This article discusses a participatory action research (PAR) project carried out with three transnational Latina youth in northern California and how the university researcher incorporated Chicana feminist strategies in the study. PAR and Chicana feminism place at the heart of research the knowledge that ordinary people produce, referring to this…

President Barack Obama is wasting no time in unfolding his plan to provide health coverage for all Americans. He started in February by signing legislation to reinstate the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which expands eligibility criteria to provide 4 million more children access to health care. This first step is one of many needed to…

Multicultural citizenship education courses worldwide show promise in their ability to influence attitudes and beliefs supportive of social justice. However, many of these courses assume behavior change results from these attitudes changes. Quantitative analyses of pretest and posttest questionnaire data compare the impact of these unique…

This study focuses upon the narratives of women educators ("educadoras") who contributed to radical democratic school reforms in post-authoritarian Brazil. We illustrate through three of the teachers' narratives how their professional identities and actions were shaped partly by their experiences of resisting the military regime and by…

This study drew upon the recently developed Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) to compare and contrast the teaching perspectives of cooperating teachers against a range of demographic data specific to cooperating teachers. The outcomes indicate, among other things, that a high percentage of cooperating teachers base their pedagogical…

Remaking Adult Learning provides an exciting and innovative addition to the literature on adult learning. Charting challenges and successes in the sector, it illustrates how taking part in well-thought-out programmes can have a positive and sometimes life-saving impact on people's lives. While grounded in adult learning practice, the book draws…

Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released this month. The study, arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s, found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W.…

This report examines the role played by Sudanese universities in the country's social and political transformation, past and present. Students and faculty there have historically served as vital voices for political change and community and international engagement, but recent educational policies have severely limited their voices. This report…

This article analyzes the process of youth political activism and development by drawing on ethnographic research on Asian and Pacific Islander youth activists. Young people revealed that collective action begins with a critical analysis of their lived experiences with inequalities. Their actions also involved oppositional consciousness that was…

Based on the survey on voluntary service in western China by students from Nanjing Agricultural University and Agricultural University of Jiangxi, this paper analyzes agricultural university students' participation in and understanding of the Western China Program as well as the major problems various universities confronted while implementing the…

In this essay, David Labaree examines the paradox of educationalization in the American context. He argues that, like most modern Western societies, the United States has displayed a strong tendency over the years for educationalizing social problems, even though schools have repeatedly proven that they are an ineffective mechanism for solving…

The current interest in multimodal rhetoric was anticipated by Jacob Riis's social documentary texts and presentations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the socialist urban critiques presented by Friedrich Engels, Riis's work demonstrated profound ambivalence toward the city's poor. While calling for reform…

Following a discussion of activity theory as an approach to human development originally rooted in transformational change, we review the historical context and diverse conceptualizations of social conduct from the field of sociology. The discussion of social conduct is broken into theories of social action, theories of enactment, and contemporary…

Learning in immersive virtual worlds (simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life) could become a central learning approach in many curricula, but the socio-political impact of virtual world learning on higher education remains under-researched. Much of the recent research into learning in immersive virtual worlds centres around games and…

Contemporary rural social movements bring diverse interest groups and stakeholders together at the local scale in the pursuit of common visions and goals, often against the backdrop of an external threat. The challenge for a movement's leaders is to negotiate and design a rural agenda that resonates with this complex constituency. One way to…