‘Not all of us can be nurses’: proposing and resisting entrepreneurship education in rural Lesotho

Education in Lesotho, as in much of the world, has historically held out the promise of a ‘better future’. Success in school and the achievement of academic credentials were expected to lead to a secure future in the formal economy. With increasing school enrolment and growing youth unemployment, such futures are now illusory for most youth. In 2009, Lesotho introduced a radical new curriculum that aims to instil in young people skills and attitudes for entrepreneurship, enabling them to build their own futures in an increasingly uncertain world. Based on 9-months’ ethnographic fieldwork in two primary schools and their surrounding rural communities, we trace how the new curriculum is being delivered in schools and how it is intervening in children’s aspirations. Despite lessons intended to prepare them for livelihoods in the informal economy, young Basotho prize the security of a salaried job as a nurse, teacher, police officer, or soldier. We frame this contradiction in relation to concepts of doxic and habituated aspirations, concluding that due to the way schools deliver entrepreneurship education it both fails to displace long-standing doxic aspirations to professional careers, and fails to engage with young people’s habituated expectations of rural livelihoods.ESR

The reinvented music teacher - researcher in the making : Conducting educational development through intercultural collaboration

Music educators working in cross-cultural contexts are faced with both challenges and possibilities, often finding themselves in need of multidimensional re-invention. This chapter focuses on teacher-researchers, contextualising them within the frame of institutional change and intercultural music teacher education. Taking an active role in educational development and regenerating usual patterns of action in music-education institutions sets various challenges as well as opportunities for the teacher-researchers involved. In this chapter we reflect on experiences through two intercultural collaborations: (1) Global Visions Through Mobilizing Networks: Co-Developing Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Finland, Israel and Nepal (a research sub-project in Nepal), and (2) A collaboration between Malmö Academy of Music and Vietnam National Academy of Music under a project Supporting Vietnamese Culture for Sustainable Development. We reflect on these processes through core concepts of affective actions and micropolitics. Our aim is to contribute to knowledge building in the field of sustainable institutional change aiming for globally appropriate music teacher education

The Research Role of Vietnam’s Universities

This chapter provides an overview of the research role of Vietnamese universities. It sets university research activities within the context of Vietnam's public sector research organisation and recent industrial development, paying particular attention to research funding, research personnel, research outputs and postgraduate training. While the Vietnamese government has set ambitious targets to enhance research and development (R&D) and university research as part of its overall objective to achieve industrialised country status by 2020, university research capacity is severely limited, although small numbers of universities in recent years have made impressive progress