The greatest difficulties for caregiving families are transitions of autonomy. This article focuses on the roles that family therapists can play at key moments in the post-childrearing phases of the family life cycle when someone's capacity for autonomy is changing. (MKA)

Explores the relationship between progressivism, vocationalism, and General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs), concluding that GNVQs are not unequivocally progressive. Suggests that the cultural context of controlled vocationalism is antithetical to progressive tendencies toward learner autonomy. (SK)

Interviews with 102 British vocational students, 43 in General National Vocational Qualifications courses, indicated that knowledge and its sources are treated reductively in GNVQs. Although student projects, activity-based learning, and participative inquiry can be progressive, students' learning experiences were not liberating and did not…

Liberal theorists often link autonomy and identity together, since, these liberals argue, an education that bestows a particular identity on children undermines their autonomy. The charge of schools ought to be to teach children to be open to a variety of identities. Encounters with diversity and cosmopolitanism are good, since they encourage…

One hundred seventy U.S. (M=16.1 years) and 125 middle-class Japanese (M=16.6 years) adolescents completed a questionnaire assessing perceptions of who (adolescent or parent) controls the personal, conventional, prudential, and overlapping domain behaviors of the adolescent. Participants also completed an inventory assessing self-reported…

This article seeks to demonstrate a particular application of Foucault's philosophical approach to a particular issue in education: that of personal autonomy. The paper surveys and extends the approach taken by James Marshall in his book "Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education." After surveying Marshall's writing on the issue I extend…

Liberal attempts to defend faith schooling have been conditional on the ability of faith schools to serve as a context for individual choice. A recent critique of these attempts claims that religious parents would find such moderate faith schooling unacceptable. This article sets forth a new liberal defence of faith schools drawing heavily on the…

Although some progress has been made, the belief that students with severe cognitive and multiple disabilities will not or cannot become self-determined remains a barrier for many such students. This article revisits topics that were identified in Wehmeyer (1998) as contributing to this problem, with a particular focus on definitional issues…

It is known for a fact that textbooks are widely used in today's classrooms. Admittedly, textbooks may have some advantages in the sense that they provide the framework for any educational course. However, exclusively depending on them may restrict both teacher and student autonomy. Textbooks have been criticized for promoting rote instead of…

Different theories try to explain why some students are more successful than the others. Phenomenologists (Mc Combs, 1989) study self concepts of the students and find such students prone to achieve more. Attributional Theorists (Dweck, 1986; Weiner, 2005) focus on personal outcome such as effort or ability. Metacognitive theorists (Pressley,…

This experimental study was intended to raise learner autonomy among Iranian native speakers of Persian in their L2 (English) and L3 (Arabic) reading comprehension through cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies instruction (CMRSI). The subjects of the study were divided into intermediate and advanced English language proficiency levels and…

High schools have been described as potent breeding grounds of alienation and boredom (Bronfenbrenner, 1974; Furrer & Skinner, 2003; Marks, 2000) while recent literature has focused on student-teacher relationships and the importance of pedagogies of care (Noddings, 1992; Wentzel & Looney, 2006). This paper examines the link between social…

This article presents a two-semester study that examines the effectiveness of threaded discussions for foreign language teaching methods courses. In particular, this study focuses on how students view the role of asynchronous computer-mediated communication in the development of language pedagogy through an exchange with expert teachers from…

Vocabulary notebooks are frequently advocated as a way for students to take control of their vocabulary learning (Fowle, 2002), with the added benefit of improvements in vocabulary learning (Schmitt and Schmitt, 1995; Laufer and Nation, 1999). The study described in this article attempts to lend empirical support to these claims, by investigating…

The purpose of this article is to review the personal development and transformation of women earning an online degree and to what extent their goals were met through earning the degree. Eighteen adult women who earned a fully online master's degree at least one year ago from a university affiliated with the Southern Regional Education Board were…