By Peter Kell. Common Ground Publishing, Melbourne. 174pp. ISBN: 1863350616 (PB).

Evidence of a continued commitment by educators, researchers, administrators and practioners worldwide to meeting the challenges of teaching for new ways of learning.

Education and training has become a globalised profession involving new partnerships of practitioners, theorists and policy makers.

In this volume educational professionals and academics look at the revolution in teaching and learning emerging from globalisation and the new technologies of learning. This “big picture” provides a broad and challenging interpretation of the context in which teachers, practitioners and theorists must work, and reviews the main challenges facing education in the new millennium.
Challenges such as:

• the changing nature of work—requiring the creation of educational experiences that are the basis of the democratic promise of equality of opportunity;
• the changing nature of citizenship—towards a civic pluralism where linguistic and cultural diversity are seen as assets that can be used by teachers;
• the changing nature of identity—no longer defined by neat boundaries, with people now subject to multiple lifeworlds with multiple layers linked to multiple and overlapping communities;
  are discussed within the context of changing learning cultures that support innovation through practical example, develop repertoires of learning which incorporate diverse views, and an approach to curriculum development that involves multiple voices.

This volume is evidence of a continued commitment by educators, researchers, administrators and practitioners worldwide to meeting the challenges of teaching for new ways of learning.

By Peter Kell, Michael Singh and Ambigapathy Pandian. Peter Lang, New York, 2002. 296 pp. ISBN: 0820456586 (PB)

English seems to be becoming the global language as a result of the massive socio-economic, cultural, and technological changes that have been struggled over since the 1950s. For teachers of English to speakers of other languages and for those involved in the education of such teachers, trying to understand the changes brought by the globalization, commodification, and technologization of English language teaching (ELT) is a major challenge in itself. Given the acceleration in language extinction and knowledge death, developing principled responses to these changes is ridden with significant complications and dangers. Appropriating English explores challenging possibilities for teachers and teacher educators in the transnational ELT market, providing a basis for informing and mobilizing innovations in the business of teaching English language and literacy to speakers of other languages. While the demand for English grows, its effects on other peoples, their languages, and their knowledge are not always positive. Appropriating English adds to the calls for a paradigmatic innovation in the ELT industry. Michael Singh, Peter Kell, and Ambigapathy Pandian offer a new perspective for reinventing the project of globalizing English that situates it within a framework of risk analysis and provides workpoints for making use of multivocal, hybridized Englishes and new digital technologies to help sustain the linguistic diversity of humanity.

Edited by Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel. Routledge, London, 2002. ISBN 0415277922.

Hariti is the ancient Indian goddess of childbirth and women healers, known at one time throughout South and Southeast Asia from India to Nepal and Bali. This book looks at her “daughter” today, female midwives and healers in many different cultures across the region.

It traces the transformation of childbirth in these cultures under the impact of Western biomedical technology, national and international health policies and the wider factors of social and economic change.

By Greg Bankoff and Kathleen Weekley. Ashgate Publishing, London. 2002. 208 pp. ISBN: 0754618714.

This work present evidence and analysis of changes that have taken place to create and reproduce Filipino national identity. It uses the 1998 celebrations to focus on the role of history in this long-term process.

Edited by Michael Zanko. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2002. 752pp. ISBN 1840647507 (HB).

It is becoming increasingly recognised that the way in which human resources are managed is a key source of sustainable competitive advantage for business. Nowhere, Michael Zanko argues, is this seen to be more relevant than in the Asia-Pacific region.