In all European countries, education has been related to nation building. It has contributed to the building of national identity, national consciousness and the development of a nation state. Since the Second World War and above all since the fall of the Berlin Wall, education in the European Union has also included a consideration of European…

With the decreasing college-aged population and the transforming policy environment in Japan, private universities are confronted with management crises, such as bankruptcy, mergers, etc. As the second largest source of funding, government subsidies for private universities is considered to have contributed to enhancing educational conditions and…

Is teaching emotional labor? Are teachers selling their own emotions in exchange for money? To examine these questions, this paper examines teachers' emotion expression in teaching. Most previous studies have assessed teachers' emotional experience using interviews, and have reported that because teachers manage their own emotions, teaching is…

Higher education systems are now in a global state of flux. Japan is no exception. The most persuasive framework for analyzing the basic structure and direction of change is the structural-historical theory of the American sociologist Martin Trow. This is a generalization of his "elite to mass to universal" based on first American and then…

In this article, the author reflects on how people "think" the university in terms of certain borders, and how the foundational faculty of education are positioned with regard to these borders and structures, and what that might mean in terms of the conflicts within which they find themselves embroiled at this point in history. Ultimately, his…

Educational research suggests that the response biases of educators can negatively influence student performance and aptitude (Blanchett 2006; Bloom 2001; Darity et al. 2001; Gordon 2005; and Skiba et al. 2000). This article introduces "good enough methods" for autoethnography as an alternative approach to this problem. Luttrell (2000, 13)…

Many teacher educators recommend that preservice teachers examine their own backgrounds and experiences to identify assumptions, beliefs, and values, as well as cultural contexts in which they grew up, which impact on how they understand schooling and students. Commonly, Social Foundations courses initiate self-examination through processes such…

The Christian Right opposes the inclusion of sexual orientation in school policies, charging that the schools are legitimating and promoting homosexuality. The arguments have moved past the trite, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," to claims of violations of parental rights and the First Amendment, often positioning Christians as the…

In this article, I argue the proposition that educators ought to be including a serious consideration of intelligent design as a counterexample to the scientific explanations of human origins. The article first distinguishes between three different ways people ask "why": the Scientific Why, the Ultimate Why, and the Teleological Why. Although…

This synthetic review aims to unite a seemingly disjoint collection of studies over the past 3 decades around their shared examination of sexism in an often overlooked U.S. population, namely girls attending private Christian schools. This undertaking reveals substantial harms that I categorize as those of immediacy and potentiality, which are…

In this article, I add a discursive analysis to the discussion about Muslim girls and women's dress in non-Muslim educational contexts. I argue that a law or policy that prohibits the wearing of "khimar," "burqa," "chador," "niqab," "hijab," or "jilbab" in the context of public schools is a form of censorship in educational contexts. This…

Religious pluralism led to the colonies' separation of church and state by 1776, to Mann's campaign for common schooling, and to the complete secularization of public schools by 1900. The dependence of Western theology upon untenable Greek metaphysics justifies an explanation that the evolutionary purpose of religion was to promote personal…

This article discusses what David Berliner (2005) has called the perverse "spectacle of fear" (208) surrounding issues of teacher quality and accountability in contemporary school reform. Drawing principally on the critical semiotics of Roland Barthes' essay, "The World of Wrestling" (1957), it examines the way that this spectacle works to…

This article introduces a teacher as a being of relations--both internal and external--by exploring the nature of a figure of the internal plane that accompanies a teacher in her pedagogical adventure. This figure is a superaddressee, a third listener, who, as the author argues, should be expected to enter a classroom together with a teacher. A…

In this article, I portray undergraduate education students at an urban, inclusive university participating in the process of defining their emerging philosophies of education. Excerpts from student writing demonstrate that, in a course organized around key essential questions, double-entry journals, and students' consideration of their…