FIRE, Volume 01, Issue 01 (2014)

The purpose of the present paper is to identify the main challenges facing Kenya's public higher education system and to propose plausible and, concrete steps policy makers and educational leaders can take to address those challenges to ensure the country's higher education system prepares the human capital, which is necessary for the construction of a knowledge economy.

Universities have come to be viewed as essential in accelerating a country's knowledge economy in order to maintain its global competitive edge. However, as it currently stands, the Global North governs much of the output of knowledge production through research and scholarship. International partnerships between universities offer the opportunity to bridge this gap by offering new avenues through which these institutions can better prepare students for the globalized world and build institutional capacity.

The training of teachers of West Africa is carried out by the Academy of Rouen (France) and organized around an annual training plan approved by the AEFE. Each trainer only supervises twenty teachers for 5 days. Teachers from eight countries (Mauritania, Cape Verde, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso), come to Dakar for a week. We have been asked four times tn Dakar (Senegal) to provide training for teachers of West Africa. It is all about being trained in order to resolve reading difficulties for students using our scientific research<strong>.

Increased interest in leadership preparation and development is based on the fact that school leaders can make a difference in both the effectiveness and efficiency of schooling. Symptomatic of weak management systems, more than 300 secondary schools experienced turbulence in Kenya between the months of May and August in 2011 due to mismanagement resulting in the destruction of property worth millions of shillings. Various theories and models have been constructed to explain the leadership functions and suggest different approaches to leadership.

BOOK REVIEW: Cuervo, H., & Wyn, J. (2012). Young People Making it Work: Continuity and Change in Rural Places. Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press. 208 pages, ill., ISBN: 9780522860979.

The editors would like to express their sincere thanks to Heather Simoneau at Lehigh University for her invaluable support and direction in moving FIRE forward, and to the members of FIRE's advisory board for their input, questions, and support in both developing this introduction as well as shaping the vision for what this journal can and will become. All errors are the responsibility of the editors alone.

The inaugural issue of FIRE: Forum for International Research in Education begins a new chapter in the scholarly and professional discussion of comparative and international education research, policy, and practice. Comparative and international education research has become increasingly isolated from educational policymaking as well as school- and classroom-level decisionmaking as the amount and diversity of research in the field has grown.