Dynamics of Faculty Engagement in the Movement for Democracy's Education at Nothern Arizona University: Backgrounds, Practices, and Future Horizons

As scholarship has become increasingly narrow and disconnected from public life, Kettering research has documented an intense sense of malaise in higher education, what Harry Boyte has called a loss of civic agency. Surprisingly, however, faculty at a few campuses have begun to self-organize to integrate civic work into their teaching and research. This study, by Blase Scarnati and Romand Coles, documents such efforts at Northern Arizona University. Rather than making civic engagement a specific project of one or two faculty, what makes this campus special is that civic engagement has taken hold across the university. Building on research by KerryAnn O'Meara, this working paper shows that civic engagement is not only fulfilling to faculty at an individual level but is starting to impact the civic culture of their institutions

Informal Education. Sociocultural Expression. and Symbolic Meaning in Popular Immigration Music Text

One February morning as I noted the events of the primary school talent show, a sixth-grade boy belted out this song made popular in two countries by the Mexican rock group, Los Bukis. It was 1987, and I was doing fieldwork in a rural Mexican immigrant-sending community I call San Felipe, for an ethnography of families and their children who emigrated from Mexico to the United States[2

Present teaching stories as re-membering the humanities

he ways in which Humanities scholars talk about teaching tell something about how we interact with the past of our own discipline as well as anticipate our students’ futures. In this we express collective memories as truths of learning and teaching. As cultural artifacts of our present, such stories are worthy of excavation for what they imply about ourselves as well as messages they pass onto our successors. This paper outlines “collective re-membering” as one way to understand these stories, particularly as they present in qualitative interviews commonly being used to research higher education practice in the Humanities. It defines such collective re-membering through an interweaving of Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Wertsch and Bakhtin. It proposes that a dialogic reading between this understanding of collective re-membering and qualitative data-sets enables us to both access our discursive tendencies within the Humanities and understand the impact they might have on student engagement with our disciplines, noting that when discussing learning and teaching, we engage in collectively influenced myth-making and hagiography. The paper finishes by positing that the Humanities need to change their orientation from generating myths and pious teaching sagas towards the complex and ultimately more intellectually satisfying, articulation of learning and teaching parables

THE ROLE OF HOPE IN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ CAREER TRANSITIONS

This article offers a theoretical, empirical, and practice-oriented examination of the central role that “hope” plays in university students’ post-graduation career transitions. It first addresses the concept of career, the nature of career transitions, and the uncertainty, anxiety, and stress factors that arise during this process. The article highlights the key needs of students as they form their professional identities, develop competencies, set future goals, and access support resources. Subsequently, the text situates hope within career development theories—particularly Career Construction Theory and Social Cognitive Career Theory—and outlines the theoretical foundations of hope through the lens of positive psychology. Snyder’s Hope Theory is used to define hope in terms of goal-directed thinking, pathways thinking, and agency thinking. Emphasis is placed on how hope enhances students’ psychological well-being, transforms uncertainty into a challenge, and fosters flexibility and resilience. From a cultural perspective, the article explores economic, familial, and societal factors influencing Turkish university students’ levels of hope. It also addresses the measurement and evaluation of hope, proposes hope-based interventions, and offers recommendations for career counseling practices. Ultimately, hope emerges as a fundamental psychological resource that enables students to approach the future more constructively, adaptively, and resolutely. Keywords: Career transitions, hope, university students

Antecedents of academic performance of university students: academic engagement and psychological capital resources

Predicting academic performance is of key importance to the success, wellbeing and prosperity of students, their families, the economy, and the society at large. This study investigates the relationship between academic engagement, psychological capital (PsyCap) and academic performance. Data were collected in two different universities, one in Spain and another in Portugal. Students completed two self-report questionnaires regarding academic engagement and Psychological Capital. Academic performance was assessed through Grade Point Average, provided by the universities at the end of the exam period. The samples consisted of 389 and 243 undergraduate students, respectively. Results showed a positive relationship between academic engagement and PsyCap, on the one hand, and academic performance on the other, in both samples. Results also supported PsyCap as a full mediator in the relationship between academic engagement and academic performance. Exploration of alternative models yielded superior fit for the proposed model. Accordingly, academically engaged students were likely to experience higher levels of PsyCap, which in turn positively impacted their academic performance. The results point to the importance of considering psychological predictors, rather than the prevalent reliance on traditional predictors of academic performance

Law and norm: justice administration and the human sciences in early juvenile justice in Victoria

A recurring motif in law and legal studies literature is the relations between justice and legal administration on the one hand, and the social and human sciences on the other. Judicial and non-judicial systems of knowledge and practice are viewed as separate and distinct, as in some recent critique of the ‘New Penology’ that posit fundamental tensions between justice and welfare models of penality. Alternately, theorists have ‘de-centred’ law by focusing on the way in which problems form at the intersection of both legal and extra-legal institutions. This paper reviews the literature on the close interconnectedness of ‘welfare’ and ‘justice’ models of penal policy and ways of conceiving these relations in terms of a ‘complex’ involving justice administration and the conduct of the human sciences. It then attempts to demonstrate these relations, historically, in the ‘cross-talk’ of agencies involved in establishing the children’s court and the court clinic in Victoria. Finally, the paper argues that the specific effects of law in this particular jurisdiction were to mandate the social scientific instruments needed to construct and promote the notion of a ‘normal family’. This account may have implications for contemporary juvenile justice policy and images of family in the present

