From the day they arrive on campus, college students spend four years-or sometimes more-making decisions that shape every aspect of their academic and social lives. Whether choosing a major or a roommate, some students embrace decision-making as an opportunity for growth, while others seek to minimize challenges and avoid risk. Practice for Life builds a compelling case that a liberal arts education offers students a complex, valuable process of self-creation, one that begins in college but continues far beyond graduation. Sifting data from a five-year study that followed over two hundred students at seven New England liberal arts colleges, the authors uncover what drives undergraduates to become engaged with their education. They found that students do not experience college as having a clear beginning and end but as a continuous series of new beginnings. They start and restart college many times, owing to the rhythms of the academic calendar, the vagaries of student housing allocation, and other factors. This dynamic has drawbacks as well as advantages. Not only students but also parents and faculty place enormous weight on some decisions, such as declaring a major, while overlooking the small but significant choices that shape students' daily experience. For most undergraduates, deep engagement with their college education is at best episodic rather than sustained. Yet these disruptions in engagement provide students with abundant opportunities for reflection and course-correction as they learn to navigate the future uncertainties of adult life.

Race, Gender, and Curriculum Theorizing: Working in Womanish Ways recognizes and represents the significance of Black feminist and womanist theorizing within curriculum theorizing. In this collection, a vibrant group of women of color who do curriculum work reflect on a Black feminist/womanist scholar, text, and/or concept, speaking to how it has both influenced and enriched their work as scholar-activists. Black feminist and womanist theorizing plays a dynamic role in the development of women of color in academia, and gets folded into our thinking and doing as scholar-activists who teach, write, profess, express, organize, engage community, educate, do curriculum theory, heal, and love in the struggle for a more just world.

Critical thinking is a major and enduring aspect of higher education and the development of criticality in students has long been a core aim. However, understandings of criticality are conceptually and empirically unclear. The book combines a well developed conceptual discussion of the nature of criticality appropriate for the twenty-first century, the extent to which it is attainable by arts and social science undergraduates, and the paths by which it is developed during students' higher education experiences. Drawing upon empirical accounts and case studies of teaching and learning in different disciplines, this book critically analyses higher education curriculum and policy documentation to explore higher educational processes, encouraging a re-evaluation of practice and educational values, and enabling the development of curricula which incorporate systematic attention to the development of student criticality. This book proposes a rounded conceptual vision of criticality in higher education for the twenty-first century.

Despite improved access to higher education for women, the distribution of women and men varies considerably between different fields of study. The chapters in this edited collection explore the participation status of women in higher education across the varying socio-economic and sociological backgrounds observed in different countries and regions. Diving into the differing social and state intervention policies, individual motives of participation and additional gender inequalities including regional and ethnic disparities, this book offers readers a better understanding of the drivers of gendered trends in higher education, such as the evidently low presence of women in certain scientific and technical disciplines. The analysis focuses on the social construction of gender differences, as well as the roles played by the economy, culture, religion, legal background, and the internal dynamics of society. Ultimately, this book provides a comprehensive overview of recent developments concerning the presence of women in higher education in both developed and developing countries, resulting in a clear picture of the current situation, and how the future might look.

They're everywhere in the academy: young, bright women mentored by older scholars, usually men, who attempt to mold them into their own masculine ideals. Janice Hocker Rushing's study of over 200 women and their life transformations is the subject of this eloquent book. Using the tropes of mythology and Jungian psychology, the author characterizes the many paths these women's academic lives take: as Muse for a faltering older scholar, as Mistress or wife, as the dutiful academic daughter. Their resistance to this power differential also takes many forms: as a Veiled Woman, silent in public but active in private, or the Siren, using her sexuality to beat the system. Ultimately, Rushing arrives at the myth of Eros and Psyche, where women's self understanding and personal development turns her erotic mentoring into an autonomous, whole, and free life, unfettered by any man. These women's stories and Rushing's literary and literate framing of their lives will ring true to many in the university.

