Education

In this article we explore the definition and development of civic capacity at a liberal arts college through a specific teaching and learning initiative. This initiative encourages faculty, staff, and students to share the roles of teacher, learner, and colleague as they gain educational opportunities and foster these for others. Through a description of two programs and analysis of participants’ reflections, we identify four stages of change that foster civic capacity. We suggest that this initiative invites a re-interpretation of the institution as a site of educational opportunities and raises questions about how to broaden access to these opportunities.

Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill development, and creativity. By drawing on the often underrecognized parallels between biological evolution and human learning, this essay argues that formal education needs and ought not to forego the unconscious exploratory processes of informal learning. Rather than posit as natural the cultural story that formal schooling must prepare students to integrate with given cultures and foreknowable futures, the evolutionary perspective shows that education is better thought of as preparing students to create cultures and to change, and foster change, in relation to unknown futures. The properties that distinguish formal from informal learning-conscious reflection and a degree of collective consensus about what constitutes knowledge at any given time-are, we argue, useful not as ends in themselves, but as tools for maximizing, sharing, and extending unconscious, evolutionary learning. Working with them as such offers a way out of some of education's persistent problems. Two autobiographical case studies provide examples of these evolutionary changes and indicate pathways of inquiry by which to pursue them.

As U.S.-based colleges and universities seek to globalize education with experiential learning, the risk of reinforcing assumptions about Western superiority, white supremacy and the "neediness" of "developing" countries increases. This essay discusses the rationale for a program that wrestles with questions of power, communication, and creativity by engaging students from the two U.S. liberal arts colleges (a consortium) and a Ghanaian university in a summer action research project. The program takes place in part on campus in the U.S. and in part in a village in Northern Ghana in partnership with three grassroots educational organizations: a community radio station, an Internet training center, and a non-governmental organization focused on early education. Tracking key words in two languages central to the programs a way to make the different histories in play visible, I argue that the purpose of the work is "lagim tehi tuma"-Dagbani for "thinking together," to develop not people, countries, or cultures, but knowledge, questions, and relationships. Drawing on Apusigah's discussion of "tullum," an indigenous, gendered approach to development, I advance a conception of collaboration that accepts limitation, impermanence, and risk as part of sustainability.

This paper offers descriptive analyses of two staff-student educational partnership programs of the Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI) at Bryn Mawr College. The focal programs partner college employees with undergraduate students in unique, reciprocal learning partnerships and student-mentored introductory staff computing courses. While community engagement traditionally focuses attention beyond the campus and identifies off-campus community members as beneficiaries of college students’ efforts, these programs focus on students’ relationships with people whose labor sustains the campus in egalitarian, collaborative, educational experiences. In focusing this argument on the educational benefits of such experiences to students, I explore the connections to liberal education. I also argue that intra-campus community engagement enhances students’ understandings and capacities to challenge limiting hierarchies and divisions. I further argue that this kind of engagement enables studen...

This paper discusses the development of a U.S.-based undergraduate senior seminar toward a conflict-centered perspective of change in education. As practitioner researchers informed by Black, feminist and postcolonial studies, we analyze student writing from the course in order to elucidate the concepts of change, both explicit and tacit, that students draw on to make sense of the complexities inherent in educational work. Some student writing demonstrates a discourse of control, and thus a conception of agency, that both oversimplifies and promotes despair about the challenges at stake. By contrast, some student writing evinces an orientation towards struggle, rather than hope, which emerges as a more generative stance towards recognizing and responding to the structural violence in which education work is fully implicated. This perspective opens the analysis and the education course to understandings that situate power relationships more broadly and more historically than order-ce...

Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writing, and program development--the authors examine education as an academic field, arguing that its disciplinary practices and perspectives invite interdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinarity to bridge from the academy to issues, problems, and strengths beyond it. Interdisciplinarity--understood as temporary “groundlessness”--emerges as a means to apprehend and respond to problems that in the context of past frustrations and failures may seem insurmountable; the willingness to not-know inspires new paradigms, experiences, and relationships. Extra-disciplinarity highlights the many chords running between academe and the rest of the world. Using this framework, we discuss the featured pedagogical instances as small-scale models for changing the power structures that have historically silenced some perspectives and knowledges, thus opening these structures to new inputs and connections. We con...

This article compares two neo-liberal education reform activities that are not often studied in tandem: alternative teacher certification in the USA, as explored through Teach for America, and the growing international service learning movement. Guided by the Movement for Black Lives’ call for a world where those “most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us,” the authors explore the ways in which programs’ neo-liberal justifications obscure the authority, history, and agency of the communities they purport to serve, while convincing people outside of the community that those within are benefitted. The comparisons drawn highlight the ways in which deficit orientations permeate different local and global contexts to perpetuate and normalize privatization and the wresting of control from local communities. In making this comparison, the authors aim to better understand what these programs have in common: a white supremacist w...

