A long-time observer of the college presidency finds that the power of the presidency is often overestimated. The faculty see the president as having authority when they want favors, students see the president as an absent figure to be blamed for problems, and journalists see the president as having enough authority to justify lavish attention.…

Examines a family literacy program based in a disadvantaged area of Scotland, to show how deficit views of children and their parents (feeling that one's own ways of speaking and writing are "wrong") might be challenged and overcome so that real learning can take place, learning that focuses on people's strengths and different types of…

Surveys past graduate-student administrators (now in professional and academic careers) involved in the consensus-based management system of a composition program. Finds that such involvement exposed graduate students to the most challenging aspects of university life, in all its political, structural, and interpersonal complexity; and was central…

Democracy in education has many facets: mass access to education, democratic governance of schools, education about citizenship, and education for citizenship. The skills and dispositions necessary for effective democracy can only be learned by practicing them, yet most secondary students have neither political rights nor a political role. Student…

Investigated the experiences of women of color teaching in predominantly white universities dominated by white males. Data from interviews with minority women teachers, surveys of professors, and evaluations by students indicated that the predominantly white classroom with a minority teacher was a contested terrain, and some students struggled to…

The author summarizes and interprets data collected while he was a visiting scholar in a foreign language (FL) department at a large U.S. public research university. This qualitative case study focuses on: (a) the process of developing widely acclaimed Web-based beginning FL teaching software, and (b) the political implications of the development…

Adopting the concept of multiple constituencies as an approach to organizational effectiveness, this chapter identifies key constituents and highlights areas and circumstances in which these constituents have an impact on research and assessment of professional schools. (Contains 1 table.)

This article argues cultural anthropology would make a good partner to service-learning pedagogy because it offers students a theoretical approach for understanding community life and its power structures. Anthropologists have been dealing with power vis-a-vis the people they study using concepts relevant to the reflection process in…

As social scientists engage their own subjectivity, there is greater awareness of their own touristic "gaze," or at least the power relations that are evoked in the researcher-subject interaction. In teaching students involved in community service learning, the challenge is to provide a learning experience that addresses power inequities…

It has been argued that some management theories and models may not be universal and are based on some cultural assumptions. It is argued in this paper that the effectiveness of applying the Learning Organization (LO) model in school contexts across different countries may be associated with cultural differences such as individualism,…

This article analyses key changes in higher education institutions as they have acquired more status, power and responsibilities in the UK higher education system and, indeed, in the polity at large. It argues that previously taken-for-granted academic ideologies now increasingly compete with those of managerialism and neo-liberalism in the…

Building upon the late Pierre Bourdieu's belief that intellectuals had a major responsibility in bridging intellectual work and the operation of politics, this paper argues that intellectuals, especially those in higher education, need to recognise that youth is an important moral referent and political starting point for addressing a number of…

Medical students will influence future health care considerably. Their professional orientation while at medical school will be related to their future professional development. Therefore, it is important to study this group's view of the role of medical doctors, especially because Swedish health care is currently undergoing major changes and…

Is it possible for principals/heads to be effective educational leaders? In this study, we compared the work of principals/heads in two policy contexts. In Policy Context 1, standards for student performance were common and well-established, and authority was devolved to the school level for reshaping the school to meet those standards. In…

This article will explore how symbolic and institutional violence shaped students' understandings of themselves within the educational context, and will argue that the creation of critical educational spaces can enable students and teachers to explore and transgress the internal and external influences and violence that shape the learning…