Critiques and calls for reform have existed for decades within music education, but few publications have offered concrete suggestions as to how things might be done differently. Motivated by a desire to do just that, College Music Curricula for a New Century considers what a more inclusive, dynamic, and socially engaged curriculum of musical study might look like in universities. Editor Robin Moore creates a dialogue among faculty, administrators, and students about what the future of college music instruction should be and how teachers, institutions, and organizations can transition to new paradigms. Including contributions from leading figures in ethnomusicology, music education, theory/composition, professional performance, and administration, College Music Curricula for a New Century addresses college-level curriculum reform, focusing primarily on performance and music education degrees, and offer ideas and examples for a more inclusive, dynamic, and socially engaged curriculum of applied musical study. This book will appeal to thoughtful faculty looking for direction on how to enact reform, to graduate students with investment in shaping future music curricula, and to administrators who know change is on the horizon and seek wisdom and practical advice for implementing change. College Music Curricula for a New Century reaches far beyond any musical subdiscipline and addresses issues pertinent to all areas of music study.

This book argues a new and more complex interpretation of the development and manifestations of the liberal arts movement in American higher education during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Specifically, the book elucidates the under-explored yet formative role that the University of Virginia and its 1935 'Virginia Plan' played, both in fostering the liberal arts movement, and as a representative institution of the broader interaction colleges and universities had with this movement.
The Virginia Plan challenged contemporaries elective curricula by promoting the development of a prescribed great books and honors tutorial course of study. It also introduced 'Oxbridge'-style honors tutorial programs to American public higher education, a development that has been essentially ignored by educational historians. The importance of this book comes from building upon and improving the historical literature on the liberal arts movement in specific, and higher education curricular reform in general. By including, for the first time, mathematical and scientific classics, the Virginia Plan fundamentally altered the content of the western canon, and in doing so, changed the notion of what was considered a 'great book'.

In this innovative fusion of practice and criticism, Jeremy Scott shows how insights from stylistics and linguistics can enrich the craft of creative writing. Focusing on crucial methodological issues that confront the practicing writer, this book introduces writers to key topics from stylistics, provides in-depth analysis of a wide range of writing examples and includes practical exercises to help develop creative writing skills. Thoroughly revised and expanded throughout, this updated edition more clearly lays out specialist ideas and technical terms within the field of linguistics, and features both greater focus on the creative process and more practical exercises to help writers engage with ideas in their work. Clear and accessible, this invaluable guide will give both students and writers a greater critical awareness of the creative possibilities of language.

Writing a doctoral thesis can be an arduous and confusing process. Writing a Watertight Thesis helps you to demystify many doctoral concerns and provides a clear framework for developing a sound structure for your thesis, making your thesis watertight, clear, and defensible. Now with the added experience of Mark A. Fabrizi, the authors draw on their extensive experience of supervising and examining numerous doctorates from an internationally diverse and multicultural student body around the world, including in Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the USA. The chapters on preparing a research proposal, the viva process, and developing publishable articles out of your thesis have all been updated, and new chapters have been added to demystifying common concerns: Do I have what it takes to do a doctorate? What is doctoral originality? Is my work of doctoral quality? What kind of relationship should I cultivate with my supervisor/advisors? Throughout the book you'll find examples showcasing central research questions and the sub-research questions derived from them, descriptions of different ways that doctoral students have achieved success, and exercises that will enable you to apply what you are reading directly to your own thesis.

