Tuesday 27 March 2012

GCES conference in Bahrain 23-3-2012 (gulf comparative education society)

Day one.
The minister said his statement. 2005 was a landmark. They establish btc. Bahrain poly, improve higher education, improve technical and vocational education, establish qaa . Also the improvements in schools covered 50% of the schools

We didn't reach our goal due to the dynamic nature of bahrain. It requires continuos improvement and review to meet the needs of society and individuals.

Dr Ali Ibrahim the president of GCES (established in 2008)
Exchange of ideas and best practices. Adapting global innovation.

Sheikh Hisham bin ali Alkhalifa ministry of education bahrain
When bahrain did the TIMSS they found that they aare much below the average in the world. They engaged undiscovered and EDB.
Singapore, Finland and new Zealand used for comparison. Made changes to the school management and monitoring. School improvement programme. 204 are the number of schools in bahrain.

Is bahrain complying with unesco millennium education reforms. Yep, there are improvements

David guile university of london
Creative economy vs knowledge economy.
STEM (science, technology engineering and mathematics) and non STEM need to be rethought of and explored.
Knowledge economy was the mentioned by Peter Drucker. Also Bell developed  the concepts of knowledge economy. (notes in a piece of paper)

Education reforms in bahrain. First panel

Ian haslam the ceo of btc
Ontario changes from a stagnant system to a dynamic system

Hanada thomure was here talking about arabic language. Great to see her after a long time.

21st century skills!
Knowledge building
Problem solving and innovation
Skilled communication
collaboration
self regulation
use of ICT for learning

Where did the C came from in ICT? Stevenson report 1997 he put the C in IT

In UK within 10 years cost 7.5 million pounds for ICT
Large capital injection in technology in schools in UK
But only 1:6 schools are really using ICT in the classrooms.

Schools are trying to imbed 21st century skills (king Hamad schools in bahrain that uses technology heavily)

Knowledge building proff. Wing Lai to relook at his papers


Second day:
Mark Bray:
World council of comparative education societies(wcces)
It has 40 member societies including the GCES which ran this conference.
The next world congress will be in Argentina June 2013 See if I can submit my research to that conference

Next year GCES is going to be in Oman

Nice word comparative educationalists

The cube of comparison taking the various aspects of comparisons.

BOOK comparative education email him and he will give us a electronic copy. Mbray@hku.hk

We have a tremendous natural laboratory here to compare things. For example UAE has many systems of education. That will be a good way to research.

In research we tend to be dominated by:
-traditions in the choice of countries to be compared
-Prejudiced tending to look at more advanced countries
-Languages we can only read in languages with which we are familiar
-Technology what is available on the internet?

Conclusions:
The gulf countries are themselves are very interesting group for comparisons

Scholars and practitioners in the GCES can contribute to a wider debates as well as learn from them.

Units of comparison must be taken with care and awareness.

And the field of comparative education is a useful domain which has much to contribute to other fields.

second speaker Thuwayba Al Barwani from SQU
Very depressing state we are, as the gulf has no mentionable research or publishable research if compared to the rest of the world.

Consumers of knowledge rather than producers  well said

The innovation sustainability  wheel
Research, vision, communication network, accountability, resources mobilisation, participation, professional development, reward system, institutionalisation,

She compared the students before the implementation of the new educational investments and after. And there was no change?
What happened to the money?

The innovation we focused on the infrastructure rather than the students. R and d is the weakest link
These innovation lacked evidence based justifications. Lacked rigorous assessment of their impact on student learning.

Education reforms in the UAE
Research on what teachers think about the reforms.

Change can be defined as the movement from one state to another.

Preserving the culture and tradition a d importing the curricula? In our schools.
Researcher used interviews as if she used questionnaires these will never be replied to. Basically the teachers are not happy about the change as they don't believe that they were given Enough time to practice it


Private tutoring in UAE:- mainly boys take private tutoring and it certainly pays to have a business for private tutoring

Most important thing I heard is that there are more females than male participating in education. Also $80 million is spent on foundation programmes every year in UAE only.

The main change in the field of education today is that there is no university that teaches a degree in isolation, knowledge is transgressive (everyone in the team works in the same place) and apprentices are taught to be creative, and that too doesn't depend on the level of study, people these days should not think that others will steal their work and ideas, as intellectual property is maintained.
STEM (the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are taught in a way that communication skills are induced as well as entrepreneurial practices.  Doctors and others in the health profession are also taught to indulge in the community health.  There isn't such thing as professional or vocational, education had changed the way subjects are taught or delivered. So scientists are asked to change the context/pedagogy/work practices to suit the learner and link work and education, link the qualification and work. Also pedagogical creativity is introduced, where we teach young people to be inquisitive and urge them to use their imagination. So we need to decontextualise learning and education.

These are the notes of the conference. I tried to summarise the important stuff. Basically what I noted is that there is huge amount of research that we can conduct in the gulf. Trends and statistics are available and they are up for grabs, so us the researchers can pick and choose, why don't we?

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