A symposium in the November 2006 issue of "College English" addresses the question, "What should college English be?" In this article, the author presents his answer to this question--it should be a functional approach to English studies. By English studies he means everything that is done in English departments. Most English departments teach…

"Speak," by Laurie Halse Anderson, is one of the most powerful young adult novels to come along in the past decade. It has won numerous awards, including the "School Library Journal" award for "Best Book of the Year," and was a National Book Award Finalist. Despite this acclaim, many English teachers are uncomfortable teaching "Speak" in their…

The case study approach was used to analyze experiential learning through its three components: knowledge, action, and reflection. Two interior design courses were integrated through a university service-learning project. The restoration/adaptive reuse of a 95-year-old library building was to serve as a prototype for future off-campus…

This study reports on a three-semester model project designed to assess the impact of enriched content related to Women's and Gender Studies on students enrolled in an undergraduate ecology course. The two constructs of interest were (a) students' attitudes toward women in science and society and (b) students' assessment of the classroom climate…

A personalized e-learning framework based on a user-interactive question-answering (QA) system is proposed, in which a user-modeling approach is used to capture personal information of students and a personalized answer extraction algorithm is proposed for personalized automatic answering. In our approach, a topic ontology (or concept hierarchy)…

The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) asked online students in SREB states for feedback about their experiences through a voluntary online questionnaire in spring 2008. This report summarizes more than 2,000 responses and provides insight into what students think about online learning and how courses might be improved. Specifically, the…

In this article we examine preservice teachers' ideas about the role of multicultural citizenship education in social studies classrooms. We use qualitative techniques to explore data collected from observations and interviews with preservice teachers enrolled in a secondary social studies methods course. The findings suggest that even when…

While the politics of curriculum reform occupy adults, high stakes get played out in crowded classrooms. As a component of democratic inquiry, how might teachers engage students in a study of those agendas shaping their education? What sorts of conceptual resources could help? To begin to answer these questions, I briefly review scholars who…

This article describes an in-service training program in action research designed for mature teachers returning to college to upgrade their teaching diplomas and complete their BEd degrees. The initial impetus was the need to develop a student-oriented pedagogy based on and enhancing the extensive professional experience of these teachers,…

Due to mounting pressures to avoid offending individuals on the basis of demographic group membership, political correctness has begun to restrict student participation in our diversity courses. This restriction diminishes what can be learned from class dialogue, an important component of diversity instruction. This article offers a model of…

This study examined 328 preservice educators' level of confidence in addressing four sexuality education domains and 21 sexuality education topics. Significant differences in confidence levels across the four domains were found for gender, academic major, sexuality education philosophy, and sexuality education knowledge. Preservice educators…

Writers in this journal have presented a number of strategies that sociology teachers can use to facilitate the expression--and serious analysis--of unpopular opinions. This article contributes to this dialog by illustrating the application of a Bill of Rights learning module. In this module, students are expected to create a document that…

The transition from school to tertiary study of mathematics comes under increasing scrutiny in research. This article reports on some findings from a project analysing the transition from secondary to tertiary education in mathematics. One key variable in this transition is the teacher or lecturer. This article deals with a small part of the data…

The purpose of this case study was to describe the role of teacher knowledge in the instructional methods of a community college developmental literacy instructor and determine in what ways that knowledge may have impacted the perceptions of the student participants regarding their authority over their academic progress in the class. Therefore,…

This paper discusses the importance of institutionalizing practices that promote equitable outcomes for all students within the vast California Community College (CCC) system. The CCC system, which annually provides educational opportunities for almost three million students, exists at the heart of the state economy and future labor pool. Because…