University agency in peacebuilding: Perspectives on conflict and development in Kenya

In 2007, Kenya erupted into violence as a result of heavily contested elections. Because identity divisions lay at the heart of the conflict, the nation’s public universities were deeply impacted, at times pitting students, faculty, and staff against one another, and disrupting the ability of Kenyan higher education to contribute to the development process. This qualitative case study explores how faculty and administrators, at two public institutions in a conflict zone, understand and describe their university’s contributions to development. Analyzed through the lens of conflict transformation, the data reveal that the universities changed internal policies and practices to accommodate constituents impacted by the conflict and to cut across conflict lines, and that participants shifted in their thinking about the institution’s internal and external relationships and purposes. The article has two aims. It offers preliminary heuristics for peacebuilding as a university process, providing a framework of practices and policies that engage university constituencies and may transform conflict. It also shows how conflict changed participants’ perspectives about the relationships between themselves, higher education, and development in their country. Further, this article explores a connection between participant beliefs about peacebuilding and development in Kenya.     

The Limits of Persuasion: Rhetoric and Resistance in the Last Battle of the Korean War

This essay explores the case of twenty-three American POWs who refused to return to the United States at the end of the Korean War. It first highlights the role of resistance in liberal rhetorical theory and then uses resistance as a lens to analyze public discourse about the incident. Looking closely at the three most common explanations for the soldiers' turning (youth, impairment, and brainwashing), the essay shows how the debate over the nonrepatriates was fundamentally a controversy over the limits of persuasion.     

The Significance of Physical Education Content: “Sending the Message” in Physical Education Teacher Education

Mind-body dualism has likely influenced how many view human beings and their behavior—mind (i.e., thinking) is elevated over body (i.e., performing)—even in Physical Education Teacher Education. The problem is that such a perspective makes physical education content (i.e., dance, games, play, and sport) subsidiary to more “intellectual” or “academic” content. This article invites Physical Education Teacher Education faculty to consider how to effectively “send the message” to future physical educators that physical education content is valuable and respectable and in many ways epitomizes intelligent human behavior. Specifically, Physical Education Teacher Education faculty are invited to (a) challenge traditional definitions of intelligence and introduce alternative definitions, (b) participate regularly in their own playgrounds, (c) provide a sufficient dose of activity courses in their curricula, (d) teach activity courses, (e) establish a performance-oriented culture, and (f) administer performance and/or game play evaluations.     

Leading the Local: Teachers Union Presidents Chart Their Own Course

Teachers unions are among the most powerful, yet least studied, actors in public education today. Although public attention focuses on the influence of national unions, the policies that most affect teachers and schooling are bargained by local unions and school boards. Interviews with 30 recently elected local union presidents reveal that these leaders balance competing interests and obligations, from the concerns and priorities of their members to pressures from state and national affiliates. Although these presidents reaffirm the traditional union agenda, most also advocate an expanded agenda of teacher professionalism and more collaborative approaches to collective bargaining and contract management.     

Information Technology in Higher Education: Tensions and Barriers

This study examined the effects of an intervention in writing with digital interactive books. To improve the writing skills of seventh- and eighth-grade students with a learning disability in reading, we conducted a quasi-experimental study in which the students read interactive digital books (i-books), took notes, wrote summaries, and acted as reviewers of a set of i-books. A repeated-measures analysis of variance indicated that the intervention group of students significantly outperformed the control group on the following measures of writing: the holistic text quality and the summarization text quality, with large effect sizes.     

Information Technology in Education: Some Reasons for Optimism

This article identifies three innovations with great promise for improving the use of information technology in education. The Semantic Web, discourse analysis, and social network analysis are briefly described, and their potential contributions to education are highlighted. Two articles in this issue are identified as highly meritorious in promoting the integration of information technology in education.     

School Effectiveness and Effectiveness Indicators

In spite of continuing investigations, researchers have yet to satisfy practitioners, policy‐makers and the international research community about production of a defensible collection of important indicators for gauging school effectiveness. The research project described in this article had four major purposes: (a) to investigate and compare the perceptions of principals, teachers and area superintendents about the overall effectiveness of schools and effectiveness on specific dimensions; (b) to assess and compare the perceptions of these educators about the importance of the specific dimensions for overall effectiveness; (c) to assess the association between principals’ perceptions of effectiveness on, and importance, of these dimensions; and (d) to probe school‐level differences about the two types of organizations. Perceptual data were obtained from elementary and junior high school principals throughout Alberta, Canada, as well as from teachers and area superintendents in one major city. Schools were rated as most effective in maintaining an appropriate school climate, while the most important dimensions involved climate (elementary), and morale, climate and acknowledging achievements (junior high). Factor analysis produced eight underlying indicators, but it also demonstrated the complexity of the effectiveness construct. Comparisons of effectiveness and importance highlighted some important but least effective areas, such as encouraging academic success and maximizing staff satisfaction. Practical and research implications are elucidated.