Over the past few years, the author has received numerous letters, phone calls, and emails from friends, academic colleagues, and members of the community inquiring why, having been a scholar for more than forty years, he now spends so much time writing op-eds. The author explains his urge to write op-eds and how this urge to write essays for the…

This article reports on a conversation between users of two research methods, biographical interviews and imagined futures essay writing. A dialogue form is used to discuss these methods and their potential to be combined. The value of comparing research methods is discussed, and then the two methods are described and points of connection and…

In this interview Dr. Bruce Ballenger and I discuss his career, his many textbooks on writing, his recent collaboration on an extensive study of the revision processes of advanced writers, and the challenges of balancing a career with a foot in multiple academic fields (i.e. composition and rhetoric and creative writing). Dr. Ballenger retired…

Professor Shirley Alexander is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Teaching, Learning & Equity) at the University of Technology, Sydney. On 12 November 2014, an article of hers appeared in "The Conversation": "Buying essays: how to make sure assessment is authentic." That article traverses, in an abbreviated way,…

The author, a former middle school teacher and now an associate professor at The University of Minnesota, was asked to write an essay for the inaugural issue of this journal that: (1) advanced the call for a more diverse dialogue in the field of middle grades education; and (2) addressed the question, "Why do we need more provocative debate…

In pursuit of more mindful notions of hybridity, this review essay provides a series of reflections on Mathew Weinstein's representations of Street Medics and "sciences for the red zones of neoliberalism". My analysis draws on three popular ways of thinking with boundaries to offer a critical reading of the boundary-work that the…

This essay is a reply to Brian Dotts's "Beyond the Schoolhouse Door," which focuses on the need of a system of general education in Jefferson's writings on educative reform. [For Dotts' "Beyond the Schoolhouse Door: Educating the Political Animal in Jefferson's Little Republics," see EJ1061579.]

As a historian of education, what excites you and compels you to keep doing scholarly work? If mortality were not an issue, how might you find your continued place in the field among ideas and sources that are dauntingly and increasingly vast? What is the work you most want to do? Jackie Blount provides her response herein: She would want to…

In this reflective essay, Alberto Ledesma explores how being undocumented can produce a particular form of writer's block. He argues that there is a pattern of predictable silences and obfuscations inherent in all undocumented immigrant autobiographies that cannot be easily negotiated when undocumented students are asked to write about "their…

The author of this article, James W. Fraser, is Professor of History and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. He begins this article with an expression of his gratitude to Robert Hampel and the editors of "The History of Education Quarterly" for commissioning the four…

This brief essay takes up the question of what is meant by education by providing two possible and distinctly different interpretations of the concept. These distinctions are then extended by attempting to demonstrate how one of these interpretations is tied to a contemporary, technologically-based perspective on life in general, while the other…

Considered one of the forefathers of the social sciences and humanities throughout Latin America, Eugenio Maria de Hostos (1839-1903) also made important contributions to educational thinking, establishing important educational programs in places like Chile and the Dominican Republic. Hostos is also a key historical figure in the struggle for…

This essay review focuses on Daisaku Ikeda (b. 1928) and his curriculum of Soka, or value-creating, education present in two works: "Choose Life: A Dialogue" (Toynbee & Ikeda, 1976) and "Thoughts on Education for Global Citizenship" (Ikeda, 1996b). In reviewing these works, the authors trace the biographical roots of Ikeda's educational philosophy…

This essay is a personal reflection on the implementation of "Creating Critical Viewers," a national media literacy program sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), an industry association, in 1995. The television industry's decision to develop a media literacy curriculum in the 1990s was a powerful…

This essay takes a look at what I call anti-progressivism in education or, more particularly, criticism of progressive education that was so vocal and visceral that it earns a label, at least initially, of anti-progressivism. After a brief introduction discussing the terms in general, I look at three instances of anti-progressivism in the 1950s…