In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students' experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda's theory of selfauthorship and students' development as leaders for social change -an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development. Students as Leaders and Learners -p. 2

In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development

The explicit purpose of gathering feedback in college classes is to improve those courses, usually along the lines of structure, organization, pace, or some other aspect of the course over which the professor typically has control. A potential outcome that is less immediately obvious is the shift that can take place regarding who is responsible and in what ways for the analysis and revision of pedagogical practices at the college level. In this article I take as a foundation for my discussion the premises of new wave student voice work, and I describe a project through which students were positioned as consultants who gathered midcourse feedback for faculty members. I analyze how those student consultants supported faculty members in revising not only their courses but also their relationships with students-both student consultants and students enrolled in the courses.

Taking the rapid development of information technologies as a catalyst for re-examining the roles generally assigned to professors, students, librarians, and technology support staff in traditional college settings, this article explores how these players in higher education can collaborate to redefine their roles. The article begins with a theoretical exploration of our concept of role and then describes a workshop designed to explore how roles are defined and played out in academic settings.

Every way of thinking is both premised on and generative of a way of naming that reflects particular underlying convictions. Over the last 15 years, a way of thinking has reemerged that strives to reposition students in educational research and reform. Best documented in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, this way of thinking is premised on the following convictions: that young people have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling; that their insights warrant not only the attention but also the responses of adults; and that they should be afforded opportunities to actively shape their education. Although these convictions mean different things to different people and take different forms in practice, a single term has emerged to capture a range of activities that strive to reposition students in educational research and reform: "student voice." In this discussion the author explores the emergence of the term "student voice," identifies underlying premises signaled by two particular words associated with the term, "rights" and "respect," and explores the many meanings of a word that surfaces repeatedly across discussions of student voice efforts but refers to a wide range of practices: "listening." The author offers this discussion not as an exhaustive or definitive analysis but rather with the goal of looking across discussions of work that advocates, enacts, and critically analyzes the term "student voice." Every way of thinking is both premised on and generative of a way of naming that reflects particular underlying convictions. Over the last 15 years, a way of thinking has reemerged that strives to reposition school students in educational research and reform. 1 Best documented in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, this way of thinking is premised on the following convictions: that young people have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling; that their insights

In 1908, George Herbert Palmer wrote The Ideal Teacher, an extended essay that explored four characteristics of the ideal college professor. Two of them -a wealth of knowledge and experience on which to draw, and the ability to invigorate life through learning -focus on the teacher's capacity; they highlight what he already has within him: his knowledge, his insights into subject matter, his range of experiences, and his ability to draw on all of those to animate learning. The other two characteristics Palmer identified -"the aptitude for vicariousness" and "the readiness to be forgotten"-highlight the importance of having the propensity to imagine, even live through, others' perspectives and experiences and to step out of the way of their development -their growth of capacity -both during the time one teaches and after the teaching is done. These characteristics shift the focus from the teacher to the student, emphasizing both the teacher's capacity to conceive of and consider the learner's perspective and her willingness to serve as a catalyst for learners' development apart from and beyond her, rather than making herself the center of the educational experience.

As has been the case throughout the history of education in the United States, the current structures and practices of U.S. schools and colleges are informed by particular ideals regarding the potential of education. Through this comparative descriptive analysis, I argue that a major reason why these ideals have rarely been realized is the way that students are positioned in educational institutions, dialogues, and reform. A preliminary argument for rethinking how we conceptualize student role and responsibility frames my description and comparison of two programs, one that involves secondary students in the preparation of high school teachers and one that involves college students in the professional development of college faculty. I then draw on the perspectives of student participants across these two programs to address a series of educational ideals that span K-12 and college contexts: inspiring lasting learning, celebrating humanity and diversity, and engaging in meaningful assessment. I designed the programs that are the focus of my analysis with the goal of improving teacher preparation and teaching, but as I discuss in this essay, they are proving to be promising models for pursuing what may be a more encompassing possibility: fostering in students a sense of and capacity for responsibility in ways that not only address existing educational ideals but that also point to both more transformative and more achievable notions of education and accountability than those currently in place.

This article describes a project that positions high school students as teacher educators within an undergraduate secondary certification program. A brief review of researchers' arguments for listening to students and a detailed description of the project contextualize the perspectives of graduates of the program who currently teach in city schools. These teachers emphasize how the project allows them to: re-access the student experience in school; get clear on what it means to really listen; learn how important it is to take students' experiences and perspectives seriously; recognize how much more engaged in their learning students are when teachers listen and respond to them; and understand the importance of knowing why, not only how, listening to students affects their learning. The article concludes with suggestions for how others can create similar opportunities to listen to students.