Educating for the 21st Century: Perspectives, Policies and Practices from Around the World

All over the world, governments, policymakers, and educators are advocating the need to educate students for the 21st first century. This book provides insights into what this means and the ways 21st century education is theorized and implemented in practice. The first part, “Perspectives: Mapping our futures-in-the-making,” uncovers the contradictions, tensions and processes that shape 21st century education discourses. The second part, “Policies: Constructing the future through policymaking,” discusses how 21st century education is translated into policies and the resulting tensions that emerge from top-down, state sanctioned policies and bottom-up initiatives. The third part, “Practices: Enacting the Future in Local Contexts,” discusses on-the-ground initiatives that schools in various countries around the world enact to educate their students for the 21st century. This volume includes contributions from leading scholars in the field as well as educators from schools and those working with schools.

Table of Contents:
Part I Perspectives: Mapping Our Futures-In-The-Making.- Chapter 1 Today's Children, Tomorrow's Creatives: Living, Learning and Earning in the Conceptual Age.- Chapter 2 Digitalizing Tradition: Staging Postcolonial Elite School Identities in the Online Environment.- Chapter 3 "Players in the World": Action for Intercultural Competence in Classroom Pedagogy.- Chapter 4 Deliberating Values for Global Citizenship: A Study of Singapore's Social Studies and Hong Kong's Liberal Studies Curricula.- Chapter 5 Signature Pedagogies in Global Competence Education: Understanding Quality Teaching Practice.- Chapter 6 Voices from the Field: What can we learn from Leaders of Diverse schools in Ontario Canada, Tensions and Possibilities?.- Chapter 7 Education for a Better World: The Struggle for Social Justice in the 21st Century.- Part II Policies: Constructing the Future through Policymaking.- Chapter 8 Global Leadership Training for Higher School Students in Japan: Are Global Leadership Competencies Trainable, Universal, and Measurable?.- Chapter 9 Exploring Top-down and Bottom-up Cosmopolitan Traces in Schools on the West Coast of the United States.- Chapter 10 Exploring the Transformative Potential of a Global Education Framework: A Case-study of a School District in the United States.- Chapter 11 For Whom is K-12 Education: A Critical Look into Twenty-first Century Educational Policy and Curriculum in the Philippines.- Chapter 12 Preparing Students for the 21st Century: A Snapshot of Singapore's Approach.- Chapter 13 Towards 21st Century Education: Success Factors, Challenges and Renewal of Finnish Education.- Chapter 14 Imagining the Cosmopolitan Global Citizen? Parents' Choice of International Schools in Kuwait.- Chapter 15 Being a 'Good Cuban': Socialist Citizenship Education in a Globalized Context.- Part III Practices: Enacting the Future in Local Contexts.- Chapter 16 Teaching Global Citizenship Education with Empathy Model and Experiential Learning: Case Study of Action Research on Developing Empathy in a Hong Kong Secondary School.- Chapter 17 Reimagine Lakeshore: A School Division Change Initiative for the 21st Century.- Chapter 18 A Case Study of Curriculum Innovation for Global Capacities: One Response to the Call of the 21st Century.- Chapter 19 MEDIAtion: Flexible literacy terms, communication and 'viral' learning in 9-12 classrooms.- Chapter 20 Prototype for a 21st Century Class: A School-wide Initiative to Engage the Digital Native.- Chapter 21 Preparing Students for a New Global Age: Perspectives from a Pioneer 'Future School' in Singapore.- Chapter 22 Problematizing 'Global Citizenship' in an International School.- Chapter 23 Being Open to the Other: K-12 Teachers' Multimodal Reflections on Hong Kong Curricula.- Chapter 24 A New Wave of Learning: Get Started with Innovation!.

About the Author :
Suzanne S. Choo is assistant professor in the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her most recent book, Reading the world, the globe, and the cosmos: Approaches to teaching literature for the twenty-first century, received the 2014 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association. She co-founded Studies in Educational Innovation at Teachers College, Columbia University and is associate editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Education.
Deb Sawch is an independent education consultant who supports educators striving for whole-school approaches to 21st century education. She serves as a research/PD advisor to the Transcend group, a non-profit school-design organization. She currently teaches the Global Competence Certificate Program at Teachers College, Columbia University where she also co-founded Studies in Educational Innovation and the Global Learning Alliance. She chairs the Teach for America-CT Advisory Board.
Alison Villanueva is co-founder of the Global Learning Alliance, an international consortium of university and school partnerships committed to 21st century education. She co-founded and co-directed Studies in Educational Innovation, a center devoted to innovative education practices. She is currently a principal with the Danbury Public Schools in Connecticut and adjunct assistant professor at the department of Educational Leadership at Sacred Heart University.
Ruth Vinz is the Endowed Morse Professor of Teacher Education and professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of thirteen books for educators and her book, Composing A Teaching Life, received the Richard Meade award for outstanding research published in English education. In 2002 she founded The Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), an incubator for new ideas in professional education including the Student Press Initiative, Secondary Literacy Initiative, and Global Learning Alliance that serves members around the globe.