Every year, millions of students take Advanced Placement (AP) exams hoping to score enough points to earn college credit and save on their tuition bill. But are they getting a real college education? The College Board says that AP classes and exams make the AP program more accessible and represent a step forward for educational justice. But the…

Purpose: The author aims to give an overview of civic education in Hong Kong as well as of Liberal Studies, and to discern the reasons behind the reforms to the curriculum and assessment of Liberal Studies. Approach: The analysis is based on government documents related to the subject's curriculum and assessment, press releases and secondary…

Technology use, education technology, and innovations continue to grow in the 21st century. Information is abundant, and it can be challenging to process and decipher. Students are deficient in critical thinking and experience negative effects from the overuse of technology. Liberal education philosophy focuses on building critical thinking and…

The study uses the Wabash National Study on Liberal Arts Education to test how arts attendance in college facilitates growth in socially responsible leadership, diversity orientation, and the importance of political and social involvement. The study uses the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) and the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity…

This issue brief seeks to add to the discussion of educational pluralism by highlighting the history, features, and successes of the classical education model. The model is unique for its emphasis on building the student to be a scholar and an active citizen. Classical schools come in the form of private and charter schools, homeschooling, and…

SCRATCH, developed by the Media Lab at MIT, is a kid-friendly visual programming language, designed to introduce programming to children and teens in a "more thinkable, more meaningful, and more social" way. Although it was initially intended for K-12 students, educators have used it for higher education as well, and found it…

In this paper, we discuss how we attempt to build classroom environments that are conducive to positive civil discourse. Utilizing the framework of cultural proficiency (Lindsey, Robins, and Terrell, 2009), we argue for an inside-out approach through self-exploration to help deconstruct worldviews we develop through the years. In coupling this…

The goal of this study was to develop a classification for a range of discourse patterns that occur in text-based asynchronous discussion forums, and that can aid in the distinction of three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge building. The dataset was taken from Knowledge Forum® databases in the Knowledge…

This paper explores how a teacher preparation program in a liberal arts institution built upon the foundations of dialogic, relational pedagogy utilizes strong alumni connections to improve teacher education curriculum and support preservice, inservice, and teacher educators as they work to teach against the grain. Best visualized as an infinity…

The centenary of the publication of "The Teaching of English in England" provides an opportunity to consider the current National Curriculum for English in England from a historical perspective. This paper reports on a hermeneutic study that explores the humanist values underpinning Newbolt's Report and how they shape the creative…

Twelve leading Social Foundations of Education (SFE) scholars describe their professional work in the field. The research question within this oral history study is: In what ways do SFE scholars express the importance of the Liberal Arts (LA) framework for the community of educational stakeholders in a democracy? The respondents explain the degree…

Although strong arguments espousing the accolades of arts involvement are evident, the visual and performing arts continue to be underfunded and underused in K-12 schooling and teacher preparation. Valiant efforts from arts advocates have made inroads to reverse this negative trend, yet policies and practices that reflect a commitment to "arts for…

Few subjects have suffered as much as the liberal arts from the power of stale rhetoric, hollow appeals to tradition, and journalistic misrepresentation. Leon Botstein, begins this article by saying that together, these three factors have generated and legitimated public skepticism about the liberal arts. A liberal arts education (which is rarely…

This book will be an original and indispensable resource for all who believe in the importance of art in the wider educational realm. Framing the recent "educational turn" in the arts within a broad historical and social context, this anthology raises fundamental questions about how and what should be taught in an era of distributive…

For decades, teacher educators and others have looked critically at the way teachers are initially prepared and during the last ten years the calls for reform in teacher education have become even more frequent. Some programs have responded to those demands and made substantial and long lasting changes. This qualitative study reports on data…