The culminating experience of the student teaching internship provides the preservice teacher (PST) a unique opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge to practice. It is a time to develop critical thinking skills, pedagogy and practical knowledge learned from their courses (Rhoads et al., 2013; Turvey & Hayler, 2017). A quality internship…

The lack of adequate numbers of people working with older adults in an aging society implies the potential of attracting students from other disciplines to the field. This qualitative study explored the experiences of 52 Chinese psychology students who took a gerontological psychology course designed to prepare them for aging-related careers. As…

In this interview Craig Calhoun talks about universities, the Humanities and his own research. Universities reinvent themselves in the face of societal and technological change. In the midst of this change, however, universities are charged with maintaining old ideals, with informing the public and creating opportunities for human development. The…

The objective of the article is to determine the importance of students' identity development and self-development in the course of vocational training and identification of opportunities that the educational environment of a university for humanities may provide to develop the identity of subjects of vocational training. The leading methods of…

Student-created self-portraits expand the possibilities for understanding how students' complex identities, relationships, and epistemologies shape their self-authoring potential. An illustrative student self-portrait demonstrates how this method reveals the nuances of development. "I like writing, but I can't express myself the…

Historically, research examining graduate student socialization has attended to the structure of the socialization process, rather than how individuals interpret it. This qualitative study explored how 21 student affairs master's degree candidates made sense of surprises that emerged during their initial socialization experiences. The findings…

This paper explores students' non-economic motives for attending university. Drawing on the results of a tri-national survey involving online questionnaires and email interviews with education students at English, German and Portuguese universities, it compares and discusses the extent to which the participants are motivated by a number of…

For undocumented students to go to college, they need to be highly resourceful and exceptionally motivated--and that might not be enough. Society confers numerous barriers on undocumented students regarding higher education attainment. Most undocumented students, who typically come from families living in poverty, cannot afford the high cost of a…

The main objective of this study is to identify the determinants that influence user demand for lifelong learning in institutions of higher education. Qualitative methodology was used to develop an instrument and a quantitative approach was used for the remainder of the study. After a literature review and in-depth interviews with experts in…

In this article, we utilise recent theorising on praxis and educational development to explore how academics in universities can foster public, institutional and more personal development, even as they are challenged by what are sometimes described as more "managerial" and "neoliberal" conditions. The research draws upon a…

The study looked back on the one-year experience of the first group of peer mentors of a university at northern Taiwan. Twelve peer mentors (six males and six females; with an average age of 21.45) took part in the study. A qualitative phenomenological approach and in-depth interviews were adopted. The results showed that participants deemed the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the benefits of higher education in mid-life from the perspective of life course agency. Studies concerning the benefits of degree-oriented higher education have been mainly conducted using survey questionnaires and quantitative methods. In order to gain a more comprehensive picture, this qualitative…

Service-learning practitioners design community engagement activities to affect students in powerful and even transformative ways. This qualitative study explores the long-term impacts (3-16 years after graduation) of participation in a senior-level service-learning course. Through interviews with 20 randomly selected participants, the researchers…

Theories of college student and adult intellectual development have shown that learning to interpret, evaluate, and construct knowledge evolves in a developmentally predictable fashion, and have offered explanations for the difficulties some students face when asked to make their own decisions (Baxter Magolda, 1992; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger,…

This study investigates how doctoral students perceive research work in the context of their own PhD projects. Thirty-two students from a Finnish university were interviewed, representing three disciplines: medicine, natural sciences and behavioural sciences. Their conceptions of research varied in terms of describing research as "a job to…