higher education

Written from an Australian higher education perspective, the information in this volume could be useful to anyone engaged in teaching, supporting, or recruiting prospective students in tertiary institutions (xi). It is a worthwhile (beneficial) resource for educators desiring to transform classroom pedagogical practices and approaches into ones that are user friendly, foster social inclusion and academic excellence, and are convergent with the pluralistic student population they serve.

Drawing on the expertise of multiple authors and a carefully constructed critical educational methodology, the book is divided into three sections. The first section introduces readers to the key terms and conceptual reasoning that underpin the participatory research used throughout the text. The second section (chapters 2 through 6) consists of selected student stories or case studies that provide windows of understanding about issues students face as they engage higher education and the educational and social factors that contribute to academic success. The authors contend that student voices serve as “organic educational theorists,” and thereby reinforce the authors’ claims that inclusive pedagogies must reflect the active involvement of the learner in achieving their own learning goals.

The case studies themselves were “developed over the course of a longitudinal research project that investigated how students from diverse backgrounds succeed in higher education” (20). The students represent Australia’s multicultural population and include both on-campus and distance education students. They also represent varied social-economic, ethnic, gender, and age groups. The authors state, “While participants’ backgrounds and experiences differed, they shared interrupted educational biographies with no clear pathways into higher education” (20). The authors state that “students from diverse backgrounds require more time to fully comprehend course material, to integrate new knowledge into their existing frameworks and make sense of it”(120).

Other insights provide food for thought for anyone working with students facing both academic and cultural challenges. For example, higher education approaches in Australia often demand more classroom participation and discussion than what students may be accustomed to in their countries of origin. Hence, a degree of adjustment by students is required for success. Other case studies highlight the experience of nontraditional age students who began their studies in their forties. These case studies provide insights about the role of social obligation and self-reliance in their own learning goals. As one student stated, “I was never going to give up right from the start, because I wanted a good solid qualification that would get me a job” (213). Additional factors mentioned by students in support of their academic success included family support and encouragement, mentoring, stable finances, internships, and the usefulness of student services.

The discussion questions found at the end of every chapter are a welcome resource for educators. These questions are insightful and could easily be used in a variety of university forums to conscientize faculty. In addressing mature students, the authors raise the following question: “How do you currently support adult learners while respecting their adultness? What changes could you make in your  current practice to assist mature age students to cope with study and the demands of on their time and energy from other life responsibilities and situations?” (159). In the final chapter the authors discuss the implications of the cases for university staff and conclude with a summary of suggested strategies for managing and supporting student diversity and higher education.

What make this book significant is that it not only sensitizes educators to the challenges faced by students coming from non-traditional backgrounds, but it also incorporates solid methodologies to highlight needed improvements in the classroom. Having read and experimented with the book’s ideas in my own teaching I can attest to its usefulness. 

As a non-Latina author, I was moved and enlightened by this compilation of twenty-two writings, weaving complex narratives from across the Americas with heritage(s) in US-American, Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, Guatemalan, Panamanian, black, Dominican Republic strands and more. Jennifer de Leon states her purposes: to dispel stereotypes of Latinas, fend off their isolation in higher education, invite activism toward social justice, and offer opportunity for each contributor to share her unique voice and wisdom (4-5). I myself stand in a line of women writing for change – Women Writing for (a) Change, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, with affiliate sites across the country – so these stories drew me all the way in. The book contributes well toward its aims, though the challenge remains for the reader to make the necessary transitions from authors’ narratives into concrete action for change. This is a liberationist text for cultural and women’s studies, college freshman seminars, educational ministries, and various creative and essay writing courses in postsecondary education.

Wise Latinas locates itself well within feminist, mujerista, and liberationist reflections on higher education, specifically in the areas of pedagogy and narrative. I was reminded of True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School, edited by Susan Gubar (W.W. Norton, 2011), though de Leon’s compilation expands horizons by attending to “rooms of their own.” The organization of the work into four sections holds the reader’s attention in a persuasive arc  – Worlds Apart, Rooms of Our Own, Inside These Academic Walls, and In Tribute, In Time.

Each section touches themes of voice (lost and found), body, family (especially daughter norms), virtue, worth, intellect, belonging (and socialization away from belonging), hospitality (often unwelcome or misunderstood in fragmented, highly mobile US contexts), gender, orientation, race, and more. Unable to do justice to each essay, I offer only a couple observations. Celeste Guzman Mendoza offers a bold, integrative writing in bilingual prose – “Las Otras” – relating her surprise at the commonalities across ethnic identities while holding to her own distinctive communicative medium, a mix of English and untranslated Spanish. I loved the demand to confront Spanish (or ignorance of it) in the reader. In “Rapunzel’s Ladder,” Julia Alvarez offers a stinging summary of higher education’s disempowerment of cultural traditioning (by schooling) and asks crucial pedagogical questions for social justice education. Chantel Acevedo’s reflections name the difficulty for a woman leaving home for school before marriage – Cuban ‘exile trauma,’ she calls it – which prefigures a difficult journey in the often nomadic academic life. One painful paradox arose in several writings: substantial parental pressure to succeed in school simultaneous with their great displeasure upon daughters leaving home to pursue said education. Throughout, the strengths of Latina wisdom arise out of hard won experience and culturally-rooted heritage awash in a world that can overwhelm.

