Trains, Buses, and Basic Skills: Learning in—and from—a Union Education Program for Transit Workers

This article begins with a brief history of two decades of U.S. workplace basic skills efforts that laid a foundation of goals, content, policies, and practices for subsequent worker education programs. It then draws on program records to present a case study of a work-related basic skills program in the New York City public transit workers’ union in the early 2000s. It describes why and how the program was begun, learners served, jobs focused on, stakeholders involved, practices used, and shorter and longer term results. It concludes with reflections on how stakeholders can use worker education to serve workers, their families and communities, employers, and unions while supporting economic and societal renewal.

Integrative processes in education: new challenges for Belarus

The article examines the main problems faced by Belarusian higher education in the framework of internationalisation over the past five years, analyses the integration of Belarus into the international educational space. This period was marked by new challenges – the process of entering the European Higher Education Area was complicated by the difficult fulfilment of a number of requirements, and in the Eurasian Economic Union education is not among the priority areas. Inbound mobility flows have declined due to external factors. The current situation requires a comprehensive solution that includes strategic and tactical changes in the educational sphere. The article proposes ways of solving new problems of higher education.

Teacher preparation reforms in Kosovo

Education is the key supporter of society, yet at the same time it is the main challenge to hu-manity and society. The need for change is incontestable in all fi elds, including that of education.Education in Kosovo has taken a long, challenging and extremely diffi cult journey. Such challenging situations are a result of the low level of economic and social development in Ko-sovo. Today, education in Kosovo is considered to have made signifi cant progress as a result of fundamental reforms of the education system towards standardization to the European Union education system.This paper aims to analyze the historical, political and economic infl uence on the edu-cation system in Kosovo in general and the teacher education in particular, on its course to-wards implementation of the objectives of the Bologna Process and integration into the Euro-pean Higher Education Area (EHEA).

Blockchain Technology Reshaping Education

This chapter aims to analyse the potentialities of blockchain in education. It is an exploratory study focused on blockchain technology applied to European Union education policy. To achieve this goal, a bibliometric analysis was done to identify studies already done on blockchain applied to education, and the main research items studied and how they can contribute to policy definition. The research question of this study is: What kind of contributions for policy emerge from the research that has been made on blockchain in education? The main findings are focused on getting a diploma, on the assessment, and the formative evaluation, but also related to the learning process in a distributive way to facilitate the educational management process.

Transnational Competence: A Transformative Tool? A Comparison of German and Irish Political Trade Union Education Programs

In the literature on cross-border labor action, labor education is seen as an important factor to improving it. This article therefore first reconstructs an innovative pedagogic concept, transformative Transnational Competence, to advance transnational labor education and action. Although initially developed for multinational firms and international organizations, this pedagogical concept is promising for labor, as it also focuses on emotional issues that are central to collective action. Subsequently, we use our reconstructed concept as a yardstick to assess labor education programs of public and private sector unions in Ireland and Germany. Our study shows that all unions face similar difficulties leading to rather little attention to transnational labor education, regardless of the very different labor relations landscapes in which they are operating. Hence, unions’ difficulties in relation to transnational labor education and action cannot be due to distinct national or sectorial factors, such as labor relations systems and different amounts of resources allocated to labor education. Instead, transnational labor education is facing challenges that are common in all cases, notably the tension between utilitarian and emancipatory orientations of union leaders, educators, and members involved in labor education programs.