Undergraduate education has not kept pace with knowledge about the role of culture in shaping human and social behavior. The deficiencies can and should be repaired, but some real innovations are essential to the process. Despite the challenge, there is a real opportunity to parlay research advances emerging out of the recent "cultural turn" in a…

Examines how teacher networks design for teacher learning, describing several dynamic tensions inherent in the designs of a sample of teacher networks and assessing the relationships of these tensions to teacher learning. The paper illustrates these design concepts with reference to the work of seven networks that aim to revamp teacher' knowledge…

The terms "learning about" and "learning from" religion have now become firmly established in the lexicon of religious education (RE). The publication of a national Non-statutory Framework for RE in October 2004 gave them official status. But what is actually meant by these terms? Certainly teachers have been less confident…

This article represents a consideration of the proposal by Michael Peters that peer review should be democratically extended. It begins by tracing the struggle between the natural sciences (the Quadrivium) and the humanities (the Trivium) in the medieval university to the present day, concluding that the Quadrivium has established a decisive…

An educator with a serious interest in incorporating critical thinking into a school curriculum might feel the need to be an expert in critical thinking simply to evaluate the many existing approaches which bear that name. Furthermore, this problem would seem to be compounded if critical thinking and the creation of art were asserted to be…

Streaming video is a potentially revolutionary tool in humanities courses. The Davideon project, a large-scale effort conducted by the University of Groningen in conjunction with the University of Amsterdam, Windesheim University, and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, focused on integrating audiovisual materials into pedagogically…

University of Chicago literary critic W.J.T. Mitchell claims that his contribution to the cultural interpretation and hermeneutic understanding of dinosaurs is every bit as valuable as archeological discoveries. Indeed, he holds that, because of his new way of looking at dinosaurs, the title "scientist" should aptly apply to him, too.…

In this article, the author focuses on how cultural studies has been translated into the Turkish context in terms of modernization, and how the process of remaking it has raised some interesting questions about interdisciplinarity. Should it exist or should it be rejected on the grounds that it seeks to abandon established disciplinary models (and…

This article addresses the complex issue of lecturers' subject knowledge and teaching. It explores the subject knowledge models of Banks, Leach and Moon (expressed in their chapter "New understandings of teachers' pedagogic knowledge", in J. Leach and B. Moon's edited work "Learners and Pedagogy," 1999) and of Grossman, Wilson…

What are the humanities, and how should they be cultivated? With respect to this crucial question, opinions differ as to how widely the humanities should be construed and pursued. Initially connoting the study of Greek and Roman classics, the concept now more generally covers arts and letters, history, and philosophy. But does it also include the…

In recent years, sociologists have been focusing a great deal of attention on young people in general and college students in particular. There is a special area of research that has made itself vigorously well known, namely the sociology of youth. This article deals with value orientations of young people in college. In this article, the authors…

Founded in 1991 by Yury N. Afanasyev and financed by a grant from businessman Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the Russian State University for the Humanities has quickly become one of the most prominent institutions of higher learning in Russia. This article discusses alleged governmental pressure against the university, its financial difficulties since…

In "The two cultures and the scientific revolution," C.P. Snow (1959) described the chasm between pure and applied science, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities, on the other. Snow was concerned that the complete lack of understanding between these "two cultures" would hamper the spread of the scientific/industrial…

Managing the pedagogical aspects of the "computational turn" that is occurring within the Humanities in general and the disciplines associated with cognitive science and neuroscience in particular, first implies facing the challenge of introducing students to computation. This paper presents what has proven to be an efficient approach to bringing…

This study, which was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, was conducted in French-language minority schools in seven Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. Using an open-ended interview guide, 47 principals were asked about the…