Split Scenes,Converging Visions: The Ethical Terrains Where PAR and Borderlands Scholarship Meet

This paper examines theoretical linkages between Anzaldua’s borderland scholarship, in particular the notion of mestiza consciousness, and participatory action research. Two studies with high school and college co-researchers falling along different points of the PAR spectrum are described to illustrate these conceptual linkages. Points in the process including critical decisions in crafting questions and conducting actions, reflections on who are the knowledge holders and producers, and struggles with responsibilities and vulnerabilities doing this work, are discussed through a lens of mestiza consciousness.

Re-visioning Action: Participatory Action Research and Indigenous Theories of Change

This article observes that participatory action research (PAR), by nature of being collaborative, necessitates making explicit theories of change that may have otherwise gone unseen or unexamined. The article explores the limits of the reform/revolution paradox on actions and theories of change in PAR. Citing examples from two recent youth PAR projects on educational issues, the author submits that when met with such a paradox, one can only move to a new vantage point. Four alternative vantage points, drawn from Indigenous epistemologies, are illustrated; they are sovereignty, contention, balance, and relationship.

Sreyashi Jhumki Basu: Building a more equitable world through science education

Dr. Sreyashi Jhumki Basu was a scholar committed to equity and social justice in science education who passed away in December 2008. In this essay, I describe Jhumki’s research and the call to action her life’s work has laid out for the science education community. In particular, I draw attention to the role of critical science agency in learning and the democratic science pedagogy model that Jhumki developed to support students in crafting such agency.

Urban Immigrant Students: How Transnationalism Shapes Their World Learning

This article examines the lives of three transnational second-generation immigrant Latinas who reside in urban centers in California and maintain close ties to Mexico. Drawing from a participatory research and ethnographic study, I provide evidence of the out-of-school learning that they experience and how this shapes their notions of global citizenship. Although schools have begun to slowly recognize transnational immigrant students, many urban educators whose cities are palpably transformed by immigrants have not fully connected the promise of such a global lifestyle and its potential for instruction in the classroom.

Homicides in Higher Education: Some Reflections on the Moral Mission of the University

This essay on the ethical mission of the university explores extremes of anti-social behavior, visiting numerous crime scenes before concluding that contemporary higher education has lost the capacity—and even the language—for taking character development seriously. In his attempt to determine whether coincidently traditional-liberationist-diversiphilic-apathetic colleges can morally improve their charges, Peter Wood collects a wrenching compendium of violent academic mayhem.

“Coming Out” in a Feminist Classroom

Ideological differences in a writing class evoke the passion of political sensitivities. A graduate student tells of “coming out” as a pro-life advocate in an essay before his feminist classmates and professor. The exchange created instant and irreconcilable enemies, but he also found some unexpected support from a hesitant voice within that classroom.

Exam Scams and Classroom Flimflams: Urban Legends as an Alternative Lens for Viewing the College Classroom Experience

Campus-based urban legends have the potential to convey and construct student culture in higher education. Basic qualitative and humanistic research methods were used to collect, analyze, and interpret legends related to the academic experience of collegiate life.

Identifying the Role of the International Consortium “MIT/ LINC” in Supporting the Integration of ICT in Higher Education in Emerging Countries

The goal of this research effort is to provide insights on what core needs and difficulties exist toward the implementation of ICT in higher education in emerging countries and how a consortium like LINC can best support these efforts. An exploratory research design combining a survey, on-site interviews, participant observation and document analysis were employed to answer the research questions. Main challenges in establishing technology- based learning environments were identified in the area of pedagogies, finances, technological infrastructure, cultural change, organization, and management. LINC, as an non-political organization embedded in an academic environment, can take an important role in facilitating the dialogue among participants through various platforms, take an active role in promoting joint programs and assist with efforts to “localize” tools and practice.

“Not Censorship but Selection”: Censorship and/as Prizing

This essay calls for a fresh critical approach to the topic of censorship, suggesting that anticensorship efforts, while important and necessary, function much like literary prizing. The analysis draws especially on James English’s recent study The Economy of Prestige. There are two central arguments: first, that the librarian ethic of “selection”––introduced by Lester Asheim in 1953 as a counterpoint to censorship––has contributed to the unfortunate construction of the censor as a “moron”; and second, that anticensorship efforts more generally tend toward uncritical canon-making, attributing value to books simply because they’ve been censored or (more typically) challenged.

