Articles

• Embracing Influence: Contradictions in Leadership Preparation,
  By Judith H. Berg
• Service-Learning on American Campuses: Challenges for Pedagogy and Practice,
  By Sandra Enos
• The Importance of Local Places: Teaching and Learning Start at Home,
  By E. Pierre Morenon
• From Gutenberg To The Gutenberg Project – Lost In The Information Glut,
  By Tjalda Nauta

Embracing Influence: Contradictions in Leadership Preparation

Judith H. Berg

Recent waves of education reforms have focused on leadership, empowerment, and involving multiple voices. This article argues that educational leadership preparation programs fail to adequately consider “political” acuity in terms of the school leader’s role in the forward movement of a positive agenda. The interrelationship of political skills and execution of a teaching and learning agenda is ignored to the detriment of student progress.

Service-Learning on American Campuses: Challenges for Pedagogy and Practice

Sandra Enos

This article traces the development of the community service and service-learning movements on American campuses from 1985 to the present. The four stages of growth are analyzed in terms of the achievements and issues presented at each stage. The implications of these stages for teaching are discussed with reference to the author’s experience as a service-learning practitioner.

The Importance of Local Places: Teaching and Learning Start at Home

E. Pierre Morenon

This afternoon we debated the emergence of modern human social systems 70,000 years ago at Klasies River Mouth, an archaeological site in South Africa. Students struggled to make sense of exotic Pleistocene animals and climates, as well as unfamiliar places and evidence. To do so, they drew from their knowledge of local weather – that persistent Canadian high that hung over us and produced the coldest January in Rhode Island in their memories, and made inferences from familiar places - the early Holocene stream sediments at Coggeshall Farm in Bristol (RI). We do not need to go to distant places to conduct meaningful research or for students to learn significant lessons.

From Gutenberg To The Gutenberg Project – Lost In The Information Glut

Tjalda Nauta

Never in recorded history have there been as many pages of information produced in a year as today. The library in ancient Alexandria contained only about 400,000 scrolls and was considered the largest collection of documents in the world at that time. Today the Internet alone contains over 8 billion pages of documents, and adds or updates 4 million pages per month. Every time our students need to do research they are staring into the business end of a fire hose of information – raw data, pre-digested or skewed – from which even the most sophisticated have difficulty selecting what is trustworthy and useful. The author makes plea for a campus-wide effort to increase library instruction, often referred to as information literacy instruction, for our students.