In this chapter, the authors consider various teaching roles that student affairs professionals may fulfill in learning communities, as well as the potential professional development that results from involvement.

Theory of mind (ToM) is key to the development of one's social skills. Without ToM, children (or adults) cannot understand or infer the thoughts, feelings, or intentions of others. A lack of ToM skills is considered by some to be a core deficit in autism. ToM affects all interpersonal interactions as well as academics, daily living, following…

Autism is characterized by deficits in pretend play, perspective taking, initiating and responding to others, and other profound social impairments. As the incidence of children being identified with autism increases, so does the need for effective interventions that target social skills development. Over the last decade, social skills…

This interdisciplinary project examined how students think and feel about their learning in race-related diversity courses. Students in four classes (literature, psychology, geography) reflected on cognitive and affective dimensions of their own and their classmates' learning. The Color Blind Racial Attitudes Scales (CoBRAS) confirmed qualitative…

Talking with friend about personal photographs is a recognizable as an activity in which people participate in the modern world. This dissertation presents three studies examining the locally initial person reference formulations used to refer to people in the photographs in such an activity. The first study shows how the speakers narrating the…

This article presents a collection of work that grew out of an international symposium sponsored by the History of Education Society UK and held in Hamburg in 2007. The symposium aimed to contribute to understandings of different approaches to researching the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change in respect of…

Despite considerable research on teaching and learning in higher education, the relationship between university teachers' and students' understandings of the same teaching-learning events has not been a focus. This exploratory qualitative study used individual interviews to investigate the role of conceptions of teaching, learning and knowledge in…

Diane Glancy's historical fiction, "Pushing the Bear", reconstructs one episode in the Cherokee Trails of Tears (there were actually several relocations to the west, for the Cherokee and the other eastern tribes of the same period). The Removal of eastern peoples from their ancestral lands westward to eventual resettlement in Oklahoma is…

There may be an implicit assumption amongst some New Zealand educators that minority cultures should assimilate wholly into the New Zealand way of life, shedding aspects of their own culture that conflict with the mainstream. Some others assert that encouraging minority students to maintain their culture, including language and traditions, results…

The authors examined outcomes and predictors of outcomes for 85 undergraduates in 3 helping skills classes. After training, trainees used more exploration skills in helping sessions with classmates (as assessed by perceptions of helpees and helpers/trainees as well as behavioral counts of skills), were perceived by helpees as more empathic, talked…

The author believes that effective communication is an essential factor in overcoming differences and creating an environment where people can come together to learn, work, or play. Communication on the surface seems a straightforward endeavour. In practice, it is fraught with a multitude of issues that are dependent on the parties involved, who…

Over the past fifty years, federal and state governments, colleges and universities, and other organizations have developed and supported numerous policies and practices that are designed to promote student success. Among the most extensive and visible efforts are the federally sponsored programs established under the Higher Education Act of 1965,…

As countries become increasingly interdependent, student populations in the United States are becoming more culturally diverse. These students' transnational perspectives present significant challenges to teachers, but a disconnect exists between the skills teachers need and those provided to them by colleges of education. As teacher preparation…

Bullying is a prelude to murder. Victims of bullying have resorted to extreme acts of violence in order to escape the torment that bullies have created in victims' lives. Research on empathy supports the idea that teacher empathy could ameliorate bullying in schools. This study investigated whether or not teacher empathy had an impact on…

Although video self-analysis has been used for years in teacher education, the camera has almost always focused on the preservice teacher. In this study, the researcher videotaped eight preservice teachers four times each during their student-teaching internships. One camera was focused on them while another was focused on their students. Their…