This study is to revisit the meaning of servant leadership, especially what it means to be "the servant as leader" in organizations. In order to appreciate nuances in the multifaceted nature of servanthood, this study engages in a hermeneutic analysis using a Heideggerian hermeneutical methodology, and converges study participants'…

Women in academia navigate multiple professional and personal roles, and may face unique challenges to integrate their intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual selves. The narrative of constraint underscores the disadvantages, challenges, and inequities that women who are mothers and academics face in their lives. This lack of privilege…

Understanding the experience of transformation in counselor training provides insight into the phenomenon of four counselors-in-training who were currently engaging in a CACREP-accredited program. The participants comprised two females and two males, whose ages ranged from early thirties to mid fifties. The qualitative methodology of hermeneutic…

As universities increasingly utilize electronic portfolios, college students are asked more than ever to create ePortfolios for academics, assessment, or advising. This study shifts an analysis of ePortfolios from prior epistemological approaches, where ePortfolios have been explored as a tool to measure student progress, onto an ontological…

The purpose of this study was to determine the role of an afterschool program on students graduating high school. The study included students that were chosen using purposeful sampling who had recently graduated high school and participated in a school's afterschool program. A qualitative design was used with hermeneutical phenomenology being…

This study explored how avid users of "Second Life" ("SL") experience and make meaning of informal learning activities in virtual art museums and similar cultural spaces through their avatars. While recent literature has laid the groundwork for studying student engagement and formal learning, the lacuna of research bound by the…

This qualitative study explores the critical thinking experiences of African nursing students enrolled in several universities in the U.S. Using a semi-structured interview approach, twelve African students discussed their experiences using and learning a western critical thinking approach, as well as described their educational experiences in…

This qualitative research study explored eleven community college educational leaders' perceptions about the essence of lifelong learning as it pertained to their personal experiences and as it related to their administrative practices in community college settings in southern California. Few scholarly studies have examined the meaning educational…

Developmental education is a primary tool of access to higher education, particularly at the community college level, for students who are not academically prepared. There is a high need for remediation of community college students, yet a low remedial course completion rate. While there is broad awareness of the problem of remediation and its…

This phenomenological study examined the experiences of twelve female African Americans enrolled as fulltime undergraduate engineering students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, an historically Black university, and seven female African Americans enrolled as undergraduate engineering students at Purdue University in…

This hermeneutically crafted qualitative study examines how six university-educated middle-class Pakistani Muslim women negotiate the competing expectations of traditional Muslim culture and the emancipated ethos of the university. It uses Robert Kegan's constructive-developmental theory, whose Subject-Object scoring system distinguishes a…

This dissertation investigates how teaching in a hands-on science center contributes to re/shaping one's teaching identity. Situated at the New York Hall of Science (NYHS) in Queens, New York, my research approach is to conduct a critical ethnography where the focus is on improving the teaching and learning of science for all involved. In…