A new movement in American higher education aims to transform the teaching of civics. This report is a study of what that movement is, where it came from, and why Americans should be concerned. What we call the "New Civics" redefines civics as progressive political activism. Rooted in the radical program of the 1960s' New Left, the New…

Our longitudinal qualitative research program examining doctoral student, post-PhD researcher and new lecturer experience is situated in an international literature documenting how early career academics learn through experience. In common with others, our work is framed within an identity perspective. What makes our view of identity distinct is a…

Life history or biographical approaches to research in lifelong learning may be particularly useful for researchers working from a social purpose and/or feminist perspective. Adult educators working from an emancipatory framework are often curious about factors that shape people's lives, both from an individualistic, biographical perspective and…

There is a dearth of literature on Access to Higher Education (AHE) tutors, which this paper addresses. Tutors play an important part in constructing emotional and academic support for students. Understanding their constructions of professional identity and their views of the students they teach helps to explain the learning environments they…

This article reports on the preliminary findings from a national UK study of the life histories of 28 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) educators who led schools across a 47-year period (1968-2015). BAME head teachers were grouped by generations (i.e. pioneer, experienced, and novice) and questioned about the critical life experiences that…

After an accomplished military career leading up to and during World War II, Truman Smith (1893-1970) was seemingly forgotten. His name was seldom mentioned after the war until his memoirs were published posthumously in 1984. History shows Smith to be an astoundingly successful figure in military intelligence. This article provides a biography on…

Extensive linguistic research and theorising relating to maintaining the family heritage, as bilingual or multilingual family in differing language contexts, is currently available. Substantial research beneficially explores approaches to multilingual parenting, outcomes for individuals through parent and child perspectives, among linguistic and…

People's true selves comprise a life story that may be considered as a narrative. With that idea in mind, the purpose of this article is to report on a pedagogical intervention that bridged life stories and a narrative perspective to examine nine, out of eighty, pre-service English language teachers' (re)construction of their true selves while…

In this study, our cross-case analysis of students' lives challenges the conventional home-university model of transition and highlights the importance of acknowledging the influence of this complex symbiotic relationship for students who attend university and live at home. We argue that as with stay-at-home holidays, or "staycations",…

Youth organizing work benefits young people in myriad ways, equipping them with the skills and dispositions to organize around the systemic inequities and policy decisions that threaten their communities. The findings from this life histories study in the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) reveal that the organization's collectivist leadership model…

Many agree that educational systems should instill in students the value of lifelong learning (LLL), but few have suggested how to accomplish that or how to measure the effectiveness of those curricular initiatives. We developed a technique intended to strengthen students' beliefs about the value of LLL and piloted use of a recently developed…

This paper focuses on the methodology of a study that asked what factors English mothers of very young babies consider when making employment decisions and childcare choices, and sought their views on the idea of carers in day care settings "loving" their children. After a characterisation of life historical study, a four-staged process…

This comparative study examines the learning trajectories of two groups of Mexican novice language teachers, three locally raised and educated ones and three repatriates from the USA. The study makes use of a combination of retrospective life-history research and the analysis of academic documents to look at the interrelationship between teachers'…

The ideal-typical distinction of normal/choice biography has been adopted by many youth researchers over the last 17 years as a means of approaching how vocational adolescents take decisions in a context in which life transitions are reversible and unsafe. In this article, we aim to show that this distinction is overestimated, by focusing on a…

"Possibilities for postmodern emergence" [Somerville, M. (2007). "Postmodern emergence." "International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education," 20(2), 225-243] in professional practice were explored by a group of tertiary educators working together on a collaborative memory project. This allowed new…