The US higher education system is on the verge of a revolution, so some observers claim. Archibald and Feldman, leading analysts, provide an incisive overview of the challenges facing and possibilities for America's universities and colleges in their training future generations. And they demonstrate that our higher education system is resilient and adaptable enough to weather the internal, external, and technological threats without changing campuses beyond recognition. The Road Ahead examines the threats posed to the current health of higher education by rising tuition and falling government support, as well as from new digital technologies rippling through the entire economy. Some predict disaster, pointing to high costs, exploding debt, and a digital tsunami that supposedly will combine to disrupt and sweep away many of the nation's higher education institutions, or change them beyond recognition. Archibald and Feldman provide a more nuanced view. They argue that the bundle of services that four-year colleges and universities provide will retain its value for the traditional age range of college students. Less certain, Archibald and Feldman argue, is whether the system will continue to be a force for social and economic opportunity. The threats are most dire at schools that disproportionately serve America's most underprivileged students. At the same time, growing income inequality reduces the ability of many students and their families to pay for higher education. Archibald and Feldman suggest a range of policy options at the state and federal level that will help America's higher education system continue to fulfill its promise.

"What a delight to read David Gooblar's book on teaching and learning. He wraps important insights into a story of discovery and adventure." -Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are taught to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom. There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. The Missing Course offers a field guide to the state-of-the-art in teaching and learning and is packed with insights to help students learn in any discipline. Wary of the folk wisdom of the faculty lounge, David Gooblar builds his lessons on the newest findings and years of experience. From active-learning strategies to ways of designing courses to get students talking, The Missing Course walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much your students actually learn. "Warm and empirically based, comprehensive but accessible, student-centered and also scientific. We're so lucky to have Gooblar as a guide." -Sarah Rose Cavanagh, author of The Spark of Learning "Goes beyond critique, offering a series of activities, approaches, and strategies that instructors can implement. His wise and necessary book is a long defense of the idea that a university can be a site of the transformation of self and society." -Los Angeles Review of Books "An invaluable source of insight and wisdom on what it means to work with students. We've needed this book for a long time." -John Warner, author of Why They Can't Write

Hookup culture has become widespread on college campuses, and Catholic colleges are no exception. Indeed, most studies have found no difference between Catholic colleges and their secular counterparts when it comes to hooking up, despite the fact that most students report being unhappy with casual sexual encounters. Drawing on a survey of over 1000 students from 26 institutions, as well as follow-up interviews, Jason King argues that religious culture on Catholic campuses can, in fact, have an impact on the school's hookup culture, but the relationship is complicated. In Faith with Benefits, King shows the complex way these dynamics play out at Catholic colleges and universities. There is no straightforward relationship, for example, between orthodoxy and hookup culture-some of the schools with the weakest Catholic identities also have weaker hookup cultures. And not all students see hookup culture the same way. Some see a hookup is just a casual encounter, but others see hooking up as a gateway to a relationship. Faith with Benefits gives voice to students and so reveals how their faith, the faith of their friends, and the institutional structures of their campus give rise to different hookup cultures. In doing so, King addresses the questions of students who don't know where to turn for practical guidance on how to navigate an ever-shifting network of hookups.

The field of Digital Humanities is becoming more exciting as the number of low-cost or free mobile and desktop applications flood the market allowing users to accomplish tasks that only a few years ago were either not possible or required complicated coding or high-end computing power. The range of these applications provides access to digital communications, advanced visualization, data storage and retrieval at unprecedented levels. Digital Humanists are incorporating these tools as part of our teaching, research, and creative expression. This research volume approaches the topic from a perspective that will be attractive to those just beginning, through the step by step guides to set up and use of a variety of tools with accompanying objectives, and to those who are more advanced, through more challenging applications and their use for teaching and research. Furthermore this text will be of interest to administrators or those sceptical about the Digital Humanities, as the essays will highlight studies and research by experts in the field while maintaining the particular perspective on literary studies and Digital Africana Studies. This volume includes an introduction to the Digital Humanities and chapters on The Social Web, Communications, Visualization and Collaboration.

