Bhutan: educational challenges in the land of the Thunder Dragon

The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where images of magical splendor obscure its challenges, provides a viewpoint from which to understand the contradictions that emerging economies face as they move towards mass education. Isolated from the outside world in every sense except for the mythologies that surround it, Bhutan is attempting to move from a basic agrarian societal framework as found in the feudal 1800s into the whirl of a technologically savvy twenty-first century. The demands for such a transition require educators and politicians at all levels to rethink the role of schooling and what it means to be educated in this country at this point in time. To provide guidance, the government set up a special task force, the Royal Education Council, to devise a curriculum and pedagogy that would equip young people with the skills to move into the future without forsaking their past. This ethnographic piece of research explores the challenges faced by teachers and principals in nine designated Beacon schools as they grapple within a historical context which views teachers as labourers, working under difficult conditions with minimal support. The work ends with the question of whether mass education might in fact move this country away from the traditional values that are perceived as making Bhutan special, if not unique. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Experimental Ramet Aggregation In The Clonal Plant Agrostis Stolonifera Reduces Its Competitive Ability

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117189/1/ecy20058651358.pd

The dynamics of regionalization in contemporary Asia-Pacific higher education

In this concluding chapter, we seek to articulate and tie together some of the dominant themes articulated in the preceding chapters. The first part frames these in terms of three “fundamental” observations about the context(s) within which regionalization is taking place in the Asia-Pacific region. In the two subsequent parts, we weave these observations through various other themes established in earlier chapters