Strategies and Intervening Factors Influencing Student Social Interaction and Experiential Learning in an Interdisciplinary Research Team

Faculty have long incorporated students into interdisciplinary research projects to meet increasingly common demands for collaborative research by federal funding agencies. Despite the critical role of experiential learning in building student research skills and capacity, few have explored social interaction mechanisms used to facilitate student experiential learning in an interdisciplinary research team. Drawing upon the New Rural Economy project as a case study, interviews with 13 students from eight Canadian universities were conducted to explore these social interaction mechanisms. While findings revealed an array of social interaction mechanisms used to develop student learning networks, the quality of these mechanisms were mixed; thereby influencing the utilization of these networks for guidance and feedback. As faculty organize social interaction mechanisms, they should consider factors such as previous experience, student and faculty relationships, finances, language, gender, ethnicity, and other issues, that will have an impact on student engagement with experiential learning.

Technology in Support of Collaborative Learning

This paper reviews the research conducted in the last 20 years on the application of technology in support of collaborative learning in higher education. The review focuses primarily on studies that use Internet-based technologies and social interaction analysis. The review provides six sets of observations/recommendations regarding methodology, empirical evidence, and research gaps and issues that may help focus future research in this emerging field of study.

On ‘developing a framework for critical science agency through case study in a conceptual physics context’

This paper provides a review of research that examines the development and expression of agency in and through high-school physics. The interchange offers realizations and questions brought to mind by the reading of the research and provides written comments connected to specific sections of the paper germane to my own theoretical perspective. Within the context of this commentary, raised issues are discussed in a dialogic manner in order to elucidate deeper understanding concerning the empirical investigation presented in the study. As a final point, a brief synopsis is put forward regarding some of the contributions that studies such as the one reviewed have to offer for providing equitable access to science for all students.

The Pedagogy and Problems of Jane Andrews’s The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air (1861)

This essay examines the interplay between Jane Andrews’s purpose and her pedagogy in The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air. The book demonstrates the teaching strategies she learned at the First State Normal in Massachusetts, moving from what the child knows to new material, engaging the child in personal observation and experiment, and introducing broad concepts before using precise terms. However, a sense of international children as distinctly “other” emerges from the author’s use of the white American reader as the point of comparison with the children of color she writes about.

Retooling Education: Testing and the Liberal Arts

The motivation and methodology for measuring intelligence have changed repeatedly in the modern history of large-scale student testing. Test makers have always sought to identify raw aptitude for cultivation, but they have never figured out how to promote excellence while preserving equality. They’ve settled for egalitarianism, which gives rise to “culturally fair” tests that substitute vagaries for knowledge, deprive students of any real appreciation for language, and trivialize education. Robert Jackson yearns for traditional oratorical approaches to schooling that venerate and imitate essential, time-tested masters. Unfortunately, he writes, such an education defies measurement with today’s multiple-choice instruments.

Measurement issues in designing and implementing longitudinal evaluation studies

Evaluation is required for almost all educational activities or programs, particularly for federal- and state-funded programs. Such a requirement is quite understandable given that we need to know what has been done actually produces its intended purposes. However, it is almost impossible that bad data can provide justified conclusions, and there are many evaluation studies that are circumvented by the fact that evaluation is a post-hoc test of educational activities. Thus, it is hard to produce the rigor and relevance of an evaluation study that may need good design and analysis to even provide partial answers to the original questions. The goal of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with some of the insights that may serve as a useful guide for designing and implementing longitudinal evaluation in a way that can improve the likelihood of high quality data for future evaluation studies.

Using interpretative meta-ethnography to explore the relationship between innovative approaches to learning and their influence on faculty understanding of teaching

Faculty experiences of innovative approaches to learning and the changes to their knowledge emerging from such experiences constitute an important area of inquiry that has to date largely been ignored or has been approached with research methods ill-suited to examining such experiences. This paper adopts interpretative meta-ethnography as its research framework to investigate the changes to faculty knowledge that occur when they adopt problem-based learning (PBL). The paper presents themes that emerged through the analysis and argues for future inquiry.

Intellectual innovation or intellectual retrofitting: on agency, culture and access to science education

A great challenge in education research involves the difficulty of differentiating between studies that apply commonly understood theoretical perspectives and recognizing studies that merely rename old theoretical frameworks. This conflict between intellectual innovation and intellectual retrofitting emerges as central to Basu, Calabrese-Barton, Clairmont, and Lock’s exploration of the relationship between critical agency and student identity development in science.