As colleges and universities increase the focus on student learning, faculty development has taken a more prominent role in higher education (Barr & Tagg, 1995; Fink, 2003; Lieberman & Guskin, 2002). While a significant body of work on the practice of faculty development exists, research on faculty developers as professionals is limited. Several…

Teacher evaluation and dismissal reforms have been in the education policy spotlight in recent years. From The New Teacher Project's "The Widget Effect" to states' Race to the Top applications, educational leaders and advocates have been thinking about how to make evaluation and dismissal more performance-based. These downstream…

As a feminist theorist who frequently teaches theorizing that starts from embodied experience, the author has begun to incorporate fat feminism into her teaching. As a neophyte and a relatively thin woman, she has been self-conscious about broaching issues related to fat bodies in her teaching, even though they clearly raise important issues about…

Campus safety and the role of college and university officials relative to safety are important topics on the agendas of political leaders at the state and national levels. Student affairs leaders must consider how to contribute in a meaningful way to these very important conversations. (Contains 1 footnote.)

In 2001, Clif Bar & Company, makers of LUNA: The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women, debuted LUNAFEST[R], an international touring film festival that showcases short narrative and documentary work of female filmmakers and raises money for the Breast Cancer Fund and other nonprofit women's organizations. A pre-packaged film festival with clear and easy…

This article has three primary goals centring on a re-examination of the research frameworks we use for understanding the politics of social movements. First, I detail the ideological and methodological deficiencies of the old social movement/new social movement framework. Second, I highlight the positive contributions of research that favoured or…

Little empirical attention has been paid to state capital expenditures for higher education. While some anecdotal evidence exists that the process of appropriating capital dollars to higher education institutions is a particularly political process, no study has systematically examined the determinants of higher education state capital spending.…

This article addresses the politics and policy-making of alternative forms of basic education in the context of EFA, with an emphasis on non-formal education (NFE) for school-age children. It explores how policy-makers interpret the relevance of such alternatives, the steps that are taken to implement the reforms and factors that play a role in…

Developments in school education in Australia over the past decade have witnessed the rise of national efforts to reform curriculum, assessment and reporting. Constitutionally the power to decide on curriculum matters still resides with the States. Higher stakes in assessment, brought about by national testing and international comparative…

This article examines the extent of neoliberalism's influence within US community colleges during the last decade. It argues that such influence is changing non-profit, publicly funded community colleges into consumer colleges, serving the needs of corporations and "customers" at the expense of civic responsibility. Educating 46% of all…

Using Kentucky as a case study, the research described in this paper examines efforts to provide equality of educational opportunity. Standards based educational reform has produced myriad data on student achievement that are used by educators, policy analysts, legislators, and researchers to discern progress. This research makes use of multiple…

In 2002, Brinckerhoff, McGuire, and Shaw observed that the field of postsecondary education and disability services had "moved through its adolescence and was embarking on adulthood" (xiii). Indeed, the field had undergone rapid expansion nationwide in the prior 30 years and grew into a full-fledged profession within higher education (Jarrow…

This article examines the ways in which education and educational policy impact upon the likelihood and dynamics of violent conflict. It argues that education is rarely directly implicated in the incidence of violent conflict but identifies three main mechanisms through which education can indirectly accentuate or mitigate the risk of conflict:…

A popular justification of education for autonomy is that autonomy possession has intrinsic prudential value. Communitarians have argued, however, that although autonomy may be a core element of a well-lived life in liberal societies, it cannot claim such a prudential pedigree in traditional societies in which the conception of a good life is…

The article reports on a study investigating influences on Australian politicians' decision making for early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy. The astronomical concept of dark matter is utilised as a metaphor for considering normalising, and therefore frequently difficult to detect and disrupt, influences implicated in politicians'…