Contemporary liberal education owes its existence to various educational ideas and pedagogical formulas that emerged from the 18th century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment conceptions, principles, and practices such as public schooling, equality of opportunity, freedom of expression, critical thinking,…

What does it take to transform a large, bureaucratic institution with a fractured culture and a compliance orientation into a nurturing, collaborative, vision-directed organization? This report and the accompanying research brief endeavor to answer that question by examining a humanistic and systems thinking approach to cultural change that took…

Schools of social work are mandated to train students for policy practice. A new instructional approach is needed so that social workers skillfully engage in policy change to address the growing economic, social, and cultural problems that affect our clients. This article presents the Practicing Policy, Pursuing Change, and Promoting Social…

This article outlines progress made towards education transformation in Wales. It explores the way in which tri-level reform is guiding system level change in Wales and looks at the implementation of the School Effectiveness Framework, which is at the heart of the reform process. It describes the way in which professional learning communities are…

Amid the Bologna Process and as a direct effect of it, European higher education institutions have to rethink their core institutional policies in order to effectively deal with the increasing demands and needs of their "customers" and society at large. The higher education management programmes across Europe, with some specific needs…

This article examines the development and the legacy of a policy making experience that was undertaken in Brazil from 2004 to 2006, under a project labelled "Educating for Freedom". The project sought to provide prison inmates with access to education. It was carried out by a coalition that comprised the Ministry of Education, the…

"Building Institutional Capacity for Data-Informed Decision Making" is the third installment of the Cutting Edge series, which aims to help colleges engage faculty, scale successful interventions, and create a strong culture of evidence through use of data to strengthen their institutional change and student success efforts. Though the…

This study explores two specific cases of institutional mergers in the field of higher education. The two cases took place in China in the 1990s. One of the cases might be labeled a vertical merger and the other a horizontal merger. The former simply implies a merger between higher education institutions with equal status and the same level of…

Until recently, the few attempts to develop intercultural competence in German higher education institutions were limited to the initiative of individuals and were mostly targeted at selected groups, e.g. students participating in international master's programmes. Only recently have German universities started to acknowledge the fact that…

This book, prepared in the context of the "UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD)", also known as "Rio+20", contains the papers submitted to the "World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities (WSSD-U-2012)", which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 5 and 6 June 2012. It pursues the following main aims: to document and…

This issue of Metropolitan Universities includes papers emanating from the work of the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative, a three-year (2004-2007) initiative designed to build capacity for community-engaged scholarship (CES) in health professional schools. As the core principles and challenges of CES are similar across…

Community-engaged scholarship (CES) is gaining legitimacy in higher education. However, challenges of institutionalizing and sustaining it as a core value remain. Significant barriers exist for faculty choosing to incorporate CES into their teaching and research. Faculty development programs are a key mechanism for advancing faculty skills as well…

The findings of the evaluation of the three-year Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative are presented, describing changes in institutional capacity for community-engaged scholarship, and changes in promotion and tenure policies and processes. The change process in the participating institutions is assessed using the Kotter model of…

This essay describes how University of Alaska Anchorage (a) mapped academic-based engagement activities into its institutional context and mission and (b) explored academic and administrative leadership strategies to reflect its commitment to engagement. Higher education governing bodies, legislators, administrators, and faculty increasingly…

One important implication of the study is that educational policy goals must more closely reflect the student's perceptions of what they want if such ambitious programs are to succeed. (Author)