This title offers an engaging look at the debates surrounding the benefits and dangers of the increasing use of technology in eduaction. "New Technology and Education" explores the benefits and dangers of the increasing use of technology in education, drawing on different cultural perspectives from across the globe to consider a variety of viewpoints. The reader is encouraged to engage with each facet of the debate considering the philosophical, psychological and sociological implications of the relationship between technology and education. Recent debates and developments are considered, including: What is the relationship between creativity, education and new technology? Are subject boundaries blurred by the use of new technologies? How do we plan for technologies becoming redundant? Reflective exercises, interviews, chapter summaries and useful websites encourage and support student learning and the application of new concepts. This series presents an authoritative, coherent and focused collection of core texts to introduce the contemporary issues that are covered in Education Studies, and related programmes. Each book develops a key theme in contemporary education, such as: Multiculturalism; The social construction of childhood; Urban education; eLearning and multimedia; and, Language and literacy. A key feature of this series is the critical exploration of education in times of rapid change, with links made between such developments in wider social, cultural, political and economic contexts. Further, contextualised extracts from important primary texts, such as Bourdieu, Piaget and Vygotsky, will ensure students' exposure to dominant contemporary theories in the field of education. Grounded in a strong conceptual, theoretical framework and presented in an accessible way with the use of features such as case studies, activities and visual devices to encourage and support student learning and the application of new concepts, this series will serve well as collection of core texts for the Education Studies student and lecturer.

This book outlines successful transformation strategies and efforts that have been developed to assist the South African higher education system in moving beyond its post-apartheid state of being. Through case studies authored by South African higher education scholars and scholars affiliated with South African institutions, this book aims to highlight the status of transformation in the South African higher education system; demonstrate the variety of transformation initiatives used in academic institutions across South Africa; and offer recommendations to further advance this transformation. Written for scholars and advanced students of higher education in international settings, this volume aims to support quality research that benefits the demographic composition of South African academics and students, and offers lessons that can inform higher education transformation in similarly multicultural societies.

More Indigenous Australians are realizing their potential but many remain significantly disadvantaged compared to other Australians on all socio-economic indicators and one of the most disadvantaged peoples in the world. Increasing successful outcomes in Indigenous Higher Education is recognized as vital in addressing this disadvantage and closing the gap by creating a new generation of Indigenous Australians armed with a tertiary education. Whilst there is widespread agreement that disadvantage needs to be addressed and success achieved for Indigenous Australians, effective solutions remain elusive. This volume offers diverse analyses and research-derived new solutions for seeding success. The volume presents informed opinion underpinned by demonstrated theory, research, and practice and is written in an engaging and accessible style that will advance understandings of contemporary issues and point the way forward to seeding success. Encompassing a collation of chapters from leading researchers and thinkers, this book illuminates the complexity of Indigenous Higher Education issues and serves to identify successful solutions that have important international implications.

There has been an unprecedented global surge in the numbers of young people going to university over the last few years and, for a multitude of different reasons, higher education worldwide is in a state of flux. To cope effectively, the universities of today will need to be more responsive to the needs of growing numbers of students and better attuned to their requirements. Many complex factors are driving strategic change and influencing institutional decision-making processes, but what is clear is that students are becoming increasingly fundamental to supporting change processes at both national and local levels, and that institutions are working in collaboration with students in new ways in order to understand and improve the learning environment. Within this context, 'student engagement' is the catch-phrase of the moment. This book highlights some of the national and global agendas and issues, from emerging sectors, to the meaning of student engagement for different stakeholders. It provides a backdrop to themes of student engagement as well as examples of innovative and inspiring means of engaging with students in practice, empowering them to take responsibility within decision-making processes and enabling them to lead and deliver change.

This volume examines key considerations for effective online course redesign. Using a 4-phase approach, Redesigning Courses for Online Delivery informs thinking, inspires creativity, and structures decisions to drive the development of high quality online learning experiences. Both scholarly and practical, it provides a comprehensive approach to redesign useful to novices and veterans alike.

