As technology is being integrated into educational processes, teachers are searching for new ways to enhance student motivation and learning. Through shared experiences and the results of empirical research, educators can ease social networking sites into instructional usage. "The Social Classroom: Integrating Social Network Use in…

This volume includes four sections of the 2020 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; (2) Language and Linguistics; (3) Philosophy; and (4) Sociology and Healthcare. Education and Educational Research includes 15 papers covering the full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy…

The author has written about his journey to Inner Mongolia, where he helped university students mount a production of a Shakespeare play, which led him to reflect on an earlier, perhaps even more improbable journey. He then describes his growth from a student with dyslexia into a teacher, and principal as the result of guidance and encouragement…

The debate over the best delivery of general education, whether through a canon of Great Books, a core curriculum of specific courses and course sequences, or a distribution requirement of course types providing for greater student choice, has existed for generations. Today, the debate plays out in practice across the top-rated colleges and…

The authors decided to use Bob Dylan's 2004 memoir "Chronicles" as a text in their freshman humanities seminars at Villanova University, partly to illustrate to increasingly career-oriented students--prospective engineers, business majors, and the like--how a liberal education and exposure to classic literature are relevant to everyone, and partly…

There have been various published histories of Australasian universities but none as rich as the two most recent relating to the universities of Sydney (1991) and Melbourne (2003). The latter, in particular, was the catalyst for this exploratory study. How was it that at a time when many major British cities lacked a university institution, towns…

YouTube, the video sharing website that allows viewers to upload video content ranging from cute dog tricks to rare rock videos, also supports a lively community devoted to the performance of Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations. YouTube is also a popular site for student producers of Shakespeare performances, parodies, and other artistic…

Laura Bates, an associate professor of English at Indiana State University, teaches college courses at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, but her Shakespeare workshop is a rarer undertaking, with a startling history. About six years ago, an inmate in one of her college-degree courses was sent from the general population to the "SHU"--the…

The question of whether "Hamlet" belongs in a freshman composition classroom is one that institutions are making easier to answer, though perhaps for political rather than pedagogical reasons. This article describes a project in which Marie Fitzwilliam and her colleagues were asked to engage in a dialogue with the administration on…

For more than fifty years, an enduring criticism of American higher education has been that it offers students a smorgasbord of courses and choices without coherence, interconnection, or relevance to the deeper purposes of life. How this fragmentation came about is the topic of this essay. American higher education went through a major…

Many students enter classes like the Shakespeare character Caliban, knowing books to be powerful but feeling eluded by them, unable to access their knowledge. Author Jill Wright shares new-found inspiration and insight she discovered while co-directing Act III, Scene ii of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and suddenly realized a…

The decades since the 1960s have been unfortunate in many respects for American higher education, but things are not uniformly bleak. Here and there, the study of Great Books persists. The general picture that is available, then, of the health of great-books study in colleges today is mixed. High-visibility news stories, along with curriculum…

The author joined the faculty of Macalester College in the fall of 1968. Much to his surprise, he discovered at the first faculty meeting that he could not understand what his new colleagues were talking about. For many years he literally had no one to talk to about subjects that mattered most to him, such as the philosophy of education. Then…

This paper (a) reintroduces E. Franklin Frazier's 1939 book, "The Negro Family in the United States," to family scholars and graduate students and highlights its importance as a groundbreaking and classic text, (b) provides both an introduction to the major thesis of this monograph and a reading of the text, and (c) discusses the…

This account of learning journeys, taken from interviews with a group of adults graduating from a part-time humanities program, traces one prominent pattern from first enrollment to graduation, prioritizing the importance of "time out". Students who had joined a course out of curiosity found themselves traveling in a land of unexpected pleasures,…