Attracting 40,000 teacher applicants each year, West Bank’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education reports that few of those candidates are competent in the delivery of student-centered teaching and learning approaches. Recognizing that qualified teachers are essential to the continued growth of its education system, the Palestinian Authority directed MOEHE to aggressively pursue new, innovative avenues to develop a high-quality teacher workforce ensuring that all students receive a world-class education.
A growing body of scholarship investigates the experiences of spiritually and religiously minoritized populations, such as black Muslim men. Findings from these studies highlight the ways students engage with campus support services, and their decisions concerning religious stylings and representations. A second line of inquiry examines students who occupy multiple marginalized social locations. With a few notable exceptions, much of empirical research on college students focuses on the realities of Muslim women.
A nation’s universities can play a central role in confronting challenges of social and economic development. But global progress can outpace the capacity of some universities to adequately prepare their graduates to meet those challenges. This disadvantage can hinder a country’s ability to compete internationally and provide opportunities for its citizens.
In Malawi, a nation of nearly 20 million in southeast Africa, more than 80,000 students graduate from secondary schools each year with no access to higher education. Multiple impediments are responsible for this lack of opportunity, including systemic societal barriers that confront females and students with disadvantages; the latter including orphans, persons with disabilities and students from rural areas served by an inadequate system of poorly resourced community schools. Similarly, institutions and stakeholders in the economy have significant capacity challenges to overcome.
In their Framework for K–12 Science Standards, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine define scientific knowledge as “a particular kind of knowledge with its own sources, justifications, ways of dealing with uncertainties and agreed-on levels of certainty.” Yet traditional school science emphasizes discoveries in their final forms, with little opportunity for students to experience how knowledge is developed — including the importance of uncertainty.
Latinos make up the youngest and fastest-growing demographic in the U.S. but remain underrepresented in STEM professions — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. According to the National Council of La Raza, while Latinos make up nearly 20 percent of the American workforce, they account for less than 10 percent of workers in STEM-related fields. Similarly, the U.S. Department of Education reports that while Latinos accounted for 16 percent of the U.S. population in 2010, they earned only 8 percent of all certificates and degrees awarded in STEM fields between 2009 and 2010.
PhD students and graduates produce many of the patent applications and patents that make the U.S. a global leader in technological innovation. This is particularly true of engineering PhDs, who are responsible for the highest number of patents in that field. In recent years, the number of engineering PhDs entering industry careers has increased, while those pursuing academic careers decreased.
In the U.S., women are substantially underrepresented in career fields based in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A 2009 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce found that, while women make up nearly half of the American workforce, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs. The gender disparity is even more glaring in Egypt, where women account for only 26 percent of the overall workforce, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In Arizona, 43 percent of children under the age of 5 are Hispanic. Many of those live in homes where Spanish is the primary language. Yet when they begin to attend school they’re expected to read, write and learn in English, and meet performance goals alongside other children for whom English is the first language.
In recent years, TWI programs — two-way, dual-language immersion — have grown exponentially across the U.S.; some with a mission of equity for language minority students, others with the goal of giving all students an edge in a multilingual, global economy. Language scholars celebrate this expansion, but many worry that programs created under this new logic are failing to meet the needs of language minority students, thereby perpetuating inequities.