In this three-article dissertation, I explore three aspects of the Next Education Workforce initiative (NEW), an education reform effort hailing from Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Through the initiative, NEW seeks to change schools and schooling, breaking down the physical and metaphorical walls of the predominant…

This dissertation uncovers the initial history of North Carolina's Industrial Education Centers, an essential part of the history of vocational education and community colleges in the State of North Carolina. These centers opened in the late 1950s through the early 1960s and served as part of the predecessors for the future community college…

This dissertation examines changes to the publicness of American research universities from the mid-20th to the early 21st century. The changes are discerned by analyzing salient higher education public policies, contemporary pressures affecting research universities, and a "Research University Publicness Dashboard," which contains…

The history of theological education in North America is a study of the complementary relationship between church and seminary. Theological education between 1980-2017 produced developing partnerships between churches and seminaries as extension centers, teaching sites, and branch campuses. In a select number of instances, a local church began a…

This paper builds a model of human capital accumulation driven by increasing specialization of the workforce. Individuals increase the efficiency of time dedicated to human capital acquisition by focusing investments on narrower sets of skills. The evolution of secondary and post-secondary curricula in the United States from 1870-2000 confirms the…

This dissertation examines the history of workforce education, corporate university development models in both literature and practice, and the evolution of the next generation of corporate universities. It traces workforce education from indentured servants in Europe during the Middle Ages, to the sophisticated corporate universities that…

This qualitative, multisite case study used Dee Fink's taxonomy of significant learning as a lens through which to examine the curricular structure, academic practices, and graduate outcomes for honors programs at Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. Special attention was given to the distinctive quality of Ignatian pedagogy and…

In the state of Louisiana, a quality education for secondary school students can be hard to come by in any area of study much less in the areas of the arts. The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) provides a quality education to those talented students who audition and are accepted into the program. NOCCA has only existed since 1974 and…

The concepts of an inclusive classroom, inclusion, co-teaching, and disability have been called poorly defined and in need of fresh conceptual analyses. In Chapter 1, I respond to this call for further analysis and then demonstrate, using current educational headlines, that these concepts of "an inclusive classroom,"…

Since "A Nation At Risk" (1954), a series of laws and key reform initiatives were passed to hold schools accountable for improving the quality of public education (e.g. "IASA," "Title 1," "NCLB," "RTTT"). These reform initiatives require that public schools undergo continuous change but simply…

While independent schools are a small sector of the American school system, they educate a significant cross section of society. Creating equitable models of leadership in their top administrative positions is important as students see those models and equate them with what leaders look and act like. This study examined leadership styles of heads…

Male nurses are but a small percentage of the total nurse population in the United States, and most certainly have potential to increase in numbers if the profession appeared more attractive as a career option for men. The purpose of this research was to discover the decision factors used by males that led them to enroll in Associate Degree…

W.E.B. Du Bois offered an educational theory that sought to contextualize the role of schools and their relevance to social justice. Responding to the social-historical malaise of African American subordination, he proposed that schools could provide the impetus towards cultural, economic, and political empowerment. Moreover, his theory of…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain an understanding of the lived experiences of female adult learners pursuing graduate degrees online. As online graduate programs have become increasingly popular and more readily available in the last decade, more women than men are enrolling in online graduate programs in addition to…