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The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the beneficiary of the bought product, as against any sense of collectivism, or education as public good). This paper explores one element of students' purported individualism: their resistance to group-work as an aspect of assessment. Presenting interview data with university students in England, it argues that such student disquiet does not stem from a resistance to collectivism in general. Using pragmatic sociology, the paper considers students' often gentle and humorous comments about group-work as critique, not complaint. Rather than understanding students' resistance to group-work as individualist grievance about doing something they would simply rather not do, this way of conceptualising their comments understands students as making critical points about what should be assessed for at university. It argues that this way of thinking about resistance to group-work leads us to take that resistance seriously, and in turn to take students seriously as interlocuters on educational matters.

This paper examines two American works of fiction concerning how teenage characters explore and manifest their identity, looking up to transcendentalist ideas, whether consciously or not. The paper puts forth the most individualistic protagonists and investigate their motivation, ways of escaping the society’s expectations and the interaction between them and their environment. The first source analyzed: the film Little Women directed by Gillian Armstrong tells the story of the March family living in the 1860s Concord, influenced by the spirit of transcendentalism. The second source discussed: John Green’s novel Paper Towns employs the notion of a character coming back to transcendentalist values and authors in the 21st century. This paper shows how the teenagers use the transcendentalist ways, whether they are aware of them, and defy the rules of the society frequently represented by the people in their closest environment.

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study that used in-depth interviews to understand the experiences and perceptions of six pre-service teachers as they engaged in microteaching at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. Using a framework grounded in dialogism and positioning theory, the study describes the ways in which different discourses offer, as well as deny, positions to the pre-service teachers as they planned and implemented microlessons. The results suggest that competition between these discourses to position pre-service teachers can result in microteaching being associated with negative emotional experiences, such as disappointment, isolation, and frustration. This emotional dissonance is shown to lead some preservice teachers to question the efficacy of microteaching. The paper therefore argues that it is imperative for teacher educators to support pre-service teachers' engagement in microteaching by revealing the presence of these discourses and by exploring how the latter can exercise agency by accepting, resisting, or rejecting the positions made available to them during their microteaching experience. Suggestions for future research are also considered.

When academics’ opinions, which are published in academic journals as letters to the editor or commentaries, are retracted based on sensitivities and objections that are raised for example on social media, there needs to be a reflection on what this might represent. On one hand, an opinion is precisely that, i.e., a subjective and biased view about an issue. Those views might even be radical, unpopular, or insensitive, but ultimately approved by editors for publication nonetheless. To maintain a truly sustainable scholarly discourse, the best academic way to counter such opinions is by allowing disagreeing voices to express themselves, also as letters to the editor or commentaries. Pressure-induced retractions of opinions not only stifle academic debate, they send the message that opinions need to be moderated and standardized to meet a publishing market that is being increasingly driven by legal parameters, political correctness, as well as business and commercial values rather than academic ones. In an environment of restrictive academic freedom, what emerges is an academia in which the way things are said, tone, and the sensitivity of those that might be affected are given greater weight than the message itself. By cherry-picking parts of the message that detractors or critics might disagree with, the original message may be drowned out by the noise of the objectors. The struggle of academics to liberally voice their opinions in the scholarly publishing realm, and to preserve those opinions, has never been more acute in this age of misinformation and radicalism fueled by polarized social and mass media. Is the politicization and/or commercialization of academia, alongside the retraction of opinions, stifling open and healthy academic debate, or expressing itself as the retraction of opinions, and does this represent a distinct form of “cancel culture” in academia and academic publishing?

The Algerian universities have witnessed significant changes since the establishment of the three-tier system composed of Licence, Master, and Doctorate (LMD). The latter necessitates many changes in the learning process as well as teaching methods. Yet, to achieve self-directed learning, the learner should first achieve autonomy at the personal level. Thus, this paper is mainly devoted to analyzing the impress of Algerian cultural and social traditions on the development of self-directed learning. This study addresses the following question: Do the Algerian cultural and social traditions enhance and facilitate self-directed learning or impede its implementation at university? The main aim of this paper is to investigate the aspects of the Algerian culture that hinder the promotion of self-directed learning. The research has been conducted in Saida University among Master students. To investigate the socio-cultural impact on the development of self-directedness, the researcher used a questionnaire and an interview that was related to Hofstede's six-D Model. Discussing the Algerian culture through the lens of Hofstede's six-D Model helped the researcher to diagnose the reasons behind the failure to promote self-directedness. The main finding of this research is that the collectivist nature of the Algerian culture retards the progress of self-directed learning. This paper also suggests that if the Algerian culture does not favor self-directed learning, educators should adopt new approaches and strategies that engage their learners in the learning experiences. Educators should counterbalance the parochial and paternalistic traditions with glocalization and multiple perspective curricula.

