Vico, Imagination and Education

This paper explores the contribution of Vico's philosophy of imagination to a practical recognition of the importance of the imagination in the conduct of human affairs in general and in education in particular. Vico's claim that the imagination is an essential component of our human nature together with the claim that all human knowledge ultimately has its origins in the imaginative activities of our forebears (a claim which has received empirical support from recent research on the history of oral cultures) provides us with the necessary philosophical basis for establishing a logical connection between imagination and education. If accepted, such a perspective would, in my view, dispel much of the skepticism that still surrounds the role of the imagination in contemporary education.     

Contradictions of interaction for wives of elderly husbands with adult dementia

The researchers used a dialectical framework to examine interviews with wives whose elderly husbands experienced adult dementia from Alzheimer's disease and related disorders (ADRD), centering on how wives coped communicatively with their husbands' illness. These "married widows" experienced a primary contradiction between their husbands' physical presence and cognitive/emotional absence. Interwoven with the presence-absence contradiction were three additional contradictions: certainty-uncertainty, openness-closedness, and past-present. Results describe the ways these wives communicatively negotiated the web of contradictions as they interacted in the present with husbands they once knew. Applications for practitioners and caregivers working with ADRD patients and their wives, including formal and informal support, understanding, and managing contradictions, and ways to more effectively interpret ADRD patients' communication, are discussed.     

Influences of Institutional Expenditure Patterns on the Development of Students' Leadership Competencies

The central purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the expenditure patterns of over 300 colleges and universities and changes in students' perceptions of their leadership abilities over a 4-year period. Our findings, unlike those of most earlier studies, suggest that institutional expenditure patterns do have a statistically significant, albeit modest, influence on the growth of students' leadership abilities. These atypical findings, in the context of prior studies, may be due to conceptual and methodological attributes of this study that sought to alleviate the deficiencies in previous research noted by Wenglinsky, namely, the use of path analytic procedures to examine the indirect and direct effects of institutional expenditure patterns and distinguishing among different types of expenditure categories. The implications of these findings for those who study the effects of college on students and those responsible for promoting student learning are discussed.     

Fissures in the Federal Structure? The Case of the University of Wales

The paper describes the evolution of the University of Wales, and describes the attempts made at the end of the 1980s to instigate university-wide planning. These arrangements were, however, of short duration and have recently been reviewed and revised. A degree of tension and instability is endemic in all federations and 'Wales' is no exception. Its large colleges are impatient of central control and planning, and the Welsh Funding Council is unsympathetic to an increase in the sphere of influence of the federal university. Such factors are fissiparous forces, but they have to be set against the symbolic importance of the University of Wales as a means of representing and giving expression to Welsh national feeling.