The middle-to-high-school transition and the first year of high school are critical periods in students' lives. According to the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), "The passage of students from the middle grades to high school is the most difficult transition point in education" (2002, p. 24). Although there are many…

Cloudworks (Cloudworks.ac.uk) is a social networking site designed for sharing, finding and discussing learning and teaching ideas and experiences. Design and development of the site has been based on an iterative analysis, development and implementation approach, underpinned by ongoing research and evaluation. To this end, we have been seeking to…

This study explores the social and cultural uses of digital literacies by adolescent immigrants to cope with their new lives in the United States. This case study focuses on three adolescent ethnic Karen brothers. Two years of participant observations in their home and Karen community, accompanied by formal and informal interviews, served as the…

This single class activity described here: (1) illustrates the importance of interdependence in groups; (2) can be used to measure group productivity and performance; (3) can encourage groups to engage in group learning; and (4) can facilitate group cohesion for newly formed groups. Students will be working in groups for the majority of their…

In this article we explore students' attitudes towards solidarity, as an aspect of sustainable development (SD), and analyse how students can be described as solidary. Our motive is to obtain better knowledge regarding important preconditions for education for SD. We conducted a quantitative study with 782 responding upper secondary students…

To provide more insights into inconsistent findings on the relationship of organizational commitment to effectiveness, this study conducted a questionnaire survey among 188 academics in Beijing. Analysis of survey responses suggested that organizational commitment presented significant relationships to performance and effectiveness. These…

This article explores the effect of web-based journaling on changes in group cohesion within experiential growth groups. Master's students were divided into 2 groups. Both used a web-based platform to journal after each session; however, only 1 of the groups was able to read each other's journals. Quantitative data collected before and…

The Committee of Vice-chancellors and Principals (CVCP) was a leading collective body for British universities for most of the twentieth century, yet there has been very little historical study of its organisation and work. Brief references tend to be dismissive of its effectiveness, although some authors have been more favourable. This article…

The Popular Front line made the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) a more hospitable place for "brain workers." The emphasis the line placed on mass ideological and cultural struggle against fascism meant that they became important allies to be won for the working class. As the principal transmitters of ideology and culture to the…

Imagined communities are not bound by space or time, they exist in opposition to other communities, and the members perceive themselves as existentially similar. Multiple case studies and interviews revealed that the seven Christian schools in this study functioned as imagined communities, and their literary practices served to establish,…

This article presents developmentally appropriate applications of Motivational Interviewing (MI; Miller & Rollnick, 2002) for use in preparing group members for the working stages of group. Practical strategies are offered for using MI to facilitate an atmosphere of trust, recognize member readiness for change, identify and resolve members'…

The author's class has been invited to speak on NPR's "Call-In-Radio" and two of her students, Omar and Diana, were elected to be their spokespeople regarding HB 2281, Arizona's controversial ethnic studies ban. Omar stressed that he and his classmates are engaged by this topic because they see what's happening in Arizona is wrong--that they are…

Maureen Curtin, associate professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Oswego, reports in this article on an initiative that is designed to spur teams of faculty and visiting artists to teach "intellectual issues" through students' storytelling. The courses were part of the…

Based on an analysis of 137 texts written by pupils, this paper examines pupils' humour directed at teachers, its types and social functions. The collected data are divided into three categories that describe different modes of teachers as targets of pupils' humour. The first mode describes teachers as unintentionally comical, the second…

Our investigation of axiology (study of values) allowed us to ascertain a hierarchy of values of pre-service education students concurrently enrolled in two degree programs. We discovered homogeneity which may be a consequence of the discipline (education) investigated and/or sampling, as 87% were female, which reflected the female dominance of…