This series of roundtable papers explores the attempt of writing instructors to empower students by teaching them both to write within the discourse of the academic community and to write critically against it, resisting its accepted forms of thought and discourse. (CJS)

At a time when higher education appears to be diverging from a sense of shared purpose, learning communities offer a way to maintain the balance between striving for oneself and contributing to the common good. They promote cooperation, help students forge interdisciplinary connections, empower students, revitalize the institutional environment,…

Shows that, despite the pendulum swings from the 1930s to the present, reading-achievement levels have remained constant, and one-third of children do not learn to read well. Argues that reading is a multidimensional activity, and that a massive effort is needed to implement multidimensional curricula that empower all children by providing them…

The locus of control, whether internal or external, is an influential concept in second-language learning. One observes it, for example, in Puerto Rican students returning to Puerto Rico to take university-level courses. Explanations address a teaching method relying on use of problems with examples in such a way as to empower students. This also…

This study explores the thinking and decisions of Vera (pseudonym), a Hispanic elementary teacher, while she enacted a reform-based science curriculum in an urban school in the southern United States. Vera's thinking, decisions, experiences, and practices were documented over a 2-year period. Using the data collected from semistructured…

Students' conversational skills, sense of importance, and penchant for creating drama can create thoughtful and even powerfully compelling prose but only if readers let it. Unfortunately, the ways that beginning writers express ideas do not always match all readers' expectations. What does this have to do with what teacher-researchers call voice?…

The new research and practice area of "adults and mathematics" is situated within the didactics of mathematics as it is structured and delimited by the concrete forms of practice and knowledge currently regarded as mathematics teaching, learning, and knowing. "Adults Learning Mathematics" (ALM) is a community of practice and research within the…

Discusses the move toward teaching strategies designed to empower students, sharing one university professor's experiences with a cooperative learning method of student assessment in a teacher training multicultural education course that utilized an empowering model. (SM)

Undergraduate and graduate training programs in the helping professions are important sites for professional acculturation of students, reflecting a powerful political process. By giving voice to students' narratives, faculty validate students' cultural perspectives and encourage them to question and challenge professional practices of the…

The "problem-posing" education model of Paulo Freire takes as its departure point the life experience of the learner, rather than the teacher's knowledge. Ursuline College (Cleveland, Ohio) created several courses for returning adult students that were based on Freire's ideas. One course called "Humanities Focus on Life" is for…

This paper discusses degree attainment statistics and their analyses, particularly when applying time censors to the equation. The author describes at the High School and Beyond Sophomore Cohort Longitudinal Study, which followed a high school graduating class of 1982, from the time of its graduation until 1993, when most of the cohort was 29 or…

A consultant discusses his experience in assisting teachers and students to develop a democratic approach to education at a new school for high-risk American Indian students in northern Michigan. Strategies included appointing students to the school board, holding weekly student meetings, and creating a judicial committee to review student…

This book describes "The Learning Community," a minischool that was founded in 1972 by five teachers as an alternative program within a large urban high school in Astoria, New York. The Learning Community included 150 high school juniors and seniors and 6 teachers. The book overviews the development of the minischool, beginning with the…

This paper examines the potential contributions of a feminist critical perspective to an understanding of assessment in higher education. It uses as a foundation the nine principles of feminist assessment (published in 1992 as an outgrowth of a project on women's studies programs) and an American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) list of…

In this book, an experienced elementary school teacher recounts how she and three other teachers of grades 4, 5, and 6 decided to relax the compartmentalization of learning into subject areas and shuffle subject matter into new patterns to offer students a voice in their education. The book describes how the teachers created a multiage…