At California State University Northridge (CSUN), Stevie Ruiz's students reflect the multiracial communities of Los Angeles County. The students are children of immigrants, working class, first-generation college students, and queer people of color. Students share a wealth of knowledge that is shaped by race, gender, sexual, and class inequality…

This response to Samuelsson's typology for assessing deliberative democracy in classroom discussions views his analysis through an equity lens. It offers Young's model of communicative democracy as a resource and argues that incorporating that model's emphasis on greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling into the typology can help to promote more…

Student voice, namely the institutionalisation of students' contributions to the evaluation, and increasingly, the day-to-day running of higher education, has a wide-ranging influence. It shapes the concerns of management and academics; it changes the organisation and content of degree courses and, at times, challenges authority. Through her…

Through my college experience and my reflection on The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered, I have come to recognize several ideas that have greatly impacted me, my views on learning, and my actual learning. My overall experience in college has been beneficial because of the teachers who approached teaching with a more conscious…

The process of effective teaching--teaching that directly leads to student learning of standards-based content--is tenuous at best and easily disrupted by contextual and behavioral factors. In this commentary, I discuss the role of student support and mediation in teacher effectiveness and curricular reform. The most vocal students in physical…

Peer education on a college campus may be an ideal nexus for two imperatives facing higher education over the next decade: (1) an increasingly needy student population; and (2) a decreasing level of support for program growth. Despite its long history as a method of instruction, both in and out of the classroom, the benefits of peer education are…

Cynthia Coburn and Erica Turner have made an important contribution by developing a framework to synthesize the various strands of research and theory related to data use in schools. The framework illustrates the complexity of the pathways between the adoption of a data-use intervention and the attainment of desired outcomes, and it clarifies the…

In her new book "Music, Informal Learning and the School" (2008), Lucy Green consolidates many ideas presented in her previous writings. There is little doubt of the significance of her approach, but it raises epistemological and pedagogical issues that must be addressed to better understand where music teachers go next with informal…

We argue that power roles can make a significant difference in how students experience in-class simulations. To test this, students who participated in Congressional simulations in one of the author's introduction to American politics classes were surveyed concerning their views of Congress, the legislative process, and the simulation experience.…

College has traditionally been a transition to adulthood, with campus life and academic experiences providing students with knowledge, tools, and challenges that create a sturdy foundation on which students build their personal and professional lives. According to the author, that foundation is eroding because parents are the ones now wielding the…

The paper addresses the question of how to design for learning taking place on mobile and wireless devices. The authors argue that learning activity designers need to consider the characteristics of mobile learning; at the same time, it is vital to realise that learners are already creating mobile learning experiences for themselves. Profound…

Awareness of how perceived roles shape how people see themselves and how others see them prompted Cheryl McLean to question how her new label of "teaching assistant" helped or hurt the teaching and learning process. As a teaching assistant, she moved into the dual role of teacher and student. She believes that the labels she adopts…

Inoue [Inoue, A. B. (2005). "Community-based assessment pedagogy." "Assessing Writing: An International Journal, 3", 208-238] sets up a radically experimental writing class as a kind of laboratory of assessment. He seeks to avoid the standard situation where a teacher unilaterally assesses and grades student writing, using only his or her own…

The author first talks about the current situation of teaching EFL in higher education institutions in Taiwan, and indicates that the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) Approach has been the most popular language teaching approach lately. Then he addresses the hybrid course approach which seems to be a trend as well as an appropriate way for…

As part of their requirements, second-year rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati campus, must teach religious school or Hebrew school for a full year in one of the local congregations. At the same time, they take a course in the practices of Jewish education. The students must create a portfolio…