This research has studied how children and young people, who are deemed by their school to have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD), experience the National Curriculum of Physical Education (PE) in England. Research has previously highlighted the physical, social, affective and cognitive benefits of participation in PE.…

Thomas Hebert and Matthew T. McBee's (2007) recent study of gifted university students examines how an honors program can function as a community for social, intellectual, and psychological growth. In particular, they find that honors programs offer advantageous support for gifted students in navigating social isolation, in questioning traditional…

This paper presents the annual report of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for 2009. The year 2009 was momentous for FIRE, for it marked its tenth anniversary. In the last decade, FIRE has been remarkably successful at fighting to secure basic rights of free speech and conscience on college campuses. It has fought for…

The central theme of this dissertation is the transformational learning journey with Pepperdine The central theme of this dissertation is the transformational learning journey with Pepperdine University utilizing the research method of autoethnography personal narratives. Autoethnography is bold, yet vulnerable, genuine and authentic. It provides…

Neoliberal agendas have acted to limit the agency of groups and of individuals through both the imposition of boundaries and through setting up rigorous systems of accountability which together act to codify behaviours. Such systems do not so much remove freedom as influence conceptions about the alternatives available. In this article we outline…

This article presents the author's response to Henry Giroux's "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex." Henry Giroux has written a provocative assessment of the contemporary challenges facing the United States as a society, which over the course of the 20th century had assumed the role of leader and exemplar…

This article reports on a study designed to examine the perceptions of house arrest (HA) and electronic monitoring (EM) among offenders who have recently experienced this criminal sentence. Data were gathered via a self-administered questionnaire and follow-up interviews with a sample of offenders. Our primary areas of interest were to assess (a)…

This article presents a personal history of the author's own relationships with the concept of academic freedom. The article is subdivided into 3 prehistories, 7 incidents, 3 disjunctions, and 3 myths. The author discusses the complications of politics, culture, and academic freedom in one career.

These days, when people want to travel a long way, they take an airplane. But once, not so long ago really, only rich people flew in airplanes. Most people took a train or a bus. Back then, in the Montgomery Greyhound station, one could notice a bricked-up doorway that was once an open door with a sign above it that said "Colored…

This article is the text of a keynote address given to the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation at its annual conference in Chicago in February 2009. Three examples of children's linguistic and literary playfulness are examined, two from England and one from the USA. The article explores the radical implications of these examples for primary…

It seems that fear of Web 2.0 is in full force. There are two concerns that resulted in a national panic concerning Internet Web 2.0 tools: pedophiles luring children via the Internet and corruption of youths through exposure to hard-core pornography or other vile material. Administrators, no doubt, are thinking in terms of saving themselves from…

Founded in 1982, Banned Books Week is celebrated annually during the last week in September and will be observed from September 26-October 3 in 2009. The event acknowledges Americans' right to read the books of their choice regardless of whether the ideas, language, or images are controversial. This annual observance of banned books is a good…

This article reports that not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel's bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza at the end of December. How should academics…

This article analyzes the 2002 Coretta Scott King Award book by Mildred Taylor entitled "The Land". The novel and its author are situated within a tradition of historical fiction written by and about African Americans. I then offer an analysis that utilizes Critical Race Theory as an interpretive tool for examining the ways Taylor embeds meanings…

Recent court rulings have challenged the long-held concept of academic freedom for faculty members. As an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Kevin J. Renken says he felt obliged to speak out about his belief that administrators there were mishandling a National Science Foundation grant to him…