESL Certificate Program at Trinity Western University, Langley, British Columbia and at the English Language Institute at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include gender in ESL; the Punjabi Sikh experience in Canada; ethnography in education; and classroom talk analysis in teacher education.David Kirk is with the Department of Physical Education, Sports Science and Recreation Management at Loughborough University. His research interests include educational reform and curriculum development in physical education, young people in sport, and situated learning in physical education and sport. His most recent book is ‘Schooling Bodies: School Practice and Public Discourse, 1880–1950’ (Leicester University Press, 1998).Eamonn McKeown is a Senior Research Fellow in Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College London. His background is in Social Anthropology having completed both his first degree and Ph.D. at Queen’s University, Belfast and he has previously been employed as a Research Fellow and tutor at Queen’s University, Belfast and University College Swansea. He has published on a range of educational research issues (selection in Northern Ireland, male recruits to primary school teaching, gender and science teaching, occupational sex-typing among primary school children) and has conducted extended fieldwork in Papua New Guinea examining the relationship between formal education and local culture and in New York investigating the nature of contemporary Irish-American identity. He is currently completing a book on literacy appropriation in a Papua New Guinean highlands community.Ann MacPhail is currently a lecturer in the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, University of Limerick. Her main interests revolve around young people in sport and curriculum development in PE During the past three years Ann has been involved in a number of projects involved with school PE and sport, including model-based teaching and learning in school PE and an ethnography of junior sport participation.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Anna Sparrman has a professional background as a museum curator. She received her Ph.D., in 2002, from the Department of Child Studies at Linkööping University, Sweden. The thesis was concerned with images and visuality in children’s culture as well as commercial childhood. Her main research interest is visual culture in everyday life. She now works as a researcher at the Department of Child Studies.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a research associate at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, where she is undertaking doctoral studies in Internet literacy practices of tertiary English as a Second Language (ESL) students. She teaches international students entering tertiary studies, where she focuses on writing processes and issues of intellectual property. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is particularly interested in Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field, and applies these critically in analyses of international students and their interactions with academic culture, print-centred and internet learning styles, and issues of intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher and Prospect on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, editor) Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) and Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He recently directed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.

Literacy instruction for children with a disability is not highlighted as a priority in South Africa. This can be attributed to numerous reasons, amongst others: the focus on care of children with disability to the detriment of learning; the high number of children with disabilities who are currently out of school; the gradual change and movement towards inclusion despite policies being in place, poorly qualified teachers with limited knowledge regarding best teaching practices and limited experience of teachers in teaching functional literacy. However, the National Department of Education is attempting to address these factors by, for example introducing a compulsory year of schooling before Grade 1 commences (Grade R), developing work books for all learners in the foundation phase and making them available across the country as well as introducing a new national curriculum – Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement CAPS – with a stronger emphasis on literacy.

In this chapter I will briefly provide a contextual background to the South African context; then provide a short discussion of the challenges faced in this context and finally focus on the best practices that have some evidence in this context.