The literature exploring study abroad students' social networks and intercultural communication traditionally considers three categories of social ties: the co-national network, the multi-national network and the host national network. However, the data collected from a yearlong digital ethnography and the narratives on the social media posts of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate students' understandings of ocean sustainability and the pedagogical influence of higher education on those conceptions. Design/methodology/approach: The conceptions of ocean sustainability of 54 university students of various academic disciplines enrolled in the 2014/2015 semester course…

Despite numerous previous studies that investigated the adoption of photovoice as the method to capture both students' and teachers' past experiences in qualitative research and educational settings, more needs to be done to explore how student-teachers voice their learning experience (e.g., beliefs, emotions, values or perceptions) and, in…

Images are powerful. They help make the abstract concrete and allow the viewer to share the perspective of the photographer, giving the photographer a platform to communicate what may be difficult to express with words. Educators, institutions, accreditors, and students are seeking diverse and inclusive university environments, yet we often lack…

We present the evaluation of the student response to a novel form of practical assessment: the Practical Skills Portfolio (PSP). The PSP is a concise record of a practical activity for the purposes of assessment, which prompts students to engage in reflective practice on laboratory skills, and provides opportunities for enhanced feedback delivered…

Community colleges, as open access institutions, shoulder most of the responsibility in serving marginalized individuals accessing higher education. Therefore, community colleges play a critical role. But what are new and incoming community colleges students' needs, in their own words? In this project, we explored an innovative component of a…

This study uses the agentic capability theory of Albert Bandura (Bandura 2009; 2012) as its lens to explore international students' experiences in a South African higher educational institution. The agentic capability theory "adopts an agentic perspective toward human development, adaptation, and change" (Bandura 2006:164). This implies…

Changing perspectives of children and recognition of the importance of researching with, rather than on, children, have contributed to a great deal of interest in participatory research methods. While many participatory methods have been developed to incorporate visual elements, uncertainty remains about the role and purpose of the image within…

This paper presents findings from a study of students' writings about the erotic. These occurred in the form of graffiti and were scrawled on toilet doors for female students attending a higher education institution in Malta. The study explores how the erotic was defined and perceived by students, and how they attempted to create alternative…

This chapter describes how photography can inspire and cultivate sociological mindfulness. One set of assignments uses self-portraiture to highlight the complexity of visual representations of social identity. Another uses photography to guide sociological inquiry. Both sets of assignments draw on the Literacy Through Photography methodology,…

In the present phenomenological study, I explored how some college women make sense of images of the body manipulated by Photoshop and how they perceive the Photoshop disclaimer labels currently mandated in several European countries. In-depth interviews with 16 female college students revealed four themes regarding the meanings of Photoshopped…

Students in social studies classrooms are faced with a barrage of images, many of which represent historical trauma and violence. Although photographs can be used as pedagogical tools to represent experiences of injustice and elicit deeper understanding, they also activate affective and unrelated responses in students. In this case study, I…

The authors examined the research and activism of 10th graders (ages 15-16) involved in a youth participatory action research project in a course in qualitative research at their small public school in New York City, New York. The authors, a classroom researcher and a high school teacher, looked closely at how the youth researchers used…

Popular culture images of reading tend to portray readers as solitary individuals deeply immersed in reading a single text in a quiet, undisturbed spot. Yet, in our documentation of adolescent students reading in Singapore secondary schools, we find that there are many ways and modes of reading, much of which is social in nature. Through the use…

Background: Ethical issues have become increasingly important in discussions of sustainability, an area involving ethical and sociotechnical decisions that engineers may not be prepared to consider. Recent literature on engineering ethics highlights the need to integrate social and environmental aspects of ethics into technical topics through…