Wise Latinas is a good read, with narrative essays, poetic dialogues, and creative expression of the journeys many Latinas in higher education have travelled. One intention was to combat the isolation Latinas face there. A happy side effect is that outsiders are invited to listen and learn, attuned to this distinct expression of an existential isolation that higher education – as currently configured – seems to insure.

It is common to hear concern about the commodification of higher education. Administrators’ reliance on business models built on the logic of the marketplace -- emphasizing the bottom-line, rational management strategies, and consumer-focused marketing -- is often at the center of any conversation about the future of higher education. Although Jan McArthur’s book does not address these issues directly, it does, in fact, make an important contribution to the discussion by forcefully challenging the instrumental economic basis for the university or college educational experience. Moreover, she rejects the “traditional liberal ideas of education as a good in itself” (19). For McArthur, higher education’s primary purpose is to contribute to the building of a more just and equitable social order.

McArthur’s monograph is a revised version of her PhD thesis, written under the supervision of Paul Ashwin at Lancaster University (UK). She divides her book into three major parts. Chapters one and two lay the theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book, offering an overview of her understanding of the relationship between knowledge and social justice. She draws on the work of Theodor Adorno to develop her own approach to critical pedagogy, especially emphasizing his ideas of negative dialectics and non-identity. This, in turn, leads to her commitment to a higher education that can be a “home for complex and contested forms of knowledge, engaged with in risky and uncertain ways, where there is safety from normalizing forces” (32).

The next four chapters make up the second part of the book and each addresses a different aspect of knowledge in higher education. In chapter three MacArthur argues that what should be distinctive about knowledge within higher education is that it be “not easily known.” That is to say, the difficulty encountered with such knowledge mirrors the complexity of the social and natural worlds, thus making it useful. In the fourth chapter, MacArthur critiques the current emphasis on the standardization of knowledge, arguing that knowledge within higher education should allow students to develop “their capacity to step outside of the mainstream, to question and challenge the status quo; to live in their own right in the intellectual world” and should not be grounded in a predetermined set of acceptable ideas that denies students their “true autonomy” (98). MacArthur’s fifth chapter introduces three metaphors she sees as especially useful for informing the educational experience of students and critical academics: exile, sanctuary, and diaspora. These metaphors speak to the ways that knowledge can be both a cause of separation from, but also a means of linking to, society. In the sixth chapter, MacArthur argues that the dichotomy between theory and practice is a false one. All knowledge should be “understood in an holistic way, as both theory and practice, philosophical and useful, social and economic” (147). Finally, in chapter seven, she summarizes her argument and suggests several avenues for additional work and reflection.

This necessarily brief overview of the book cannot adequately convey the significance of MacArthur’s refreshing and well-written work. Her argument for placing social justice at the very core of higher education is both forceful and convincing and relevant for those teaching in religious studies or theology departments. For faculty struggling with questions regarding the future of higher education and who are looking for something beyond a business-model approach, MacArthur’s book offers a worthy conversation partner. She concludes her work with a challenge to those who would choose to follow her lead: “We should cease to feel the need to apologize for academic work that shows its passionate motivations and committed values. . . . Free and curious human beings can never be mainstream, predictable, or standardized” (160).

Researchers and teachers will find this book a useful resource on student learning and enhancement. Based on twelve international collaborative research units’ seminars sponsored by the Scientific Research Network of the Research Foundation Flanders at Antwerp in December 2011, the volume reports empirical research and theories on educational practice to support studies of learning pattern development in higher education. Thirteen of fifteen essays are multi-authored, and the contributors are mostly higher educational specialists from Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, and Spain. A few essayists are from Ireland and United Kingdom. Though written from the European continent, many of the learning concepts, strategies, and patterns – cognitive strategies, factors for learning patterns, and learning-learner characteristics – are transposable in higher education. A few essays explore pedagogy in global contexts. One article in particular compares multidimensionality and learning differences between students from the Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Spain and Latin America, and Hong Kong.

