In 1998, the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Metropolitan Ministry's Task Force on Religious Understanding, in partnership with the National Conference for Community and Justice, the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, and three local universities, began planning an interfaith study abroad experience in Israel for adult learners within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim…

The "Teaching Foreign Languages" workshop will help K-12 foreign language teachers improve their practice by making connections between the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning and current research in foreign language education. Workshop components include eight lively half-hour video programs with leading researchers and practicing…

This document discusses how service learning has developed over the past century in its practices from involvement in volunteerism to active civic engagement. It is so beneficial to both learners and the community that many educators and government leaders believe it should be a required component in the educational career of all students. The…

This paper discusses service learning, arguing that the pedagogy of service learning offers a framework in which students can remember and apply more of what they learn than in traditional content based and faculty centered curriculum. Service learning strategies recognize that we retain 60% of what we do, 80% of what we do with guided reflection,…

The author, who is the President of Miami-Dade Community College (MDCC), Florida, argues that the fundamental purpose of MDCC is to preserve democracy. MDCCs open-door policy makes it possible for those who might otherwise be excluded from higher education to gain a college education, which then makes it possible for them to become active,…

This paper--part of a collection of 54 papers from the 48th annual conference of the Education Law Association held in November 2002--discusses open-meeting laws. All 50 states have adopted laws that require school officials to conduct their business in open sessions before the public and the press. This paper examines the Brown Act, California's…

A study examined the role of paraeducators as liaisons to the local community. Phase 1 of the study involved interviews with four paraeducators and three teachers, each of whom was part of a rural teacher/paraeducator team that used the paraeducator's background in the community to enhance school activities. Phase 2 involved five group sessions…

In 1997, AEL, a regional educational laboratory, invited more than 100 people from 18 primarily rural school communities in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia to join the QUEST network, a 3-year program dedicated to building quality learning communities that support high levels of student and adult performance. School stories from…

This proceedings of the 17th annual conference of the Society for the Provision of Education in Rural Australia (SPERA) contains 28 keynote addresses and conference papers. Major conference themes were vocational education and training (VET) in rural schools, small schools, flexible rural delivery systems, and the community as a resource and…

Small rural schools have always had an important place in the educational life of New Zealand, but they have faced a number of challenges in the past decade. These challenges include difficulty in attracting and retaining high quality teachers, changing expectations of parents, decreasing rural population, and the impact of national educational…

This digest explores various ways in which businesses have partnered with educational institutions to improve vocational education efforts. It begins the article with an acknowledgment that vocational education has undergone consistent reform in the last decade to satisfy the demands of public, corporate, and government sectors that hold community…

The systemic reform exemplified by the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA) requires the coupling of top-down state mandates with bottom-up advocacy and leadership. This research on an Eastern Kentucky school district details the dynamics at the district's main high school, as people struggle to build both a community of learners within…

This booklet addresses three questions about small schools, commonly posed by skeptics: "What do we really know about small schools?" What is there to recommend them?" and "Can we explain their track record?" With regard to the first question, large-scale studies compared the records of 300 students in 8 small New York…

The abstracts in this series provide brief discussions of issues related to leadership, administration, professional development, technology, and education in community colleges. Volume 10 for 1997 contains the following 12 abstracts: (1) "On Community College Renewal" (Nathan L. Hodges and Mark D. Milliron); (2) "The Community College Niche in a…

This paper discusses the nature of a theoretical school of transcendence as conceived by participants in a graduate course on the topic of transcendence in teacher-learner relationships. Transcendent teacher-learner relationships are spontaneously occurring ones in which teacher and learner transcend their traditional interactive roles. During the…