Over the last 3 years, the advocacy organization Speech First has filed six lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of bias response teams on the grounds that they violate free speech. Bias response teams are university-wide committees that respond to reports of racially charged incidents on college campuses to promote institutional goals of…

Gameful pedagogy is "an approach that takes inspiration from well-designed games to create learning environments that support student motivation" (Holman, 2018, p. 1). According to Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), students are intrinsically motivated when their basic psychological needs for autonomy (the need to make…

The stone age of college and university admissions was characterized by paper, snail mail, large file rooms, and cumbersome admission processes. Even more frightening to recall is that only fourteen short years ago, approximately 36,000 applications for admission to Michigan State University arrived hand printed on paper in sealed envelopes. Mere…

This essay highlights a range of questions that arise when white suburban students engage urban neighborhoods of poverty and color in the United States. How can involvement in an "other" context move beyond "educational tourism"? The essay presents a pedagogical style that raises questions of the kind of socialized body one…

Turner's (1974) conception of liminal space provides an entry point to look beyond the given and to create opportunities to examine, critique, and challenge the assumptions inherent in many music programs. Building upon his theory of liminality as a place that is "ambiguous, neither here or there, betwixt and between all fixed points of…

The author's school had just been labeled a failing school by No Child Left Behind when its new principal arrived in the fall of 2007. In this demoralizing climate, teachers can get frustrated and choose to give up, or they can rise to the challenge, create a plan for improvement, and plunge into uncharted waters. This article discusses how the…

Over the past decade, the Gurian Institute has trained more than forty thousand teachers in more than two thousand schools and districts, both coed and single-sex. The institute's trainers have worked with public and private schools, Montessori schools, and a variety of charter and independent schools in fifteen countries; it has therefore been…

In the summer of 1998, this author was appointed Principal at Cooper Elementary, one of 21 elementary schools in the Livonia Public Schools' district, the 5th largest district in the state of Michigan. Like many first-year principals, she was full of fresh ideas, lofty goals and endless enthusiasm to inspire students, staff and parents. Her…

This past summer fifteen teachers from the Detroit public schools and the metro Detroit area participated in Wayne State University's first Invitational Summer Institute as part of the Wayne State Writing Project. As the director of a brand new National Writing Project site, the author was apprehensive about what she could expect from herself, the…

Maintains that negative stereotypes of Arabs permeate U.S. popular culture. Discusses Arab stereotypes among educators and the effects of stereotyping on Arab American students. Describes efforts used in the Dearborn, MI, schools to eliminate stereotypes and integrate into the curriculum the study of Arab culture. (CFR)