The paper presents a critical review of major works on reflective practice in teaching that mainly define reflection as a technical and isolated process, taking place in an individual's mind. Critiquing the cognitive nature of reflective practice promoted in mainstream research, the paper directs attention to the increasing recognition of sociocultural factors in teacher professional learning, and highlights the significance of reflection as a social practice. Starting with the ideas of John Dewey on reflective practice for teachers, the paper delineates Schön's successive works on the subject, followed by a discussion of Wallace's reflective model. The final part of the paper describes how Vygotsky's sociocultural theory provides a theoretical framework for teachers to effectively engage in reflective practice by moving from individualism to social constructivism in their efforts to enhance their professional competence.

This paper discusses the influence of cultural dimensions on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) introductory videos. The study examined the introductory videos produced by three universities on Coursera platforms using communication theory and Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The results show that introductory videos in MOOCs are influenced by the national culture of the country in which the university is based. Based on this finding, this paper raises interesting questions about the effect of these cultural elements on potential learners from different countries and cultures around the world. The paper also makes suggestions about introductory video production in MOOCs.

The purposes of this paper are to investigate Taiwanese undergraduate students' responses to a selected fictional text, and to propose a critical intercultural pedagogical approach of reading global literature in the EFL educational context based on the insights from the research findings. The authors first critically analysed Xiaolu Guo's third novel, "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers," in terms of Occidentalism, in order to unpack the ideologies underlying her representation of the British and the Chinese. The analysis of the text was conducted through a qualitative approach of critical content analysis. After that, a semi-structured interview was adopted to scrutinise Taiwanese undergraduate students' perceptions of the ideologies underlying the fiction. The analysis of the text identified three themes of British-Chinese binary opposition together with the juxtaposition of ethnocentric Occidentalism and reverse Occidentalism. The findings obtained from interviews indicated that two of the three dichotomies, i.e. individualism versus collectivism and cosmopolitan versus rooted, underlying the fictional text were commonly perceived by the interviewed undergraduates while they had diverse views on the second dichotomy, sexual freedom versus sexual reticence. Furthermore, some students? responses to the fiction signified a subtle, implicit and delicate form of reverse Occidentalism. Based on the above research findings, the authors configured a critical intercultural pedagogy for raising students' capability of decoding and deconstructing Occidentalist ideologies underlying global literature.

This article presents a control group study of the influence of a partnership-centered, community-based learning program on students' academic writing. The improved writing of first-year students in the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CCLCP), we argue, results from the deeply situated learning that took place in the context of reciprocal, community-based relationships. We also argue that research on the impact of community-based learning should take into account the contemporary university's emerging paradigm of engaged learning and research, which calls for a redefinition of partnership and reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the task of conveying information, methods and skills to their pupils, teachers are also expected to mediate certain basic values. In this paper we are interested in the educational task of mediating such values in societies imbued with individualist values and attitudes. As a background we use the results from the recurring "World Values Survey" (WVS) which maps the evaluative profile of citizens in about 80 different countries worldwide. The results from WVS reveal that Swedes in general stand out as remarkably individualist with respect to their reported value judgements. Hence, Sweden constitutes our example of an individualist society, i.e., a society whose members to a large extent share an individualist evaluative profile. One important feature of such an individualist evaluative profile is a tendency to regard questions of value as largely a private matter and to downplay the importance of ethics in general. Against this background we investigated the evaluative outlook of 134 Swedish teacher students, using questions from WVS as a point of departure. The results indicate that these students do not differ to any significant degree from the Swedish population in general as regards their evaluative outlook, and yet they are supposed to mediate both individualist and social basic values in their coming profession. The purpose of this paper is to make visible and problematize the tension between an individualist evaluative profile and the educational task of mediating a set of basic values. This tension, it is argued, poses special challenges for teachers and the teacher education in societies on the individualist side of the scale.

