Background: Students' identities and sense of belonging in a program affect whether they stay in engineering. Research suggests that students' ways of knowing and beliefs about what counts as knowing and learning -- their personal epistemologies -- can be aspects of their identities, or sense of self as knowers and learners. Purpose/Hypothesis:…

Black male adolescents face unique barriers in schools that may contribute to racial disparities in educational outcomes. Their social-cognitive strengths, however, influence their confidence to be academically successful despite these barriers. This study explored whether racial academic stereotypes and racial centrality were associated with and…

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their…

Immigrant students and their families sometimes experience conflict or alienation in U.S. schools owing to differences between the collectivistic values of home (focused on the well-being of the family and group) and the individualistic values of schools (focused on the well-being of individuals) that drive instructional practices and school…

This study examined the subjective well-being, as reflected as their satisfaction with life, of academically gifted secondary school students in China, under the framework of the broaden-and-build theory. A total number of 351 academically gifted secondary students participated in the study. Multiple scales were used to measure these academically…

Effectively teaching sociological theories to undergraduate students is challenging. Students often enroll in theory courses due to major requirements, not personal interest. Consequently, many students approach the study of theory with anxiety. This study examined the effectiveness of an experiential learning activity designed to teach Karl…

This article is both a personal response to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and an examination of the concept within literature of making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange. It discusses the educative force and potential of Beckett's strangers in a strange world by examining my own personal experiences…

This paper puts forward the hypothesis that in recent decades, pupils of schools in the western world have been given a new form of individuality. This construction has been nourished by both the demand for emancipation as it was expressed in the critical sociology of education (and pedagogy) and by the neoliberal turn in education policy. It…

This paper argues that the "institutionalisation" model used by universities to spearhead the intellectualisation of African languages is a non-starter for taking African languages in new creative directions. The major constraint for African language literary culture is that written output has historically been heavily bent towards…

Although research on teacher alienation and isolation has demonstrated the importance of developing collegial relationships, mentoring, and induction programs, there is limited research examining the ways to support critical educators with combatting their feelings of alienation and isolation as it relates to the larger sociopolitical dynamics…

This study reports on an educational development initiative where peer instruction was used instead of traditional lectures in a calculus course for first-year engineering students. The aim of the study was to explore students' experiences of this method. Data were collected by means of an open-ended questionnaire on two occasions: early and late…

A survey was distributed to all enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian (EBCI) college students to compare the experiences of those attending Tribal and non-tribal colleges. The results of the survey provided data for a nonexperimental quantitative study that addressed 18 research questions in an effort to determine whether there…

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems "out there" to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift--along…

This paper explores how notions of race, ethnicity, and blood are mobilized in educational texts in Hong Kong. It elaborates how civic identity is racialized as part of a nationalist education operating beneath the surface of expressed commitments to global citizenship, human rights, etc., in curriculum and textbooks. Many have commented on how…

Reflecting on my experience as a teacher and a lesbian in a second-level school in Ireland in the early 1990s, I use an auto-ethnographic approach first to explore some of the ways dominant narratives can silence, constrain and marginalise some people. Projecting forward to an imagined future, I draw on creative writing to "re-frame" how…