Barabbas has a small role in the Gospels, but his presence influences the way the Christian story has been told and received over the centuries. While he is mentioned in all four Gospels during the account of Jesus' Roman trial, he never appears "on-stage" in the Gospels. His main purpose is to exculpate the Romans of responsibility for…

In an era of profound antisemitism, it is essential that higher education leaders and campus communities provide additional, direct support to Jewish students. In this space, we introduce recent literature on Jewish identity expressions and campus climates for bolstering Jewish appreciation in hopes of catalyzing necessary conversations with…

Online and blended learning (OBL) overemphasize the process of creating artifacts, producing strategies, or otherwise utilizing a "making" orientation in education. As an alternative to this making-orientation, we offer a model for relational course design founded in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. We examine an…

As educators, we each hold privileged and minoritized identities which can be leveraged to navigate difficulties across difference. In the article below, we discuss how working in coalition across professional relationships might help educators navigate intergroup tensions on campus. We offer strategies for higher education professionals to…

Focusing on the work of the Interfaith Leadership in Higher Education Initiative, a partnership between AAC&U and Interfaith Youth Core, this publication showcases institutional efforts to broaden, deepen, and strengthen commitments to interfaith teaching and learning. [Foreword by Lynn Pasquerella.]

When pondering how to contribute to this special issue, the author was startled to realize that their career, the journal's history, and the development of the discipline--rhetoric and composition/writing studies (RCWS)--had run in parallel for 50 years. This essay tells a story of how "generation" came to matter in rhetoric and…

The article acknowledges the limits of the categories of similarity and difference in undergraduate comparative religion courses. To challenge these limitations, including the potential for dualistic or "us/them" thinking, several pedagogical attempts to increase relationality in Christian-Muslim courses are explored. Relational methods…

Surveys with rating scales are often used in higher education research to measure student learning and development, yet testing and reporting on the longitudinal psychometric properties of these instruments is rare. Rasch techniques allow scholars to map item difficulty and individual aptitude on the same linear, continuous scale to compare…

Higher education professionals often are tasked with providing evidence to stakeholders that programs, services, and practices implemented on their campuses contribute to student success. Furthermore, in the absence of a solid base of evidence related to effective practices, higher education researchers and practitioners are left questioning what…

The geographic studies of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944) offered an understanding of human activities on Earth's surface that differed from the geographic theories and practices of his Euro-American predecessors and Japanese contemporaries. With his rejection of geographic determinism and its imperialist/colonial orientation he sought to…

In recent years universities have given increasing attention to religious pluralism on campus. There exists potential for different fields in U.S. higher education to partner toward strategic goals for religious understanding. This conceptual article finds that while key stakeholders are aware of each other's work, it is largely uncoordinated,…

Forging a sense of community for the Chinese nation is the main line of ethnic affairs in the new era, and also a hot topic of research in theories about the Chinese nation today. The scientific connotations of education about forging a sense of community for the Chinese nation includes three aspects: conceptual content, theoretical content, and…

Primary and secondary school education holds dual implications in forging a sense of community for the Chinese nation. Primary and secondary school education is not only the main battlefield for the normalization of education for identification with the community of the Chinese nation, but also an important field for promoting interactions,…

This article sketches the scaffolded three-phase "My Story" assignment, which unfolds over the course of a semester, is embedded in the context of local lived interreligious encounter, and aims at developing interfaith leadership and interreligious wherewithal. The "context" (large urban Catholic university),…

Between 1849 and 1930, colonial, provincial, and federal governments assumed greater responsibility for education in what is now British Columbia, using schooling as a strategy to catalyze and legitimize the development of a capitalist settler society. "Lessons in Legitimacy" brings the histories of different kinds of state schooling for…