The terms "learning about" and "learning from" religion have now become firmly established in the lexicon of religious education (RE). The publication of a national Non-statutory Framework for RE in October 2004 gave them official status. But what is actually meant by these terms? Certainly teachers have been less confident…

Teaching of History of Psychology is likely to become increasingly important as the British Psychological Society's 2002 guidelines for approved undergraduate courses are implemented. Results of a survey of History of Psychology teaching during the academic year 1999-2000 are summarised and discussed in the light of these new requirements. While…

This paper argues that the teaching of a subject can change our understanding of what it means to know, to teach and learn that subject. It also argues that when our understanding is questioned and changes then academic work can become an emotionally charged endeavour. This paper reports on a study where, over a semester's teaching, around two…

This paper reports the outcomes of a study, undertaken from a phenomenographic perspective, of university academics' experiences of their own growth and development, i.e., what it means to them, what they are trying to achieve, how they go about it, why they do things that way... The outcomes presented are based on a series of interviews with…

The author is a part-time English faculty at a wealthy, 95 percent Anglo, liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and she is a candidate for a PhD in Native American studies. College administrators and her colleagues know that she is a tribally enrolled Native American (Shawnee). She used her tribal enrollment card for Form I-9 identification when…

During the past 35 years, Seymour Martin Lipset and his collaborators have generated a series of studies and reports on the political alignment in academia. They have all found the social sciences and humanities to be preponderantly Democratic. In the past decade there has been little scholarly inquiry into the political orientation of faculty.…

This paper considers the generic structure of "Conclusion" chapters in PhD theses or dissertations. From a corpus of 45 PhD theses covering a range of disciplines, chapters playing a concluding role were identified and analysed for their functional moves and steps. Most "Conclusions" were found to restate purpose, consolidate research space with a…

In the simplest terms, academic freedom means unfettered scholarly inquiry, a scholar's fundamental right of research, publication, and instruction free of institutional constraint. This indispensable principle of scholarship is the precious gift of independent intellectual judgment--an endowment of open inquiry, free investigation, speculation,…

This article proposes that we extend our information literacy instruction programs to include tenets of genre theory as a way to move toward a more critical stance in our pedagogy. By developing an anthropologist's sensitivity to culture, academic librarians can learn the characteristics of the academic disciplines and then help students learn…

The works of the Belgian neurologist and educationist Ovide Decroly (1871-1932) extended over the medical and pedagogical fields as well as both the practical-professional and the theoretical-disciplinary fields. For this reason, Decroly seemed to be a suitable starting point for a contribution to the problem outlined by Hofstetter and Schneuwly…

This article examines the role played by the conferences of the New Education Fellowship (NEF) in the emerging disciplinary field of the sciences of education between the two world wars. The NEF was a movement connecting lay enthusiasts for educational reform with major figures in the developing disciplines of psychology and education, such as…

What are the humanities, and how should they be cultivated? With respect to this crucial question, opinions differ as to how widely the humanities should be construed and pursued. Initially connoting the study of Greek and Roman classics, the concept now more generally covers arts and letters, history, and philosophy. But does it also include the…

There is a widely recognised national trend for girls to outperform boys at all levels of compulsory schooling. With few exceptions, however, most recent research has reported that, in relation to academic performance at university, men are proportionately over-represented at the First Class level. A number of general hypotheses have been put…

The paper draws on communitarian theory to suggest that the traditional strength and stability of academic identities are strongly associated with membership of communities, primarily the discipline and the university, that together constitute a coherent, bounded world. It analyses how science policies have helped to weaken these boundaries over…

This article argues that the way in which research training is affected by national policies aiming at modernizing graduate education is shaped by the way in which national characteristics of state policies, academic institutions and disciplines interact. The argument is applied in an analysis of the consequences of policy changes and higher…