Japan as a Focus Culture for Global Education

The aim of this paper is to examine the implications of China-Nigeria economic/trade relations on international cultural education, through the adoption of Chinese language in Nigerian public and private primary and secondary schools. This study is based on qualitative educational orientation, and the exploratory literature review and descriptive case study designs. Qualitative content analysis was used to elucidate and include citations from the reviewed literature data, and for description of the case studies. Findings of the study show that China-Nigeria economic partnership re-shaped Nigeria’s current language educational policy for inclusive international cultural education; promotion of global, peace, and citizenship education; development and improvement of language instructional centers and personnel; and improving implementation challenges as delivery mechanism on pedagogy, resources, time, and financial cost. The study will incite further research by African countries currently implementing Chinese language and culture curriculum in schools and adult education centers. Confucius Institutes’ research and development units across Africa can undertake research and come out with a unified Chinese language policy for schools and centers across Africa, a means of sustaining China-Africa partnership. China-Nigeria partnership on language and cultural education in primary and secondary schools has not been researched in any conventional research format prior to this article. The paper will be of value in interdisciplinary studies as international, cultural, peace, global, language, history, and economics education; economics; globalization studies; modern history; Chinese and Asian studies; African studies; amongst others.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the three domains of learning within the global citizenship education conceptual dimensions of United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are the cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral, which correspond to the four pillars of learning that are, learning to know, to do, to be, and to live together. This chapter discusses issues related to the socio-emotional dimension of learning to be from selected Asian perspectives that develop a sense of interdependence and common humanity, and promote dialogic, reflective, and transformative learning experiences. It examines the contributions that the Japanese thinker, Daisaku Ikeda’s ideas can make to revisit the notion of dialogue within global citizenship education and dialogic modes of learning.

Traditional folk culture is a manifestation of cultural identity, historical awareness and a means of learning about cultural diversity. The cultural tradition and cultural identity of the Ruthenians in Slovakia are interconnected and are not genetically transmitted. Ruthenians currently no longer live in homogeneous village communities, live under significant assimilative influences of the multicultural environment, their cultural manifestations are absent in the curricula and in the textbooks for primary schools. In the youngest generation, national cultural awareness, the ability to communicate in the Ruthenian language, is disappearing. Artifacts of traditional folk culture can be part of the content of cross-curricular themes: Regional education and traditional folk culture, Multicultural education and Global education. The subjects of the paper are attributes and forms of implementation of elements of Ruthenian folk culture into the educational process of primary school.

Global Education and School Culture

The introduction is divided into four sections. The first part is concerned with the theorizing of humor as a cultural activity. The second one deals with the internet as a media space and locus for trans-individuation and social cocreation. Part three brings these issues to the Latin American context, while part four introduces the contents of this volume. On the whole, our volume studies the role of humor on the internet in Latin American productions, from memes to YouTube videos to Instagram posts and beyond. We are interested in the significance of web-based discourses and narratives in the context of local, national, regional, transnational, and global cultural production, commercial ventures, material culture, audiences, education, government policy, and community practices. If the internet has been an extraordinarily effective medium for social exchanges, and if it has redefined what counts as a social exchange, then we have come to conclude that humor is one of the things that circulate the most throughout internet-based cultures.

The major focus of this ethnographic study is devoted to exploring the confluence of global and local referents of science education in the context of an urban chemistry laboratory classroom taught by a first-generation Filipino-American male teacher. This study investigates encounters between the teacher and four second-generation immigrant female students of color, as well as encounters among the four students. The pervasive spread of neoliberal ideology of accountability and sanctions both globally and locally, particularly in public high schools in the Bronx, New York City fuel situations for teaching and learning science that are encoded with the referents of top-down control. In the face of theses challenges, classroom participants must become aware of productive ways to build solidarity and interstitial culture across salient social boundaries, such as age, gender, ethnicity and role, to create and sustain successful teaching and learning of chemistry. Empirical evidence for solidarity was guided by physical and verbal displays of synchrony, mutual focus, entrainment, and emotional energy, body gestures, and prosody markers. This study shows that classroom participants used a combination of prosody markers to appropriate resources to decrease breaches in face-to-face encounters and, at the same time, create and sustain participation and solidarity to successfully complete an acid–base experiment.

Introduction Food insecurity, the household-level socio-economic condition of having limited or uncertain ability to acquire adequate and safe food, has affected 13.8 million households in the United States in 2020 and is a cofactor in the onset and worsening of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). Areas covered To illustrate the epidemiological evidence linking MASLD with food insecurity, and the potential pathobiological mechanisms underlying their association we searched the PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus database from inception to April 2025 for relevant keywords pertaining to the topic. Finally, we discuss promising areas of future research in this field. Expert opinion Research on food insecurity contributes to the establishment of the biopsychosocial disease model in the MASLD field. Understanding the broader sociocultural factors influencing food choices, which may disproportionately affect certain vulnerable populations, can help shift the focus from individual responsibility to a more comprehensive approach to addressing obesity-related metabolic dysfunction. Future studies should focus on quantifying descriptors of food insecurity more effectively. Additionally, further research is necessary to determine whether and to what extent global cultural advancements and specific education in food security can prevent and reverse the negative outcomes of food insecurity-associated MASLD.

The empirical research investigates the orientation and learning processes of adolescents concerning global issues in different educational settings. How do adolescents create their knowledge about the world? What worldviews and ideas do adolescents have about global perspectives? How do they deal with the complexity of world society? The qualitative-empirical research focuses on the comparative analysis of learning processes in different educational settings, such as school lessons in different subjects, school-based extra-curricular activities and non-formal youth work outside school. The main topic of the paper is a case study of a group of female students who run World Shop as student company. The objective is to describe a specific learning culture at a gymnasium, a German grammar school, and the learning processes which occur within a certain learning arrangement. In this context, the student company is important both as an extra-curricular project and because issues which occur in its work setting are integrated into different school lessons. The integration of Global Education in school culture results from the presence of the student company in everyday life at school and the combination of informal learning processes within the peer milieu and formal systematic instruction in school lessons. The research reveals the great potential for the desired acquisition of competencies and knowledge. This in turn demonstrates the extent that student learning is encouraged by a particular school and learning culture.

Chapter 9 explores the roles of Sino–foreign education partnerships (SFEP) within China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in particular, how it has been shifted from a strategic tool to reform and upgrade China’s domestic higher education sector, to becoming a diplomatic instrument for building connections between China and the regions and countries along the BRI routes. The history of the development of SFEP reveals how policy and regulation have evolved. The shifting paradigm of the Chinese government, through its MOE (Ministry of Education), in regulating SFEP provides a window into the grand transformation of China’s narrative towards its position in the global education hierarchy. China is shifting from the follower/importer of “advanced foreign educational programs,” to a proactive player that builds a platform and framework for educational collaboration in the world. Now, China is becoming an initiator/exporter of its own educational programs and culture along the belt and road.

L'objectif des auteurs de cet article est double. Il s'agit d'une part de presenter une etude exploratoire sur les tendances actuelles temoignant de l'emergence d'un nouvel activisme non gouvernemental dans le champ de l'education et d'autre part de dresser un cadre analytique afin d'evaluer l'importance de cet activisme, en elaborant des concepts bases sur les recherches ayant porte sur les nouveaux mouvements sociaux et les debats theoriques actuels a propos de la societe civile mondiale.