This paper presents some possibilities for applying the linguistic and psychological theories of two dialogists, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan, to the classroom. There is a short summary of how the two theories may interact with each other and then a discussion of their two opposing views of identity formation. Bakhtin was a Russian, coming from the collectivist paradigm and Lacan's theories were arcane combinations of Freud's emphasis on the needs of the individual and French post-Revolutionary individualism. Lacan insisted that one could only become "whole" at the cost of incompleteness for another. Bakhtin opined that completeness could only be achieved within experiences shared and co-constructed by others. This paper concludes with the question of how teachers can ensure the positive experience of co-construction rather than one person paying a cost for the other's identity-formation and whether it is possible to fully implement insights from a collectivistic paradigm in an education system where the stated aim is to enable each individual to meet his/her potential. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.)

Coronavirus Pandemic has changed the way that people live, interact and communicate with others. Some modifications are transitory, while others seem to be permanent. Seeking for social and human development, many individuals find in educational courses a way to get a better quality of life. During the lockdown periods, reducing human contact, information technology plays an important role to enable the access of books by individuals. Cultural factors at a country level also can expand or decrease the interest in information technologies to access electronic books (e-books). Therefore, considering the lockdown limitations during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper tests the effect of culture on e-book popularity among different countries. First, we observed a significant increase in the popularity of e-books during the lockdown period, which reinforces the potential that information technology has to generate different values for individuals and firms during lockdown restrictions. Large countries, and countries with better levels of information technology tend to search more for e-books during the lockdown. Moreover, masculinity and power distance are two dimensions of culture that seem to be related to the changes in the interest of e-books during pandemics. These results highlight new questions that can be explored in further research.

ERP training is a critical success factor in ERP implementation. The current ERP training was largely ineffective and caused user resistance and ERP implementation failure. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the current ERP training approach can accommodate the cultural learning behaviors of end-users. Hofstede's cultural dimensions are employed to explain end-user dissatisfaction toward the current ERP training approach. The research is founded on the idea that different people learn in different ways, and cultural diversity may also influence how they learn and are taught. The current ERP training approach was design based on a Western learning culture and applied without concern for different learning cultures, which may be problematic. To achieve the objective, a qualitative method was adopted in this research. In-depth interviews were conducted with seventy-two end-users from twenty-two companies that had adopted an ERP system and had experienced ERP training in a Thai context during the implementation phase. The findings support the assumption by showing that the current ERP training approach did not accommodate Thai cultural learning behaviors in many areas. The content in this paper is a part of a comprehensive research to propose an ERP training framework to support the variety of end-user learning styles and different cultural learning behaviors.

Korea and Austria: two very different schooling systems, and different approaches to educational reform. Yet for both, the renaissance of aesthetics has great potential. This paper analyses the arguments in Korea and Austria for aesthetic education. For each country, we identified a distinctive philosophical approach to meeting the individual needs and challenges of each country's schooling system through aesthetic education--yielding some fascinating insights and resemblance: in the context of Korea, the American philosopher Jenefer Robinson is taken into account. By contrast, the situation of Austria is connected with the thoughts of the French philosopher Simone Weil. A comparison of these subtle distinctions in thought reveals the intercultural perspective of each country. The final aim of this paper is to highlight the common substance of both approaches and to suggest it as a basis for further intercultural cooperation for the revival of aesthetics within the field of comparative education.

This paper focuses on incorporating Eastern and Western learning perspectives into an American learning environment. The design-based research approach is employed. The following principles influenced by the Eastern and Western perspectives of learning were implemented in course design: providing pre-sequenced materials with high structure and flexible options, valuing group collaboration and individual autonomy, and promoting diverse ideas and critical thinking. Responses from 38 participants show that students from the Western learning environment also favor the pre-sequenced course materials with high structure. Even though they prefer independent and individual work, in an online environment a certain degree of collaborative work is necessary to create interactive dynamics and a sense of presence. Critical thinking in an online environment is not always adequately executed, which does not support the Western learning perspective of favoring critical thinking.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the possibilities offered by religious tourism according to Generation Z's education in values. Both the theoretical and empirical frameworks of the research have focused on Hofstede's Cultural Model, aiming to predict with a certain level of success the influence of cultural and social values on the consumption of religious tourism by the young age segment of Generation Z. A cross-cultural analysis was performed using exponential sampling (Snowball Sampling). All respondents were higher education students. The surveys were carried out using "Google Forms". The results obtained allow the design of a communication plan for the management of Religious Tourism according to the dimensions of Masculinity-Femininity, Individualism-Collectivism, Distance to Power, Risk Aversion, and Long-term Orientation.

