Current Perceptions of the Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Education Degrees in Counselor Preparation

Results of a survey of program coordinators of counselor preparation programs addressing current perceptions regarding the doctor of education and doctor of philosophy degrees are presented and implications are discussed.     

Information Studies for Engineers

This paper proposes objectives for information studies for engineering students derived from several years' experience of teaching this subject at Napier Polytechnic, Edinburgh. Napier's approach to information studies is described and analyzed; sample curricula are appended. Information studies programmes should have both short-and long-term objectives. In the short term to make students more effective users of their university or college library. In the long term to provide lifelong information retrieval and analysis skills which will serve the engineer throughout professional life.     

Adult learning for citizenship: towards a reconstruction of the social purpose tradition

This paper seeks to review and re-frame the idea of social purpose adult education in the context of a contemporary Risk Society and the interface between modernist and postmodernist influences on learning. After interrogating and critiquing the social purpose tradition in adult education, it relates this to the changing nature and widening scope of adult learning within a developing Learning Society. The paper puts forward the idea of Adult Learning for Citizenship as a way of maintaining and reconstructing social purpose learning within a Risk Society and as a necessary challenge and counter-focus to the dominant discourse of Lifelong Learning shaped by the economic imperative and framed very much in terms of human capital. In developing this argument, the paper proposes a new framework for Adult Learning for Citizenship which consists of four different but overlapping dimensions of social purpose learning: learning for inclusive citizenship, for pluralistic citizenship, for reflexive citizenship and for active citizenship. Within this framework, it develops new rationales for social purpose adult learning linked to instructive examples of practice from a range of international contexts. In conclusion, it examines the implications of such a framework for the praxis of adult educators.     

Moral Law and Moral Education: Defending Kantian Autonomy

In this paper, I examine why Kantian ethics has had such a hard time of it. I look at readings of Kant's moral theory that have had great force in the 20th century and conclude that these have much to do with an ensuing confusion, which has led to charges of rigidity, formality and severity. Then I demonstrate that when we make moral judgements we rely heavily on the stock of rules, norms, duties and laws that is extant in our social life. We use these as frames that are already influential in the role and scope of our anticipated moral action. We deliberate primarily by forming a maxim (principle) that must have the consent of all. We do so only occasionally, as the existing stock of rules is already in operation, helping us to reject out-of-hand outlandish or egregious maxims. Finally, I discuss, in very cursory form, some educational approaches based on this way of conceiving Kantian moral theory.