The goals of higher education often entail the development of students' character. Rarely, however, are these character development goals connected to the unique design and delivery of distance education programs. Additionally, the research literature that explores the character development aspects of distance education is sparse. Thus the purpose…

Narrative research methodology embraces multiple ways of representing lived experience discursively, regardless of a participant's levels of literacy, education or formal occupation. This article explores some of the dilemmas of "doing" narrative research in comparative and international education, with particular emphasis on the…

Among youth workers who experience moments of not-knowing what to do, many often describe their thoughts and reactions to the phenomenon in vocational and existential terms. They ask what right they have to work in the helping professions if they find themselves simply unable to be helpful. In many cases, the vocational crises following…

I begin this paper with a caveat. I am not a Catholic, having been baptized in the Eastern Orthodox Church and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I came to Catholic education in 1995 when I was hired by Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where I began teaching in the Department of Philosophy. I have learned much about the …

This article explores how future educational leaders make meaning of the principalship through metaphor. At the conclusion of a university principal preparation program, principal interns were asked to use figurative language to represent the principalship. The metaphors identified four distinct themes: (a) protection and nurturing; (b) skill,…

The UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Program (1975-1995) provided impetus for developing, legitimizing, and institutionalizing environmental education. More recently, UNESCO was mandated by the United Nations to carry out a worldwide shift towards education for sustainable development. As international organizations'…

In the paper we attempt to address principal issues of political history as part of the political science curriculum today, ranging from "what to teach" to "how to teach." Assuming the necessity in contemporary information society of selecting information rather than only accessing it, we propose approaches, such as topics networking, to create…

Mentorship has been identified in the adult and higher education literature as a transformational tool for mainstreaming disadvantaged people by providing direction, networks, and opportunities for empowerment to break barriers (Harlley, 2001). Current global interests in mentorship principles and practices are also supported by evidence of the…

This book illustrates the breadth of theoretical and philosophical perspectives that can be brought to bear on mathematics and education. Part 1, "Constructivism and the Learning of Mathematics," contains the following chapters: (1) "A Radical Constructivist View of Basic Mathematical Concepts" (E. von Glasersfeld); (2) "Interaction and Children's…

Algebra and calculus students have difficulties to express themselves in a statement of mathematical symbols and to comment on written mathematical statements to end with equivalent mathematical symbols statement. In this study, the reasons behind the meaning students load to the mathematical symbols and written mathematical statements was…

Communication--"real" communication--involves the hearer/reader as much as it involves the speaker/writer. This paper presents some of the ideas regarding the speaker/hearer, writer/reader, and text/meaning relationships in the work of Paul Ricoeur and Mikhail Bakhtin. The paper notes that, though neither of these men thought of…

This paper calls for the inclusion of narrative, thematic, and metaphor analysis as organizational assessment or communication audit methods and discusses some practical means of integrating these symbolic interpretational devices. The paper begins by defining the notion of symbol as the message content important to the organizational member. It…

This book offers both an intellectual history and a sustained argument for the inescapability of education's immortality agenda. It seeks a Hegelian synthesis of common ideas about living in one's students by giving them something of oneself, developing the image of immortality as an a-temporal, mythic, meaning-making, relational enterprise.…

The strongly positivist beliefs on which traditional conceptions of instructional design (ID) are based derive from Aristotelian logic and oversimplify the world, reducing human learning and performance to a repertoire of manipulable behaviors. Reviews the cases against deterministic predictability and discusses hermeneutic, fuzzy logic, and chaos…

Considers methodological issues that arise when values form the main focus of empirical educational research. Includes discussion of the idea that social science, in general, and educational research, in particular, are forms of moral inquiry. Outlines a methodology of educational research, drawing from work by Imre Lakatos, Alasdair MacIntyre,…