In response to a paper calling for the re-engagement of agricultural education with the sciences and science education, this essay is supportive but argues to proceed with caution: one that at first does no harm. I offer a supplementary lens and story of change at Cornell University as a cautionary and motivational tale. I concur with the authors…

In his books "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public," Walter Lippmann argued that policy leaders should deny the public a significant role in policymaking. Public opinion, he argued, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated. In "The Public and its Problems," Dewey countered Lippmann…

The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations. At the same time, community has been and continues to be a deeply problematic concept. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williams's characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams…

Principals have tremendous influence on the schools they lead (Bamburg & Andrews, 1990; Marzano et al., 2005). Certain leadership behaviors impact school level factors (Cotton, 2003; Hallinger & Heck, 2010; Leithwood, Begley, & Cousins, 1990; Marzano et al., 2005; Orr, 2003). To affect high levels of student achievement, school…

This is a response to the Nowell and Boyd (2010) article printed in this journal titled: Viewing Community as Responsibility as Well as Resource: Deconstructing the Theoretical Roots of Psychological Sense of Community. In that article, they argued that the McMillan theory of Sense of Community is a simplistic, needs-based theory that excludes…

One of the tasks of Jean-Paul Sartre's later work was to consider how an individual could live freely within a free community. This paper examines how Sartre describes the process of group formation and the implications of this discussion for education. The paper begins with his metaphor of a bus queue in order to describe a series. Then, by means…

As a specialist in ritual theory and performance, with some professional experience of community music, I have always been struck by the robust resistance to clear-cut definitions or identities, by both "ritual" and "community music". This article takes as its point of departure the proposal of ritual scholar Catherine Bell,…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the influence of professional and academic identities in online teaching practices in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: This paper draws on data from a longitudinal study of five professional degree academics teaching subjects in nursing, teaching, engineering, allied health sciences, and…

Discusses the liberal-communitarian debate from the perspective of moral philosophy, examining strengths and weaknesses of liberal and communitarian moral thought, noting implications for education, and arguing that reconciliation requires developing criteria for determining what conditions merit support to maintain and reproduce each culture's…

Explores the communitarian dimensions of feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman as expressed in her Utopian novel "Herland," arguing that, although cognizant of tensions between individual and community, Gilman's central point is the creation of community based on care and cooperation. Gilman's theory of education as related to…

This essay proposes the theory of normative behavior and presents general discussions of two communities-the online world of virtual communities and the world of feminist booksellers associated with the Women in Print Movement-that can be used as test cases for that theory. (Contains 73 references.) (AEF)

Project Adventure's adventure-based counseling text, "Islands of Healing," uses language and simplistic conceptions of individualism and community to create an ecology of ideas. In this framework, moral and social complexities of modern life are exchanged for an artificial cyberspace-like microworld where unthinking acquiescence to group…

Explores geographical definition of communities and tendency for community relations to transcend geographical boundaries. Reinterprets Durkheim's theory of social solidarity to argue that division of labor directly reduces solidarity but indirectly increases solidarity through secondary groups, the state, and the cult of individuality. (LFL)

This study investigated the association between community violent crime rates and middle school students' (N=857) perceptions of school danger. Findings indicate that community crime rates are associated with male middle school students' reports of school danger but not female students' reports. Discusses community- and school-based prevention…