Mindfulness offers a pathway for preservice teachers to develop self-awareness, which is an essential part of personal and professional growth. However, supporting teacher self-awareness is rarely given much attention in teacher education programs. The authors studied the use of mindfulness meditation in an early childhood college course with…

We investigated the efficacy of a phenomenological matrix of mindfulness as a framework for examining expectations, formal meditation experiences, and appraisals of first-year college music students (N = 18) who participated in a 5-day mindfulness module offered through an introductory course in music education. Participants expressed hopes that…

Trauma is a present issue on college campuses, yet there is a lack of research on how best to promote positive outcomes for college students who have experienced trauma. With college being an important time for developmental growth, it is vital to encourage more research that investigates the effect of trauma on students as well as ways that…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has become an avant-garde term in the last few years. It is how people acquire and apply knowledge, attitudes and skills to understand and control emotions. Incorporating the SEL perspective, teachers can not only help students set and achieve positive goals, but also help students understand how empathizing…

The development of human spiritual formation involves the work of the Holy Spirit and the effort of human beings. Under this model an individual must come to recognize the inner state of the self in order to truly engage in spiritual development. In Chinese culture, the element of self-awareness in pursuit of spiritual formation is not emphasized…

Changes in their brains, combined with a greater awareness of peers and events around them, make adolescence a key time for students to figure out who they are, what they aspire to be, and what they want to do in the world. This Alliance for Excellent Education report explores how human identity and self-regulation develop during adolescence and…

A majority of college men struggle to successfully navigate the college environment and their newfound independence and freedom upon leaving home for the first time. Although recent research makes it clear that there is a college male crisis within higher education (Kimmel, 2004) and men are more likely to struggle navigating their identity and…

Living and learning in another country, primary conditions of the study abroad experience, are commonly associated with two fundamental outcomes. The first outcome is an increase in "external" connections, manifested through an increased ability to converse in another language and an increased understanding and sensitivity to another…

There is a dominant paradigm of teacher education within the teaching profession; that only through the experience of undertaking professional practice can a student become a teacher. This approach, the "apprenticeship of observation" model (Borg, 2004 using the term coined by Lortie, 1975) describes the way in which teacher education students are…

The leadership identity development (LID) grounded theory (Komives, Owen, Longerbeam, Mainella, & Osteen, 2005) and related LID model (Komives, Longerbeam, Owen, Mainella, & Osteen, 2006) present a framework for understanding how individual college students develop the social identity of being collaborative, relational leaders…