In preparing cadets to be officers, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (CGA) is committed to developing "the whole person." CGA has increasingly developed program-specific ways to achieve educational goals and learning outcomes. While character development and ethical education have long been important learning outcomes, today's CGA curriculum…

This paper reports on a case study that was undertaken to discover not only the belief and intent behind the everyday opportunities that four exemplary teachers offered their high performing students but what activities they incorporated into their everyday lessons in an attempt to make sense of how aesthetic experiences may enhance learning. The…

In this article, the authors introduce and explicate Daisaku Ikeda's contributions to peace education. Ikeda is a Buddhist leader, peacebuilder, school founder, and prolific author whose six decades of contributions to peace education have had a global impact in practice but have remained unexamined in the extant, particularly Anglophone,…

Educators' expectations and understandings of parental involvement in our nation's schools are often disconnected from the reality of students' home lives. This qualitative study purports that educators often lose opportunities to more fully understand and serve students, particularly when perceptions of parental involvement and…

In the age of educational accountability, national and statewide measures are assumed to secure and improve the educational quality. However, educators often wonder how much a new accountability measure may improve the actual teaching and learning practices when the agents of change (teachers) are not active participants of such educational…

The International Baccalaureate (IB) organisation, through its three programmes (Primary Years Programme, Middle Years Programme and pre-university Diploma Programme), aims to develop students who contribute to a more peaceful world through promoting intercultural understanding and respect. The aim of the study on which this article is based was…

Serious re-examination of participatory traditions of democracy is long overdue. Iconically central to such traditions of democratic education is the practice of whole School Meetings. More usually associated with radical work within the private sector, School Meetings are here explored in detail through two examples from publicly funded…

In this paper, the writer discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the two dominant research methods in social sciences; quantitative and qualitative paradigms. The natures of two paradigms are quite different so this leads many researchers to discuss these issues in a comparative way. This paper tackles the knowledge and understanding of…

There has been much debate on the concept of student as customer/consumer in higher education but little empirical research, most of which lacks a solid theoretical framework. This article summarises the key arguments in the literature and their shortcomings, proposes a framework to analyse student perceptions and behaviour, and reports research…

English language proficiency and entry standards have dominated discussion of why many international students from Asia appear to be reluctant contributors in Australian university classrooms, a reticence that is usually understood to result from difficulty in forming and expressing their ideas in English. This paper draws on a qualitative…

This paper traces the evolution of Australia's apprenticeship and traineeship system since permanent European settlement in 1788. The system was imported from Great Britain; it has evolved and diverged in some areas but retains many of the features of the British model. Most major changes have occurred in the last 25 years. The apprenticeship…

The practice of "standardized" testing has been embedded in United States federal education policy since at least the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The roots of standardized testing in American education, grounded in Kantian "Modern Thought," can be traced to the U.S. Military Academy at…

This paper begins with a discussion of Canadian and international work that has identified a number of shortcomings with standardized assessments, which are framed within neoliberal ideology. It then explores the principles of good assessment and applies them to an analysis of British Columbia's standardized Social Studies 11 exam. It finds that…

On June 4 this year, Howard Finberg of the Poynter Institute gave a speech called "The Future of Journalism Education" at the European Journalism Centre's twentieth anniversary celebration in Maastricht, the Netherlands, in which he presented the results of a survey of journalists and journalism professors about the value of a journalism degree,…

Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., and Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, wrote in "How to Rescue Education Reform" in The New York Times on December 5 that the federal government can and should play a…