Developing an ecology of mind in design

The relationship between design and sustainability (DfS) is forever evolving: from the early focus on cleaner production processes and resource efficiencies to more recent endeavours to promote environmentally benign behaviours or to counter the increasing impacts of climate change. The uncomfortable truth though is that the majority of design activity serves market forces at a global scale and at an ever-increasing rate. Despite predictions of resource scarcity – peak oil, peak minerals, peak water – the increase in the linear transit of material through the Global economy rises year on year. Design straddles this production consumption cycle: it conceives of the processes and technologies that shape our artificial world; and it fashions the forms of that artificial world that drive a consumption ideology. Neither position is sustainable. Informed by Sterling’s rigorous exploration of different sustainable education paradigms, this paper reconstructs a design literacy that has the capacity to realize effective transitions for the long-term wellbeing of environment, biodiversity and humankind

Embedding sustainability through systems thinking in practice: some experiences from the Open University

One initiative that has emerged during the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through the work of the Open University Systems group has been its postgraduate programme in Systems Thinking and Practice (STiP). Built on some forty years’ experience of systems teaching and research at the Open University (OU), this open learning, distance taught programme is designed to develop students’ abilities to tackle complex messy situations, to provide skills to think more holistically and to work more collaboratively to avoid systemic failures. This paper critically reviews the trajectory of this programme –its past, present and future. It discusses the STiP programme’s many boundaries with other programmes and across sectors. Challenges of epistemology, ethics and purpose are explored, in relation to education for sustainability. The programme’s many and varied teaching and learning processes are explicated. The pedagogy of the STiP programme is grounded in a diverse range of students’ experiences and needs that by no means all focus explicitly, or primarily, on sustainability or sustainable development. Many OU students study part-time alongside their other commitments, both work and community-based. STiP students are all interested in systems and learning. But what STiP is a part of for them varies considerably. Students come mainly from the UK and rest of Europe. Many of their interactions are online through several different fora. A diverse, active and critical OU STiP alumni community has developed, initiated by the early graduates of the programme. Academics responsible for the programme also participate in this community’s deliberations, at the invitation of student alumni. In this paper, the authors build on their various experiences of the STiP programme and re-explore its contexts and boundaries from an ESD point of view. They use some of the systems heuristics that they teach, to critically reflect on both what is being achieved through this programme in relation to education for sustainability and what they and some of their past students and associate lecturers think ought to be occurring in this respect as they go forward

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches

Preparing adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses urban charter schools to analyze, navigate, and challenge race and class inequality

Background/Context: Sociopolitical development (SPD) refers to the processes by which an individual acquires the knowledge, skills, emotional faculties, and commitment to recognize and resist oppressive social forces. A growing body of scholarship has found that such sociopolitical capabilities are predictive in marginalized adolescents of a number of key outcomes, including resilience, academic achievement, and civic engagement. Many scholars have long argued that schools and educators have a central role to play in fostering the sociopolitical development of marginalized adolescents around issues of race and class inequality. Other scholars have investigated school-based practices for highlighting race and class inequality that include youth participatory-action research, critical literacy, and critical service-learning. Objective of Study: The present study sought to add to the existing scholarship on schools as opportunity structures for sociopolitical development. Specifically, this study considered the role of two different schooling models in fostering adolescents' ability to analyze, navigate, and challenge the social forces and institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Setting: The six high schools participating in the present study were all urban charter public high schools located in five northeastern cities. All six schools served primarily low-income youth of color and articulated explicit goals around fostering students' sociopolitical development. Three of these high schools were guided by progressive pedagogy and principles, and three were guided by no-excuses pedagogy and principles. Research Design: The present study compared the sociopolitical development of adolescents attending progressive and no-excuses charter high schools through a mixed methods research design involving pre-post surveys, qualitative interviews with participating adolescents and teachers, and ethnographic field notes collected during observations at participating schools. Results: On average, adolescents attending progressive high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their ability to analyze the causes of racial inequality, but adolescents attending no-excuses high schools demonstrated more significant shifts in their sense of efficacy around navigating settings in which race and class inequality are prominent. Neither set of adolescents demonstrated significant shifts in their commitment to challenging the social forces or institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Conclusions: Both progressive and no-excuses schools sought to foster adolescents' commitment to challenging race and class inequality, but focused on different building blocks to do so. Further research is necessary to understand the pedagogy and practices that show promise in catalyzing adolescents' analytic and navigational abilities into a powerful commitment to collective social action-the ultimate goal of sociopolitical development