The academic field of Native American/American Indian studies (NAS/AIS) has been and largely remains a product of political forces at the national level and now at the tribal level. The very recognition of American Indians as a unique group by the U.S. government is a political statement of survival. In this article, the author revisits the…

This paper examines the notion of the student as a customer in a university, focusing on the perceptions of academic staff. Changes in the higher education sector in recent years have significantly reduced the differences between universities and other types of organisations and it has been argued that students have become "consumers" of…

A grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for training on communication and social interaction in healthy aging was used to support the collaboration of three students and one program mentor from various age-related backgrounds (e.g., vision, hearing, cognition, and social work) to develop a transdisciplinary and interinstitutional…

The purposes of this paper are to discuss the historical emergence of academic geography in Canada, and how it has been tied closely to the nation-state. Canadian geography is not simply a slice from a pre-existing disciplinary block but has been actively formed and molded by a set of evolving national imperatives determined and coordinated by the…

In Giyoo Hatano's passing, we have lost an esteemed colleague and a treasured friend. Among his many contributions to our field, our work, and our lives, we honor and build on his and his colleagues' work on conceptual growth. We liken the view developed by Hatano and his colleagues to Toulmin's evolutionary scheme for understanding conceptual…

Considerable scepticism still persists with the academic disciplines in higher education in the United Kingdom about the quality of the research undertaken by employees in their own workplace. Workplace "investigations" are negatively contrasted to academy-based research degrees, which are held to be a model of how research should be…

This paper inquires about the conditions that enable the rise of new applied undergraduate fields in American universities and colleges. After identifying high-growth fields since 1950, the paper traces their professional development from an embryonic stage until universities and colleges started offering bachelor's degrees in those fields. The…

Aside from the appeal to administrators as a tool to reduce costs by combining less robust departments with heftier relations, interdisciplinarity is a powerful idea because it implies that different branches of knowledge can benefit from talking to one another: a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building…

This paper highlights program-level assessment of learning outcomes in an 8-month Faculty Certificate Program (UBC-FCP) on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The aim of the UBC-FCP is to enhance SoTL in multidisciplinary settings. Essentially, SoTL is an approach to academic work that…

The purpose of Adult Basic Education (ABE) articulation is to ensure learners have access to quality courses, receive appropriate credits and are able to transfer easily among publicly-funded colleges, university colleges, universities and institutes in British Columbia. Articulation also involves liaison with the school system's ABE programs to…

A student's emerging genre mastery is a complex process which involves learning not only relevant discoursal forms, but also a wide range of specialist knowledge frames. Recent research suggests that these knowledge frames are acquired during the development of a student's disciplinary identity. Although disciplinary identity clearly contributes…

Starting in the 1960s, academic research on accounting became significantly more quantitative and analytical than in previous decades. The new paradigms have greatly increased our understanding of how financial information affects the decisions of investors as well as managers. However, those models have also crowded out other forms of…

The field of biomechanics has grown rapidly in the past 30 years in both size and complexity. As a result, the term might mean different things to different people. This article addresses the issues facing the field in the form of challenges biomechanists face in the future. Because the field is so diverse, strength within the different areas of…

Academic service-learning is based on the value of university-community partnerships. But what about campus partnerships? Who on campus best understands and most effectively administers academic service-learning programs? Locating service-learning programs solely in academic affairs or student affairs departments certainly simplifies the process.…

This study explored the apprenticeship of students with high-incidence disabilities into the discipline of history through mediation of a web-based instructional environment, the Virtual History Museum (VHM). Thirteen students with high-incidence disabilities spread across two co-taught classrooms participated. They engaged in two units of…