An Educational Management of Alternative Schools in Northeastern Thailand: Multi-cases Study

AbstractThe aim of this research is to study situations thus propose guidelines of educational management of alternative schools in Northeastern Thailand. Research samples included two alternative schools as a multi-cases study. Instruments comprised of a semi-structured interview questions, observation note and participatory and non-participatory observation record. Triangulation technique is used for reliability verification and validity of data before analyzing it by content analysis method. Finally, data is summarized by applying descriptive approach. The results revealed that the situations of educational management as such: (i) the policies and goals are determined to focus on the vision of moral, ethic, knowledge and life skills, right and freedom of education, being happy, forming a justice community, loving a local community. Instructional management emphasized on an integrated and flexible curriculum, student-centered instruction, helping students to solve their problems, participation of community and multi-disciplinary sectors and developing the potential of teachers and administrators using contemplative concept; (ii) policies and goals are driven by focusing on participatory networks of parents and multi-disciplinary sectors in order to provide lifelong education management and student development; (iii) learning management activity pattern are focusing on contemplative concept application, informal education, critical thinking activities with parent and community and psychological and life skills development program. In addition, the proposed guidelines are schools are encouraged to accept fully qualified students, alternative education should be managed concurrently with the regular system and all the related sectors should participate in management

Evolving The Idea: Designing teams for detailed design

The detailed design phase is critical in maintaining the design concept whilst considering aesthetic ventures in light of time, cost, and buildability prior to implementation. During this phase, design components are connected, solutions are tested and methods of implementation finalised. Design becomes a truly interdisciplinary activity. In addition, the challenge of sustainability requires built environment professionals to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries if effective solutions are to be realised. However, there is currently limited research on how the behaviour of teams affects subsequent products and outcomes. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of this link. An experiment was carried out using single discipline and multi-disciplinary teams with differing collective personality characteristics to test whether it is essential to have the right personalities in the design team as well as the correct disciplines. Observation of design workshops provided the necessary data for analysis of how these environments influenced design outcomes. An evolutionary analogy was applied to map and understand the way that ideas behave during each of the four design processes. The teams’ performances and design outcomes are then analysed to draw some tentative conclusions about how design teams may be formed and managed during the detailed design phase

Safe environments for innovation: developing a new multidisciplinary masters programme

This paper outlines the research and resulting curriculum design activities conducted as a collaborative venture between Northumbria University’s School of Design, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences and Newcastle Business School undertaken in the creation of a new postgraduate programme in Multidisciplinary Design Innovation. With the area of multidisciplinary innovation education practice being comparatively new, the research conducted in support of the programme development was undertaken through a series of industry-linked pilot-study projects conducted with Philips, Hasbro, Lego and Unilever. The key finding from this research was an understanding of the importance of freeing students from different disciplines of the inhibitions that limit creativity in collaborative settings. This paper gives an account of the pilot studies and the associated learning derived from them, the collaborative development of the programme and approaches in curriculum and assessment design adopted in order to create what we call ‘safe environments for innovation’; environments designed to free students of these evident inhibitions

Safe Environments for Innovation: the development of a new multidisciplinary masters programme

In September 2007, three schools at Northumbria University came together in collaboration to create a Masters Programme in Multidisciplinary Design Innovation (MDI). The lead school was the School of Design working together with the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences (CEIS) and the Newcastle Business School (NBS). This innovation was in response to an emerging understanding within the School of Design of the value of ‘Design-Thinking’ as a multi-disciplinary activity (developed and reinforced through a series of under-graduate pilot projects) and the Cox Review of Creativity in Business: building on the UK’s strengths, which was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, at the time of the 2005 Budget (Cox, 2005). (Design-Thinking is an approach to viewing business and organisational situations from a more interpretative perspective than that of traditional business analysis (Lester et al,1998)) The programme was launched in September 2008

Are schools panoptic?

Schools are often understood by social researchers as panoptic spaces, where power is exercised through constant surveillance and monitoring. In this paper, I use Foucault’s notorious account of the Panopticon as a point of departure for a detailed empirical investigation of the specificities of surveillance in schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in a primary school, I argue that how surveillance actually operated in this context diverged from the panoptic programme in two crucial ways: surveillance was (i) discontinuous rather than total, and therefore open to resistance and evasion, and (ii) exercised through sound and hearing as much as through vision