High rates of faculty turnover can be costly to the reputation of an institution and to the quality of instruction. Community colleges may expect high rates of faculty turnover as an aging workforce retires. Other sources of attrition, however, can be attributed to organizational characteristics and the structural properties of faculty work. This…

Tech Prep is a federal education initiative funded by the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act initially authorized in 1990 then reauthorized in 1998. Texas HB 2401 subsequently established the parameters for the operation of Tech Prep in Texas. Texas has 26 regional consortia that coordinate the delivery of services between…

The goal of developmental, or remedial education is to help students prepare for college level courses. Students need remediation for a variety of social, economic, and psychological reasons. Many students requiring remediation turn to community colleges because community colleges have an open door policy regardless of a student's level of…

The role of a department chair is difficult and complex because it requires one to be an instructor, an administrator, a leader, a manager, and a mediator simultaneously. With the present budget constraints, effective internal leadership at the department level has become indispensable for community colleges. Despite the fact that department…

Faced with the challenge of responding to shifting tides in the American labor market through the development of innovative and relevant educational programs that directly facilitate regional economic growth, numerous community colleges have identified the implementation of small business development and entrepreneurship education initiatives as…

Driven largely by efficiency imperatives, many universities have come to adopt a managerialist approach to research over the last several years. University administrators have become actively concerned with the traditionally long times taken to complete a PhD and high attrition rates. Consequently, the PhD, and PhD students' experience of struggle…

I argue that creating "interfaces" between the humanities and cognitive sciences would be intellectually stimulating for both groups. More specifically for the humanities: they might gain challenging and rewarding avenues of inquiry, attract more funding, and advance their position in the 21st-century universities and among the general public, if…

Employability has become a global buzz-word: instructors in higher education are increasingly being called upon to produce highly employable students who will in turn contribute to the financial capital of the country's economy. For vocational subjects and degrees for which clear links to industry may be envisaged (such as IT, Business, Technology…

This narrative account describes and analyzes the story of resistance to aesthetic education in an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program. After carefully listening to the students' resistance to the Lincoln Center Institute's aesthetic education component of their student teacher experience, the author designs a curriculum initiative…

Based on a review of its historical evolution and the contributions of significant writers in the field, this article addresses perennial questions of purpose, content and pedagogy in education in the arts and humanities and, more broadly, liberal education. Taking cognizance of the educational significance of service-learning and practical…

Graduate supervision is a pedagogy that remakes students into the disciplined subjects of scholars and researchers. While the supervision relation is structured by the fixed and asymmetrical institutional positions of supervisor and student, pedagogic interactions between the two can also have a dynamic, playful and more mutual character. At these…

Can we creatively bring our intellectual interests to bear on how we talk about teaching? Can our teaching shape how we understand and go about our scholarship? This article addresses and attempts to bridge the scholarly and the pedagogical imperatives of our profession through the methodically unmethodical process that Theodor Adorno identified…

This article is an introduction to two other articles in this issue, Catherine Maxwell's "Teaching 19th-century aesthetic prose" and Kirsteen Anderson's "The whole learner: the role of imagination in developing disciplinary learning". It highlights the significance of the courses described in Maxwell's and Anderson's accounts by discussing how the…

The Writing and Learning Mentor programme (WLM) at University College London (UCL) supports a cross-disciplinary network of PhD students who act as writing mentors to students in their departments. WLM also offers the mentors a space in which to reflect on their own writing practices. The focus of this article is our work with the mentors and…

This article was given as a keynote address to the 2009 conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), 30 June to 2 July, at Coventry University, UK. It draws on experiences at Queen Mary, University of London, of developing a "writing in the disciplines" initiative and of working towards institutional…