Why we need our world history teacher to be a Martian

‘In space, race doesn’t matter, nationality doesn’t matter. In space, you see the world as a globe and you don’t see the boundaries.’ Maggie Aderin Pocock, space scientist Figure 1:...

Access denied: Education in rural India during Covid-19

Covid-19, education and educational research

The disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are borne disproportionately by already disadvantaged social groups. When all educational institutions across India shifted to online and distance...

Education during a pandemic: Lessons from the United Arab Emirates

Covid-19, education and educational research

Even before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic I was wondering, as a teacher and researcher, whether technology and digital platforms would replace teachers and traditional classrooms in the short...

Collaborative online international learning (COIL) in UK higher education: Reloaded

The concept of ‘collaborative online international learning’ (COIL) has been conceived as an educational approach that provides students from different geographical and linguacultural...

The BERA Annual Conference goes digital

The year 2020 will be remembered as one that brought many changes to both our personal and professional lives. It also gave us the opportunity to reflect on what is important to us: visits to our...

Why open educational resources are failing to widen access to education

Open educational resources (OERs) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that are freely available in the public domain. Current discussions about OERs are...

The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2020

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A warm and wintery ‘welcome’ to all our readers, wherever you may be. This time last year I wished all of you a seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’, blissfully unaware of how 2020 would play out. Today,...

Who is Australian? Textbooks continue to exclude Black, Indigenous and people of colour from Australianness

Both the explicit and implicit messages that schoolchildren receive from their textbooks matter. My research focuses on race and national belonging and how these have changed from the 1950s to the...

National curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil

In an article recently published in the Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, we compared how national curriculum policy, in Norway and Brazil, adopted the global logic of...

Evaluation of an immersive virtual learning environment for operator training in mechanical and plant engineering using video analysis

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) refers to computer-generated real-time, three-dimensional and interactive environments. Their use is associated with diverse potentials, such as spatially and...

Curriculum integration can support the development of powerful knowledge in education

On 20th March 2015, an article published by the Independent (Garner, 2015) claimed that Finnish schools had scrapped school subjects and replaced them with topics. Ever since then Finland has been...

Empathy and engagement from a distance: Three learning delivery options in an uncharted terrain

Uncharted terrain: Teaching and learning in higher education for times of uncertainty

My understanding of the uncharted terrain that ensued from January 2020 in China and March 2020 the world over is that human in-person mobility and interaction outside homes has been completely...