In this paper, I argue that current arrangements for school-to-work transitions support in England, now school-based, are designed to contribute towards ensuring the consent of the population for what I refer to as the 'state of insecurity' (Lorey, 2015): the neoliberal relationship between the individual and the state in which insecurity is promoted as freedom. Based on an analysis of policy, the paper argues that the government careers strategy for young people aims to contribute to shaping the precarious subjects which inhabit the state of insecurity, by encouraging them to internalise neoliberal values around freedom and individualism which accompany governmental precarisation. Drawing also on the work of Judith Butler (2011), I suggest that throughout the careers strategy, neoliberalism functions as performative or hegemonic norm which is cited to constitute notions of 'good' or 'normal' labour market arrangements, aspirations and selves. I suggest that this strategy is an example of Berlant's (2011) 'cruel optimism', which constitutes a fantasy of a 'good life' which is in fact likely to be unattainable to many young people, especially the more disadvantaged.

Massive Open Online Courses, also known as MOOCs, figure as the main trend in the international educational market in recent years, characterized by the offer of free, open access and global courses. Although many current studies address issues like design, quality and acceptance of these courses, little attention has been given regarding cultural aspects that could influence this global open learning movement. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate cultural determinants of MOOCs offering, through a crosscountry analysis. To this end, four cultural factors proposed by Hofstede were considered. Through the multivariate regression analysis, we evaluated the relation between these factors and the number of MOOCs offered in each country. The results show that Individualism presents a significant and positive effect on MOOCs offering. Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance and Masculinity dimensions of culture do not present significant effect on MOOCs offering. This means that although individuals from countries with higher rates of Masculinity and lower levels of Uncertainty Avoidance and Power Distance are more likely to attend online courses, universities in these countries are not necessarily the ones offering more MOOCs. The results of the study may be useful to support the implementation of strategies for the diffusion and internationalization of MOOCs.

When I was invited to edit a special issue of "Education Sciences" on the theme of "Moral education and identity", I saw an opportunity both to gain a better understanding of how scholars across a range of disciplines construed the task of moral education in terms of identity and--I can now confess--to defend the claim that moral education, when properly understood, depends upon an account of identity which is quite different from that which dominates the social sciences, the media and popular opinion. My aim here is to provide such an account and, thereby, to suggest how we might construe the challenge of moral education in a world, and at a time, in which self-centered, short-sighted and narrow-minded thinking dominates much of the socio-political landscape. I argue that the dominant view of identity--that our own identities are constituted by those collectives and institutions with which we "identify"--actually reinforces narratives which bind us to tribal perspectives--in national, religious and cultural terms--in which we increasingly see ourselves and others in terms of who is "in" and who is "out". I propose a relational view of identity in which each person sees her/himself as "one among others", where the relationships in question both bind us in familiar and concrete ways to others--i.e., other persons but also other objects in the world--and transcend the boundaries imposed by belonging to this or that nation, religion, culture, or tribe. This idea of what it means to be a person goes hand-in-hand with a framework for moral education which is also both concretely relational and appropriately transcendent. Put briefly, we need to create the conditions in which young people engage one another "dialogically" in taking responsibility for tackling what I term "the Big Questions", including: "What do I/we stand for?", "What/who really matters?", "What kind of society/world do I/we want to live in (and leave for future generations)?", and "What is my place in the world?". (In taking this approach, I aim to address at least some of the questions posed in the original "call for submissions" for this special issue, as outlined at the Special Issue "Moral Education and Identity").

This paper reports on a sequential mixed-methods (quan [right arrow] QUAL) study that explored rural Appalachian teachers' perspectives and pedagogical decisions about Global Citizenship Education (GCE). In phase one, a questionnaire was completed by social studies teachers (n=19) from remote and distant rural high schools located in Central Appalachia across two states. Closed-ended items were analyzed through descriptive statistics. Open-ended items were coded to elicit themes that helped to answer the research questions. In phase two, two participants from the original sample were interviewed to uncover their experiences navigating GCE in their unique community contexts. Findings suggest social studies teachers in rural Appalachia, while not using the exact terminology of global citizenship, support multiple types of global citizenship aims. They tend to perceive their communities as homogenous, isolated, and conservative, which presented both challenges to and stimuli for teaching global curricula. Participants tend to perceive much of their global curricula as contrarian in their communities and, therefore, rely on professional tact and community-based knowledge as rural natives to inform their pedagogical decisions.