This article explores assignments as a core teaching practice essential to integrating the cognitive, personal, and professional identities of seminary students. These core practices emerge in seminary curricula where there is a strong focus on the teaching of canonical texts and a goal of achieving textual mastery. We propose that carefully…

This book brings together a group of extraordinary educators and scholars who offer important insights about what we can do to defend childhood from societal challenges. The authors explain new findings from neuroscience and psychology, as well as emerging knowledge about the impact on child development of cultural and linguistic diversity,…

This article reviews and reflects on the Diploma in Addiction Studies: a 1-year, full-time programme taught at the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity College Dublin since the academic year 1983/1984, which has recently had its external funding withdrawn. The programme was aimed at multidisciplinary classes, including students from…

In this article, the authors describe how they used formative assessments to ferret out possible misconceptions among middle-school students in a unit about weather-related concepts. Because they teach fifth- and eighth-grade science, this assessment also gives them a chance to see how student understanding develops over the years. This year they…

This article is an autobiographical account of a remarkable childhood. In this essay, David Steiner, the Klara & Larry Silverstein Dean of the School of Education at Hunter College in New York, chronicles his early years and his road to Oxford. David is the son of George Steiner, the polymath who has scathingly denounced Western societies for the…

The past several centuries have presented well-documented cases of prodigious youth. Many represented extreme examples of children who had burned brightly and then faded into obscurity, succumbed to a mental illness or an early death, or entered into a career deemed below their mental capacity. These very public displays of mental prowess caused…

In this article, the author shares his experiences in his undergraduate years and how he was influenced by his professors regarding human history. The author believes that social change very often arose from encounters with strangers who possessed some obviously superior skill or knowledge that locals could borrow and adjust to their own use. His…

The work of academics has intensified, but the focus for most remains on teaching, research and contribution to service. Institutional imperatives and positioning within universities impact significantly on how individual academics fashion themselves to fit with expectations and demands. There is, of course, no simple version of scholarly identity…

This paper outlines the development of a reflective process through which student feelings are brought to the surface to advance their learning outcomes. A key notion in relation to the capacity of student development is the ability of students to alter their collective habits of thought and in turn the nature of the learning environment. The…

This essay contends that engagement, a productive coupling of the academy's intellectual resources with the enterprise of generating solutions to current real-world challenges, can best flourish when its theoretical foundations rest upon rhetorical perspectivism. We examine the current movement in academe toward engagement and problems attendant…

Developmental and prescriptive advising styles have been the focus of the academic advising literature for the past 35 years. Academic advising scholars have called for a new paradigm in the field. Drawing from leadership theory, a new model for academic advising is proposed. Full range advising encompasses laissez-faire, management-by-exception,…

This article discusses how teachers in child care and elementary schools learn to work with Reggio-inspired pedagogical documentation. While teachers grasp the value of such documentation theoretically, it is most challenging but exciting to use in practical settings. Documentation illuminates teacher theories about children's understanding:…

Critical scholarship frequently depicts literacy education as an "initiation into passivity." Disconnected from the lives of students and reduced to strategies for scoring points on tests, literacy becomes an exercise in the reproduction of a moral economy of discipline, compliance, and productivity. Yet people also recognize that the modern world…

There are many links between literacy and movement. Movement and language are both forms of communication and self-expression. Rhythm is an essential component of both language and movement. While people may think of rhythm primarily in musical terms, there is a rhythm to words and sentences as well. Individuals develop an internal rhythm when…

Literature on retention for first-year students appears to focus on the emotional, interpersonal, and financial problems these students face when beginning their post-secondary education. The article accepts the importance of these issues and their effect on retention. However, the article suggests that there are other issues that should be…