An assignment taken from Robert Marzano's "Tactics for Thinking" sparked a protest movement in two southern Indiana school systems in Spring 1988. Seven Gibson County women viewed the focusing assignment as mind-control and tied Marzano's book to the "brainwashing" New Age movement promulgated by Marilyn Ferguson's book…

Consists of two articles responding to the question "Can liberal adult education maintain its independence in Finland?" Notes that independence involves responsibility and discusses various pressures, especially the development of adult vocational training. States that liberal education can justify its existence by demonstrating that in…

Argues that teachers ought to challenge the assumption that professional advice should be perceived as a prescription for language learning and teaching. A re-examination of the relationship between advice givers and advice receivers leads to the assertion that the connection between problems and solutions does not necessarily include…

Compares and contrasts the principles of press freedom and academic freedom in both origin and practice to explore the potential of the model of academic freedom for enhancing the autonomy of journalists. (SR)

The presented-problem situation offers few opportunities for an educator to exercise professional judgment. Administrators must be both problem finders and problem solvers. Effective education reforms occur when real problems are identified and refined, when alternative solutions are proposed and studied, and when solutions are site specific. (13…

Restates his earlier criticisms of the North Carolina Teacher Performance Appraisal Instrument. The instrument is not content specific and is built on an epistemology valuing propositional thinking and devaluating suppositional thinking at a time when other initiatives are promoting teachers' feelings of worth and sense of autonomy. (MLH)

The notion of "qualitative confirmation" is explored in relation to processes and outcomes of qualitative research. The framework developed by S. Miller and M. Fredericks (1994) is applied to a published report of qualitative research into teacher and principal autonomy (S. Glass, 1997) to illustrate the usefulness of this framework for…

A global paradigm shift is taking place at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, which is resulting in massive changes in the frames of reference about the ways of life, work, and society and how they are viewed and organized. This shift is essentially a sweeping set of worldwide changes in the public domain which challenges the prevailing…

If we take as a given that faculty are their own moral agents, and not mere agents of the educational institutions at which they work, online grading systems, which are increasingly popular and mandatory, compromise their ability to act ethically. This is because such systems reduce the nuances of a complex and challenging reality to the…

This paper examines claims that recent reforms to UK education have led to significant organisational changes in primary school and higher education. It also examines two main theoretical explanations for these, namely post-Fordism and New Managerialism. Examples of changes in both schools and universities, including flexibility and teamwork, are…

The ability to generate and process information, and hence the availability of knowledge has increasingly shifted to the foreground of the new knowledge societies. At the same time, traditional systems of knowledge production (science) and knowledge reception (professions) are subjected to a steady loss of legitimacy. Within this context,…

This paper examines recent education and teacher education reforms in the USA and Namibia and analyzes two tensions that have been a central part of debates about teacher quality and teacher education in many parts of the world: whether we should prepare teachers as technicians or as reflective practitioners; and whether we should prepare teachers…

Self-determination theory posits that individuals who have basic psychological needs satisfied while engaging in an activity will be more likely to value and persist in that activity. Scholars in this area have also posited that autonomy-supportive social contexts are top-down determinants of individual need satisfaction. To understand better the…

This article uses Andrew Abbott's concept of jurisdictional challenge to analyze the current challenges facing university-based teacher educators. The author suggests that teacher educators are dangerously close to losing jurisdiction over two key professional tasks--the preparation of new professionals and the production of academic knowledge for…

The purpose of this research was to study the development, implementation, assessment, and revision of an integrated social justice curriculum with the goal of providing an understanding of the elements which supported and hindered social justice education from the perspective of an elementary school teacher. The research procedures used in this…