Education Commons^™

Radical Academia: Beyond The Audit Culture Treadmill, Rowan Cahill, Terry Irving

Rowan Cahill

The pathos of radical academia: notes on the impact of neo-liberalism on the universities, especially the audit culture, the production-model, casualization, academic scholarship, academic writing, peer reviewing, and open access. The authors suggest ways scholars can be radical within, and outside, of neoliberal academia. Part I, 'Missing in Action' appeared as an Academia.edu session in May 2015, where it attracted many comments. Part II, 'What Can Be Done?' is the authors' response to these comments. The whole piece was posted on the Cahill/Irving blog 'Radical Sydney/Radical History' on 22 October 2015.

Creating Inclusive Learning Communities For Ell Students: Transforming School Principals' Perspectives, Kathryn Brooks, Susan R. Adams, Trish Morita-Mullaney

Susan Adams

School-level administrators are often concerned about tertiary supports for English language learners (ELLs), such as translating signs and school documents or offering Spanish classes for their teachers. Although modeling and learning the heritage language(s) of the ESL population can be helpful, its focus on language differences can limit our considerations of broader systemic challenges that impact the success of ELLs in our schools. This article shares the dialogues that school administrators are having about ELL students and discusses the use of social justice and equity focused professional learning communities as a way to transform this discourse to address the broader …

Hitting The Wall, Bonnie D. Irwin

Bonnie Irwin

Much has been written over the last several years about the increase in the number of students who come to our campuses with behavioral disorders and under medication. While honors students are certainly not immune to these conditions, the more frequent emotional trauma we see them suffer is their first encounter with failure. Luckily, we can address this trauma successfully if we are prepared to do so. As honors faculty, we encourage intellectual risk, knowing from our own experience that failure may very well result but confident in the fact that learning also happens despite other outcomes, good or bad. …

We Are The Stories We Tell, Bonnie D. Irwin

Bonnie Irwin

As I approach my last hour of the presidency of NCHC, my voice will fade; it will become less prominent in the discourse of honors and our organization, and a new day will bring new stories into our midst. Yet my stories of our organization and our meeting in Phoenix will endure as I return to my campus, tired but enlightened, inspired to apply what I have learned and experienced over these four days. You each will do the same, returning home and telling your stories; by doing so, you will tell the story of NCHC. I study storytelling and …

Riding A Unicycle Across A Bridge While Juggling: The Musings Of An Honors Administrator, Bonnie Irwin

Bonnie Irwin

My favorite metaphor for the life of an honors administrator remains that of a plate spinner. Those of us of a certain age remember them from the Ed Sullivan Show: frantically running from pole to pole, these acrobats had to keep the plates spinning so that none would fall crashing to the stage. Meanwhile, in the background, some classical, frenetic piece of music, often Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance, would be playing, faster and faster. Indeed, if a university can be likened to a circus—and many are tempted to do just that— honors administrators are the plate spinners.

Hempstead Schools Stops District Rounding Up Grade Policy, Aisha Al-Muslim

Aisha Al-Muslim

No abstract provided.

Hempstead School District Rounding Up Grade Policy, Aisha Al-Muslim

Aisha Al-Muslim

No abstract provided.

A Semi-Automatic Approach For Project Assignment In A Capstone Course, Mark Chang, Allen Downey

Mark L. Chang

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to assigning students to project teams for a year-long, industry-sponsored senior capstone course. Successful assignment requires knowl- edge of at least individual project requirements, student skills, student personalities, and student project preferences. This mix of hard skills, soft skills, and interpersonal impres- sions requires human involvement to produce a high-quality assignment. The importance of faculty input often requires that the assignment process be labor- and time-intensive.

Our approach attempts to reduce the time required to perform this assignment by selectively automating parts of the task flow. An automated search uses a randomized greedy algorithm …