The literature on reflective journals reveals that unless instructors use reflection in an educationally meaningful way, students often view journaling as busywork. The instrument we have designed and propose here for analyzing reflective journal entries provides students with useful methods for reviewing and critiquing connections between…

The purpose of this article is to offer some reflections on the relationships between digital technologies and learning. It is argued that activities of learning, as they have been practised within institutionalized schooling, are coming under increasing pressure from the developments of digital technologies and the capacities to store, access and…

Markets have a number of uses. One increasingly important use of markets by politicians is as a means of regulating the supply and distribution of goods and services formerly supplied and distributed by governments on non-market bases. The use of markets as a regulator of higher education is not novel. However, the increased reliance on markets as…

Intrinsic to experiential learning is the challenge of empowering students to both reflectively engage with and inquire into ethical issues, while facing time, task, social, and other daily pressures. As designated "learners" in a professional setting, experiential education students typically see themselves as having little authority…

Based upon the words of small school-district superintendents, this article explores how superintendents might lead in these complex contexts. In national focus groups, thirty-five participants described their decision-making processes as resting upon "doing what's best for students," acknowledging the unique challenges of small school district…

Situational Consultation (SC) is presented as a framework for flexible integration of several models and methodologies in consultation practice by choosing an approach adapted to the specific situation. In SC, models and their characteristic role positions are considered interchangeable tools with qualitative differences in strengths and…

As educators in academic programs featuring interdisciplinary learning, the authors can attest that helping undergraduate students in an interdisciplinary studies major engage in interdisciplinary learning--that is, draw from two or more disciplines to advance understanding of a problem, question, or phenomenon--is no mean feat. Consequently, the…

Conceptions of student creativity have shifted historically as ideas about art and education have changed. The ways people think about art, including those related to creative practice, require continual reconsideration in times of change. Art educators have begun reconsidering a range of art concepts and principles to better support contemporary…

Teacher-student relationships are accepted as influential but the dynamics of those relationships are not well understood, especially with difficult students. A series of interviews were combined with classroom observations and written reflections to understand in what ways a teacher negotiated her relationship with a behaviorally challenging…

One of the most relevant strategies that shapes the education of the citizenry can be found in the formation of a historical consciousness. Yet the very idea of "historical consciousness" as a skill to be taught cannot be taken for granted. In order to disrupt the educational common sense, I will analyze the ways in which historical consciousness…

This article presents a rubric to help instructors conceptualize, implement, and assess service-learning courses. Using a first-letter mnemonic of O.P.E.R.A., the rubric incorporates principles of best practice to provide a framework for enumerating objectives (O), exploring community partnerships (P), identifying the type of service learning…

This "Research Commentary" explores the roles of theoretical and empirical work in the development of productive lines of research by elaborating on 3 main points. First, the dialectic between theory and empirical practice is highly productive for both: Theory is enriched by close attention to data, and one's understanding of empirical issues is…

The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to discover how six community college presidents who were undergraduate English majors construct the stories of their academic and professional journeys. Findings were synthesized using three themes--boundaries, connections, and transformations--as an interpretative framework. The selected presidents…

Teacher professionalization has been focused too strongly on external experts and a one-size-fits-all set of solutions that often fail to distinguish between the needs of different teachers. This article describes a research into teacher networks that might be more successful vehicles for professional development of teachers. The results show that…

If a curriculum in higher education is understood to be an educational vehicle to promote a student's development, and if a curriculum in higher education is also understood to be built in large part around a project of knowledge, then the issue arises as to the links between knowledge and student being and becoming. A distinction is made here…