Reading and teaching "Don Quijote" present multiple challenges to twenty-first century students and instructors who are culturally and historically distanced from the seventeenth century. With "Las Meninas" serving as a visual lexicon for cuing correlative themes and events in "Don Quijote", the instructor, through an ekphrastic, interdisciplinary…

In this article we study how members of an interdisciplinary research team use an online forum for communicating about their research project. We use the concepts of "community of practice" and "connectivity" to consider the online interaction within a wider question of how people from different academic traditions…

This paper offers an overview of the current state, difficulties, limitations and future possibilities for sex education in Spain. On the basis of a study involving 3760 teachers from all provinces in Spain, a detailed analysis of the obstacles at legislative, school and teacher levels was developed. Significant weaknesses were found at each of…

Many organisations are under increasing pressures to recruit and retain creative individuals as a core asset in the emerging knowledge economy. In universities, such people are often academics who focus on high impact, innovative and interdisciplinary research. Yet, instead of feeling supported, many of these academics face structural,…

This commentary addresses the analysis in Persson's (2012a) article. According to the authors, the agenda for change amongst scholars has four productive proposals. These are: (1) that scholars should broaden their disciplinary outlook beyond psychology and education; (2) that they should eschew policy borrowing; (3) that they should clarify, for…

To argue for the importance of an integrative approach to learning in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and other courses, we present a case study of a project incorporating cross-curricular skills in a college algebra course. We analyze student work on the project and responses to surveys, and find the…

Critical thinking is a graduate attribute that many courses, including engineering courses, claim to produce in students. As a graduate attribute it is seen by academics as a particularly desirable outcome of student learning and is said by researchers to be a defining characteristic of university education. However, how critical thinking is…

The randomized trial is the gold standard in scientific research and is used by several fields to study the effects of media. Although useful for studying the immediate response to media exposure, the experimental approach is not well suited to studying long-term effects or behavior outside the laboratory. The "natural experiment" approach, a…

Background: This study investigated the experiences and perceptions of operational members of Victoria Police in relation to their contacts with people with intellectual disability (ID). Key interests for exploration included how frequently and in what context police reported coming into contact with people with ID, how they made this…

This article looks at how arts integration can boost the language development of limited English proficient students in kindergarten through second grade. I first review existing research on how young children learn and describe the special challenges faced by children who must learn in an unfamiliar language. I then identify arts-based mechanisms…

This article analyses child development "as text" to highlight newly emerging contemporary tropes of northern, normalized childhoods in relation to gender, racialization and familial organization. A recent UK marketing campaign for the washing powder Persil is analysed for the ways it mobilizes discourses of childhood and child rights.…

Theories of student learning and development are particularly important in leadership education because they make prescriptions about how people can adopt increasingly complex ways of being, knowing, and doing--essential forms of development for leadership learning. Increasingly, there is a call for leadership educators to adopt interdisciplinary…

This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and departments with "problem-based" curricula and programmes of study. It considers, particularly, the potential…

In an ever-changing world, foreign language instruction remains faithfully devoted to teaching by means of coursebooks, the design of which is based mainly on the skills or the structural syllabus paradigm that arranges language according to complexity of grammatical phenomena. In this paper, I aim to explore the appropriateness of the materials…

Henry A. Giroux is well known for pushing the definitions of education. From his early forays into what has been termed the "New Sociology of Education" in the early 1980s to his more recent discussions of "public pedagogy", Giroux has methodically challenged existing orthodoxies. This essay will focus on the interdisciplinary broadening of…