Six chapters in Part I examine dimensions of learning patterns. Given the twenty-first century’s multifaceted learning environment, educators face the challenge of presenting learning integratively and creatively so as to motivate learners in their respective contexts and learning patterns. The authors claim that individual learner-oriented approaches and student subgroup orientations in learners’ cultures affect learning presage, perceptions, processes, patterns, and outcomes. The book claims that research continues to validate self-directedness among mature adult learners amid other reasons for facilitating effective adult learning.

Nine chapters in Part II engage aspects of measuring student learning patterns and development. Core measurement issues include (a) learners’ academic achievements, (b) motivations and cognition on measuring achievements, (c) student teaching experience as a process for their deeper learning, (d) transition from higher education into the workforce and professional service, and much more. Teachers may be interested to discover that learners’ self-confidence and self-directedness are crucial to inspire their performance. Even so, perceived workload, task complexity, working memory capacity, and attention span directly affect learners’ degrees of engagement. The effectiveness of a pedagogical mode – whether it is lecture-based, case-based, an immediate mixed-learning model, or a gradual mixed-learning model – will depend on the student’s motivation and learning profile.

The empirical settings and the theories presented are not directed at the teaching of religion and theology. Students of religious studies are not among the human subjects identified in the reported empirical investigations. Thus, for Teaching Theology & Religion’s readership, the book is not as relevant as other edited volumes including: Andrea Sterk’s Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); Richard Devine, Joseph Favazza, and Michael McLain’s From Cloister To Commons: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Religious Studies (Stylus, 2002); Sherry Hoppe and Bruce Speck’s Identifying and Preparing Academic Leaders (Jossey-Bass, 2004); and David Smith and James Smith’s Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning (Eerdmans, 2011). Several essays in Learning Patterns in Higher Education allude to the importance of learners’ contexts for constructing effective pedagogical models. However, the book does not examine the many sociopolitical aspects that have impacted learning (for comparison, see Liam Gearon and Sue Brindley’s MasterClass in Religious Education, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

Nonetheless, this book is well researched. Readers will profit from its extensive treatment of learning theories, and it will enhance an educator’s overall teaching competence. Educational psychology and theories of human development are embedded in many of these theoretical explorations, and therefore, the findings in this book may be transferrable to the practice of religious studies or theology.

The enterprise known as collegiate education is at a crossroads. This statement should not be a surprise to those involved in higher education. The playing field has changed drastically over the last decade since the advent of online learning. Debates continue to rage in the academic community regarding issues related to accreditation, how courses are delivered, faculty credentials, and the cost of a degree program. These questions confront present-day educators and administrators located in U.S. higher educational institutions.

These debates are keenly felt in the U.K. and in other global contexts, although each context will address them from different perspectives depending on teaching and learning needs. Towards Teaching in Public is primarily focused on addressing these questions head on. As the book details, there is a seismic shift occurring in the educational institutions of the U.K., and it is likely that these shifts will be felt here in the U.S. sometime in the not-too-distant future. That said, understanding how these shifts are impacting British schools before they impact American institutions could aid administrators and faculty in how to plan for the forthcoming changes.

The place to begin, then, is in understanding what is meant by “public.” In the U.K., “public” and “private” have less to do with religious affiliation and more to do with where tuition dollars come from in higher educational contexts. In the British system, education in “private” institutions is provided at the expense of the student. “Public” institutions, then, primarily receive money from the government to provide education to students. These students can be degree-seekers, lifelong learners, tradesmen who are looking to pick up some new information, or individuals interested in taking a class now and then. The question the book raises is whether this remains an effective endeavor in a perpetually struggling economy. A secondary question concerns higher educational institutions as the loci of learning – teacher, student, and community. In answering these two fundamental questions, the contributors to this volume contend that the university could serve as the central hub of political, societal, and cultural reform.

The volume is divided into three major sections. The first section (chapters 1-3) focuses on education as “a public good.” The essays in this section recount the modern history of education in the U.K., noting how the public university was established to provide free education to all and how that morphed into the private universities that sought to offer degrees to paying students who would be held to more rigorous academic standards. The second section (chapters 4-6) focuses on the relationship between teacher and student. This section argues for a higher value to be placed on students. The chapter entitled “The Student as Scholar” was particular insightful as it mapped out a program for developing undergraduate researchers who could benefit the university in a number of ways. The final section (chapters 7-10) seeks to answer the questions raised previously. First, the university should continue to offer free education to the general public through workshops, public lectures, and continuing education offerings. However, the book advocates for requiring stricter regulations for degree-seeking students. Second, the locus of learning has moved to the community, although the concept is more Marxist in nature. This would be my only critique of the material in the volume. In the end, the authors seem to say that the purpose of education is simply to share our collected knowledge. The modern university, then, will be a place where the discussion of ideas will occur but little else. Although this volume was an insightful read, it would most benefit those involved with administration or international policy discussions rather than faculty.