This study looked to explore the access to academic social capital for those who have considering dropping out. The research utilized social network analysis, specifically ego networks, to explore how four individuals from an alternative school perceived their own social networks. Name generators, name interpreters, and name interrelators were…

The idea of social capital as the value obtainable from an individual's social relationships has been used to study many organizational and social settings, but rarely virtual environments. We used data from an online higher education institution to examine how an individual's social capital derived from her position in the social structure…

The path to human wholeness and love requires an embrace of sexuality and gender as powerful forces in human lives. This includes vigorous engagement with the life-giving and life-defying forces of sexual passion as that passion intersects with gendered identities and gendered social structures, thus opening doors for ethical reflection. The essay…

This article develops an agentic approach to activist learning and analyzes the interplay between agency and learning. The agentic approach derives from Alheit's concept of biographical learning and Emirbayer and Mische's concept of agency. The article builds on the case study of an activist's narrative to show that the development of agency is…

Research on identity in teacher education and professionalism has been a significant issue for language teacher educators in terms of their trajectories and career development. Examining identity from contextual perspectives can assist teachers in establishing a professional self in order to facilitate them to better understand and negotiate their…

This paper studies the current differences in educational expectations between urban and rural students and explores the mechanism from the individual/family and school/society perspectives. The results show significant differences in expectations between rural and urban junior high school students for going on to higher education. In addition,…

This study was conducted in order to examine the self-efficacy of school counselors-in-training and their attributions and attitudes towards poverty. The population for this study consisted of master's level school counseling students from two southeastern schools. All data were obtained via self-report measures and were collected using an…

This study presents an analysis of hidden elitism in music education through the free choice argument -- that individuals are fundamentally free to choose to study music -- as a meritocratic power structure. Qualitative Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is applied to understand music education as a social system with a special structure in which its…

Whilst the faculties of literacy and numeracy are rightly recognised as worthy of pedagogical nurturing, this article champions a more venerable articulacy -- "visualcy" -- crucial to a healthy culture, arguing that the one domain of human inquiry which distinguishes the visual arts from other disciplines is surely that surrounding the…

MacIntyre's earlier work and concern with social science enquiry not only exposes its limits, but also provides an insight into how its knowledge claims have been put to ideological use. He maintains that the institutional embodiment of these ideological ideas is the bureaucratic manager who has had a negative role to play in social structures…

This paper describes the application of a "biosocial" approach to informal health and science education. As an engagement between biological and critical social sciences, biosocial theory has sought to re-articulate human bodies as fundamentally the product of interrelationships between the biological and social dimensions of human life.…

Microaggressions in the higher education setting are a pervasive issue frequently encountered by members of marginalized cultures. The experience of microaggressions can result in negative outcomes on neural substrates, mental health, emotional health, and physical health. Furthermore, academic microaggressions can impact performance, learning,…

Language assessments are often framed as benign mechanisms needed to objectively classify people's linguistic proficiencies. In this article, I argue for the need to critically re-examine how purportedly objective institutional language assessments and our participation in them deceptively reify historical and contemporary inequities. I offer the…

In this article, David I. Backer introduces the politics of recitation as a third realm for research on recitation pedagogy, in addition to process and product. Recitation is the pattern of classroom talk where a teacher asks a question, a student responds to the question, and the teacher evaluates the response. Research on classroom talk shows…

The paper investigates the determinants of academic performance of accounting students in Ghanaian secondary and tertiary education institutions. Data analysis is based on a survey of 500 accounting students enrolled at secondary and tertiary education institutions in Ghana. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, the results indicate…