International Journal of Educational Reform

Religion and spirituality are gaining renewed appreciation as key elements of the cultural milieu. Yet there has been an inattention to the academic study of religion and spirituality in U.S. education due to several contributing causes. Central to remediating this deficiency is an understanding of these causes and how the reform of key factors in higher education may play a part. This article outlines several conditions contributing to this “failure to engage” the ideas of religion and spirituality in the academy and notes some encouraging trends that may provide opportunities for progress.

From its beginning, UNESCO made education for international understanding in school history and geography a priority. As these were the areas where children were most likely to encounter nationalism in state schools, a reform of these subjects was critical to the success of education for international understanding. The experience of two world wars and the threat of further conflict created a sense of urgency that sometimes allowed historical scholarship to be sacrificed for ideological ends. The major contributions of UNESCO in history education were pedagogical and involved new ways of organizing the subject for school instruction.

Student discipline and the ineffectiveness of out-of-school suspension is examined in light of the Ontario (Canada) legislative reform that supported a greater emphasis on progressive discipline alternatives to out-of-school suspension. Alternative discipline herein is explored via the behavior education plan, the school survival group, and conflict resolution training. As well, the need for alternative learning programs and school centers has been illuminated within a positive discipline mode, which may include various programs, advisory centers, as well as behaviorist and diagnostic approaches.

To what extent do divided cities characterized by geopolitical conflicts and a variety of contradictory expectations create a distinctive context and a unique professional conflict for individuals holding boundary-spanning roles? Data collected in a set of in-depth interviews conducted with school principals leading Arab schools located in East Jerusalem provide evidence for principals’ stress following the large and various number of role expectations they are expected to satisfy. The data testify to principals’ exposure to a hybrid role conflict—a unique conflict reflecting a mixture of incongruent expectations regarding a particular issue coming from both internal and external sources representing different sets of values. Moreover, it is evident that hybrid conflicts suggesting a clash between competing values and ideologies foster principals’ tendency to employ a radical coping strategy based on a cost–benefit minimal risk approach and to act deceitfully as means to diminish their stress. The study demonstrates the significance of contextual features that frame the scope for individuals’ professional behavior when serving in boundary-spanning roles and discusses some implications of hybrid conflicts for professional judgment and behavior.