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This chapter examines the inauguration of the university study of Education in Scotland and its relation to teacher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The chapter outlines moves to establish Education as a disciplinary field in higher education and the junctures at which this movement aligns with and is in tension with concurrent moves to advance teaching as a profession. Academisation and professionalisation are the twin poles of this debate. This is not a parochial or obsolete debate. The place of teacher preparation in higher education has been the focus of sustained discussion across Anglophone nations. Three examples – the inauguration of chairs and lectureships, the governance of teacher education and deliberation on the content and purpose of a degree in Education – are used to help explain the apparent paradox between the historic place of education in Scottish culture and identity and the relatively recent full involvement of Scotland's universities in the professional preparation of teachers. Investigating the activities of the first academic community of educationists in Scotland may help to understand continuing struggles over jurisdiction and authority in this contested and yet neglected field.

The origin of the learning community, in higher education in the US, began over a century ago. In contemporary higher education, living-learning communities (LLCs) have become a strategic way to foster student development, engagement, and success as well to advance key tenets of diversity and inclusion. Within this work, a historical narrative of the learning community is provided, in addition to a discussion of relative student development theory. Finally, this chapter positions diversity and inclusion as central to this educational intervention and frames the utility of this student engagement model within the Dynamic Student Development Metatheodel, a modern theory of student success and development.

In the context of the risks inherent in global warming, public libraries can partner with each other, community-based environmental groups and/or other institutions to enhance community resilience and sustainability. This chapter presents a case study of an ongoing experiment to address this opportunityand challenge. In April 2021, six Western MA libraries formed a collaborative in conjunction with a local citizens’ group, Voices for Climate [V4C], to expand public education opportunities relating to understanding, mitigating, and adapting to climate change. In its initial year, this effort yielded 13 separate programs serving more than 110 patrons, all within the 7 days of Climate Preparedness Week, a state-wide program held annually. Subsequently, this Pioneer Valley Library Collaborative [PVLC] has grown to 10 library partners and continues its close alliance with V4C. In describing the programs offered in the first year, the challenges met, limitations encountered, and lessons learned, the chapter provides one model for how libraries can jointly choose to become hubs of climate conversation and education as a means to promote their communities’ quality of life, sustainability, and resilience.

In the USA, as elsewhere, there is an ongoing need to improve quality in higher education. Quality improvement models from business have not been widely embraced, and many other approaches to accountability seem to induce minimal compliance. This paper aims to contend that learning communities represent a viable alternative in the quest for quality. By restructuring the curriculum and promoting creative collaboration, learning communities have become a major reform effort in US colleges.

The paper provides an overview of learning community theory and core practices and four original case studies of institutions that have made learning communities a long‐term focus of their quality improvement efforts.

Findings include: effective learning communities are clearly positioned, aimed at large arenas and issues and are central to the organization's mission; learner‐centered leadership is a key component of effective programs; learning communities offer a high leverage point for pursuing quality; effective learning communities meet faculty where they are; successful initiatives create new organizational structures, roles and processes; successful programs attract and reward competent people and build arenas for learning from one another; and successful programs have a living mission and a lived educational philosophy reaching constantly toward more effective practices.

Educators will draw rich lessons from this concise overview of learning community theory and practice and the story of these successful institutions.

This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

IN his admirable survey of library methods and problems in Great Britain, read—unfortunately by proxy—at the St. Louis meeting of the American Library Association, which the author of this paper had the pleasure of hearing, Mr. Bond, in writing of open access, was courageous enough to say that the system in question was the system of the future. It is true that he put that future a long way off, but it is none the less creditable to Mr. Bond's fairness and foresight that he recognises and admits that some time the system of shelf access—perhaps a better term than open access—is bound to prevail, and become the rule rather than the exception in the library administration of this country. One has therefore a shrewd suspicion that much of the fierceness with which the system and the personalities of those who have adopted and approved it, have been assailed, is due to an uneasy feeling on the part of its opponents that time is on the other side, and that they can at best only put the clock back, not stop it.

Excessive entitlement, the enacted belief that one's voice, opinion, or assessment holds more weight than that of others (even those of one's own kind), and how it unavoidably rubs against their sense of their best-loved self, is the focus of this chapter. Some define excessive entitlement as a kind of greed where individuals in academia elevate themselves and lord their perceptions/stances over others. This work is situated in the academy and involves relationships and situations that arose between and among graduate students and professors as well as between and among professors and other professors. Wedged between conflicting agendas, individuals feel pulled from pillar-to-post as they experience differing phenomena and images playing out within themselves, some seriously challenging their images of the best-loved self. This fine-grained scholarship illustrates that although strides have been made around gender, professional backgrounds, ethnicity, and race in society, room for significant improvement still exists, most especially at the micro-levels where aggressions can still take place. This research reveals intertwined hegemonies in academia. Narrative inquiry – a storied method that unpacks stories – deftly skirts research issues by including fictionalization as a fourth analytical tool, joining the conventional tools of broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying. Using these devices situates the inquiry, burrows into stories of experiences, and illuminates shifts taking place. Truth is established through employing multiple research tools over time and gauging the extent to which the intersecting narratives ring true to those outside the research situation.

The introduction of Web‐based course instruction into an existing degree programme offers the opportunity to re‐examine models supporting learning and the transfer of knowledge among students enrolled in such courses. By removing the barriers of time and place, instructors can create and sustain student learning communities supported by interactive communication tools grounded in asynchronous learning models. The instructor’s role moves to that of a facilitator who seeks to stimulate interactions between students and between students and the instructor, in the pursuit of improved learning and knowledge base construction.