This exploratory qualitative study focused on the free responses that undergraduate students gave to the question: "Should have learned something valuable in this course, what was it?". This question is part of a survey that intended to obtain the views of the students on courses of humanistic character as part of their college…

This study applies discourse analysis to Israeli media coverage of national and international standardized examinations within Israel's public education system. Through systematic analysis of the topic in the two main Israeli financial publications between the years 2000 and 2013, we explore the nature and narrative of the media and compare the…

One of the main educational challenges we still face today--more than ever--is the humanistic challenge, namely how to promote humanistic moral values, how to strengthen in students the motivation to be morally active, and especially how to help them recognize the other as a human subject. I adopt Nel Noddings' approach of relational ethics of…

This paper addresses the limitations of social justice in institutional spaces and in rhetoric. I write in the form of a quest narrative to describe the lessons I learned from a brief sojourn in a temporary position in an urban teacher education program with a social justice focus and at a nonprofit organization with other social justice workers.…

This paper follows undergraduate students' engagement with the concept of childhood presented to them during a year-long childhood and youth studies module. Through the application of "threshold concepts" as concepts which transform students' understandings of a subject, the challenges of learning new ideas or concepts of childhood are…

Franklin Vernon provided an example of how programs viewing themselves as "cultural islands" are in fact embedded within historical capitalist relations, through the discourses of "self" that they promote. In this response, I expand on Vernon's argument to situate the quasi-therapeutic practices he identified in the history of…

I assessed the effect of the dimensions of emotionalized learning experiences on the social competence of 3 intact groups of BBA students. Each group was taught the affective course, Reinvent Yourself, by a different teaching method. There was a significant effect of the dimensions on students' social competence, particularly with regard to the…

After more than a decade of democratic citizenship education in public schools in South Africa, the Department of Basic Education (DoBE) has still not produced sufficiently plausible ways for how democracy and citizenship ought to be taught in classrooms. I argue that the recent "practical guide" on how to cultivate "responsibility…

Communication teachers have long been concerned with the development of students' oral communication competencies. Regrettably, public speaking remains one of the most feared communicative contexts. Though there has been extensive interest in cognitive/behavioral strategies for alleviating communication apprehension, there has been surprisingly…

Working methodologically and theoretically with the hydro-logics of bodies of water, this article addresses the limitations of humanistic perspectives on water play in early childhood classrooms, and proposes pedagogies of watery relations. The article traces the fluid, murky, surging, creative, unpredictable specificities of bodies of water that…

That the issue of violence sits uneasily on the conscience of higher education is evident in the view that educated people are as likely as uneducated people to participate in violence. The concern of conscience is equally prevalent in the view that the public role of the university is "the responsibility of a community of thinking".…

Humane education (HE) is a specialized niche in higher education and adult learning. HE provides a curricular framework positioning environmental ethics, animal protection, human rights, media literacy, culture, and change processes as the nexus for understanding and inspiring social change. Research-derived experiences illuminating how educators…

The authors propose a pedagogy that considers a historical individual in all their reality, an education responsive to the situation of each student in the uniqueness of their existence. The educational action is always an ethical response to the demand of the other. Implies that I have acquired an obligation, a moral dependence which I cannot…

In this article, the author examines how some of the tenets of Catholic social teaching (dignity of the human person, seeking the common good, and preferential option for the poor and vulnerable) along with the notion of integral formation (a principal belief of Catholic education), helped form a perspective on development that counterposed the…

Distinctively economic objectives for lifelong education, especially adult learning and education, feature prominently in policy-making agendas and educators' practice in much of the world. Critics contend that humanistic and holistic visions of lifelong learning for all have been marginalised and neglected. The current turn of political attention…