The United States is facing a crisis of college and university closures as we approach the demographic cliff. As a result, the expected number of four-year college closures is predicted to be substantial. This doctoral project offers a theoretical model (HERC Model) that provides tangible suggestions or recommendations for how to confront the…

With an urgency to leverage existing and emerging policy reforms to improve student outcomes by centering educational equity, this manuscript explores the critical role of policy implementation in higher education--specifically in community colleges. In doing so, we explore historical and contemporary approaches to higher education, highlighting…

Humanizing engineering education is a research-based way to help students understand the origin of concepts and the people who contributed to the field's development. This case study explores an experimental intervention to improve engineering undergraduate student knowledge and interest in fluid mechanics. The intervention incorporates the…

Human sexuality is a basic foundation of the human experience. In graduate school for psychology, students are often taught about sexuality in terms of gender identity and sexual orientation. However, there is a lack of education around sexual functioning in terms of sexual wellbeing, arousal, and disorders. Many psychologists are licensed as…

Harmful and inaccurate narratives about the nature of mathematics, and about the mathematical incapability of historically marginalized groups, are pervasive and longstanding. The persistence of these narratives, and their documented negative impacts in school, the discipline, and beyond, have led some scholars to conclude that there is something…

This work highlights the experience of eight education students from a public university in the American Southeast in their trip to Stewart Immigration Detention Center. A pre-interview and two post-interviews were conducted to understand students' perceptions toward the topic, what they learned from their experience, and how the experience…

Student engagement in higher education has been a topic of discussion for decades, as student engagement directly indexes student retention, achievement, and career development. While previous research emphasizes the importance of effective teaching practices to increase student engagement in higher education, faculty and staff report…

This article argues that in the teaching of writing online, incidents of linguistic discrimination can be (in)directly caused by faculty unfamiliarity with online teaching best practices, lack of critical linguistic awareness, and the prevalent legacy of racist and monolingual ideologies. To address this issue, it is necessary to cultivate empathy…

With the continued growth in online education, higher education institutions have moved community engagement further into virtual spaces through e-service learning courses (Faulconer, 2021). These courses have a history of being client-based, rather than critical or transformational (Strait & Nordyke, 2015). I argue that this conception of…

This dissertation investigates student experiences on a four-year public U.S. college campus, focusing on the impact of humanized support services in non-academic administrative offices. Chapter 1 introduces the study's purpose, while Chapter 2 reviews literature on customer service practices through the lenses of Experience Management, Service…

This reflection on practice explores dehumanizing educator talk as an explicit topic within multicultural/diversity/anti-bias and anti-racist teacher education. Dehumanizing educator talk is defined as formal or informal conversation during which targeted individuals or groups are openly demeaned with offensive generalizations in the absence of…

In recent years, scholars have become critical of mainstream leadership development approaches. In particular, Petriglieri and Petriglieri refer to the "dehumanization of leadership," whereby leadership breaks its ties to identity, community, and context. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for humanizing leadership using…

Using collaborative autoethnographic techniques, the authors explored the intersectionality of motherhood and academic career life during 2020, which was logistically and emotionally complex and deeply racialized. To engage in active reflexivity, the authors told their stories with the backdrop of their intersectional identities. Beginning with…

The democratization of knowledge is liberating and has presented some new and difficult challenges. When everyone can position themselves as an expert, how do we create new frames of intellectual and pragmatic knowledge with integrity? How do we understand the histories of expert privilege and harm that have led us to this time of uncertainty? And…

Leading with care and compassion, critically reflecting on our teaching practices, and collaboration has always been central to our pedagogical practices. Participating in the #ONHumanLearn project, an initiative designed to humanize learning in higher education, we began to notice a growing divide between our engaged and disengaged students. As…