Education Commons^™

Nurturing The Development Of Teacher Change Agents Within A Teacher Education Program, Barbara Ruben

Dissertations and Theses

The American education system has two daunting challenges. First, citizens need to be able to function in an interdependent world. Second, public schools' demographics have changed dramatically. Schools are failing to reach many students, particularly children of color and poverty. Schools must change to meet the needs of 21^st century students. Without teachers' openness to change, effective educational reform win fail. Schools of education must prepare the next generation of teachers to be change agents who will implement school reform to meet the significantly different requirements of 21^st century students.

This study examined how one graduate teacher education …

Essay Review: A Marxist Critique Of Michael Apple’S Neo-Marxist Approach To Educational Reform, Ramin Farahmandpur

Educational Leadership and Policy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay review examines Apple's most recent work. It begins by providing a brief historical account of Marxist educational theory since the late 1970s. Next, it offers an analysis and a critique of a number of the theoretical underpinnings of Apple's neo-Marxist approach to educational reform. These include, among others, his interpretation of Gramsci's concept of the 'commonsense' his employment of the 'decentered unity' which he identifies as an counter-hegemonic alliance among progressive forces on the left; and finally, his notion of a 'dual strategy' for building alliances between progressive forces on the left and those on the Right. Finally, …

Using Electronic Portfolios As A Pedagogical Practice To Enhance Student Learning, Yves P. Labissiere, Candyce Reynolds

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Real learning transcends barriers of time and place. It can also provide a bag of tools one can take on the journey through life. Some students, unfortunately, leave college with empty toolkits, or ones they do not know how to open. Engaging students in the process of salient, transformative learning is a challenge, but one worth taking. Tagg (2004) speaks eloquently in a recent About Campus article about the need for faculty to use practices in the classroom that improve the quality of learning, and calls for faculty to help students claim their learning and engage in what Kegan (1995) …

Successful Online Course Retention At Marylhurst University Constructing A Model For Online Course Retention Using Grounded Theory, Vincent Schreck

Dissertations and Theses

Over the past 6 years, the course retention rate for Marylhurst University's (MU) online courses was 91%, which is within four percentage points of its on-campus course retention rate (Schreck, 2002). This appears to contradict a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that stated, "Although there is significant variation among institutions with some reporting course-completion rates of more than 80% and others finding that fewer than 50% of distance-education students finish their courses, several administrators concur that course-completion rates are often 10-20 percentage points higher in traditional courses than in distance offerings" (Carr, 2000). Recent studies (Beatty-Gunter 2001; …