More Indigenous Australians are realizing their potential but many remain significantly disadvantaged compared to other Australians on all socio-economic indicators and one of the most disadvantaged peoples in the world. Increasing successful outcomes in Indigenous Higher Education is recognized as vital in addressing this disadvantage and closing the gap by creating a new generation of Indigenous Australians armed with a tertiary education. Whilst there is widespread agreement that disadvantage needs to be addressed and success achieved for Indigenous Australians, effective solutions remain elusive. This volume offers diverse analyses and research-derived new solutions for seeding success. The volume presents informed opinion underpinned by demonstrated theory, research, and practice and is written in an engaging and accessible style that will advance understandings of contemporary issues and point the way forward to seeding success. Encompassing a collation of chapters from leading researchers and thinkers, this book illuminates the complexity of Indigenous Higher Education issues and serves to identify successful solutions that have important international implications.

This volume of the "International Perspectives on Education and Society" series comparatively examines various two-year and community college institutions worldwide. While these institutions are called by different names and may not all be structured the same around the world, their core mission remains consistently: to respond to the needs of their local community. Inspired by the German Volkshochschule, founded in 1844, this model is now throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, Thailand and other nations. While the community college "label" is debatable and possibly controversial in and of itself, these institutions all serve the needs of their local communities by bridging the gap between academic and technical training with open and accessible learning. Students served by these institutions come from various socioeconomic backgrounds including age, race, culture, gender, and income levels. Two-year and community colleges adapt and institutionalize differently to meet various community needs, whether they provide students with technical training, the ability to transfer to four-year higher education institutions, remedial education or lifelong learning opportunities. This volume analyzes the ways this model has served and continues to serve communities in different international contexts for similar purposes.

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism - and semiotics, more broadly - as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.

There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research, this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical messages, showing how presumptions about theory's relation to practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula. The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal education, and the agency of students and faculty.

This book offers eight clear-sighted essays critical of racial "diversity" preferences in American higher education. Unlike more conventional books on the subject, which are essentially apologies for racial reverse discrimination, this volume forthrightly exposes the corrosive effects of identity politics on college and university life. The fact-filled and hard-hitting chapters are by Heather Mac Donald, Peter N. Kirsanow, Peter W. Wood, Lance Izumi and Rowena Itchon, John Ellis, Carissa Mulder, and the editors Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzschild.

Decolonizing University Teaching and Learning considers apprehensions around decolonizing and offers a summary of key arguments within critical discussion around its meaning and value through engagement with a growing body of literature. The contextually based and complex discussions concerning decolonization means one cannot be guided through the process in a particular way. Therefore, the text is not intended to be read as a handbook for decolonizing teaching and learning, nor is it an anthropologically oriented text. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the book highlights the benefits of decolonizing teaching and learning for all students and staff. This book offers up the TRAAC model as an entry point for challenging conversations. By bringing together questions raised within existing scholarly discussions, the TRAAC model provides prompts to instigate deeper reflections around decolonizing by way of supporting colleagues to start a productive dialogue. Through these critically reflective and reflexive conversations, action-oriented discussions can simultaneously take place. The value of this book lies in the contributions from authors based across a number of universities and disciplines. Reflecting on personal experiences, staff and student relationships, subject specific challenges, and wider issues within HE, the contributions are grounded in the employment of the TRAAC model as a mode of entry into discussing particular issues around decolonizing teaching and learning.

This book links theory, policy and practice in a critical examination of the relationship between the professional identity, knowledge, learning needs and research experience of teacher educators. The book concludes by drawing these themes together as a means to support the induction and further professional development of teacher educators. Teacher educators have, until relatively recently, been invisible in the eyes of policy makers with little attention given to their induction and professional learning needs. This book draws on a growing body of research on this diverse profession within a context where, in many countries, the school practicum plays an increasing role in the training and education of teachers. The recent policy gaze of the European Commission has added further momentum to the attention being given to teacher education, its educators and the role they play in pupil achievement. However for many beginning teacher educators little support is offered at the start of their new career trajectories in schools, colleges or universities. This book examines some of the issues surrounding these career transitions and the implications they have for professional learning. It serves as an invaluable yet accessible source of knowledge for all those interested in the professional learning needs and recognition of this heterogeneous occupation.