Studies investigating the acquisition of multiword items (MWIs) from reading have furnished evidence that the likelihood of acquisition improves considerably if such items are typographically enhanced (e.g., bolded or underlined) in the texts. In the case of captioned audio-visual materials, however, an earlier study by the authors did not find such compelling evidence. In that study, indications of an effect emerged only when the same video was watched twice. Arguably, for learners to benefit more immediately from typographic enhancement in captions, they may need to be made aware of its purpose beforehand. The present article therefore reports an approximate replication of Majuddin et al. (2021), but this time the students were informed about the MWI-learning purpose of watching the video. As in the original study, the learners watched a video once or twice with standard captions, with captions in which MWIs were enhanced, or without captions. The positive effect of enhancement for MWI learning was clearer than in the original study, and it already emerged after a single viewing. On the downside, enhancement was found to have a negative effect on lower-proficiency learners' comprehension of the content of the video.

At the start of the twentieth century, few Americans ever imagined getting a college degree. Less than 5 percent of children made it through high school, and approximately 1 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college. Two-year institutions were still a novelty, and four-year colleges catered to the 1 percent.1 Those numbers have changed dramatically. We now live in a world where 94 percent of Americans believe some college is “very important” to their lives and future prospects.2 Scholars tend to point to midcentury legislation—i.e., the GI Bill and Higher Education Act—as well as “College for All” movements as key drivers for the change. But the US isn’t alone. Globally, college-going has undergone a fundamental transformation during the past century. And the future promises the further expansion and reimagining of postsecondary education, though no doubt with surprising twists along the way.

For this policy dialogue, we asked Roger Geiger and Philip Altbach to discuss the past, present, and future of higher education in the US and abroad. Roger Geiger is a distinguished professor emeritus of higher education at Penn State University. He has written extensively on higher education history, with particular attention to research universities. His recent works include The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II and American Higher Education since World War II: A History. Philip Altbach is a professor emeritus at Boston College, where he was a research professor and distinguished fellow at the Center for International Higher Education. He has received the NAFSA: Association of International Educators Houlihan Award for Distinguished Service and the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Howard R. Bowen Distinguished Career Award. Both bring decades of research experience, professional expertise, and personal insight to this discussion.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

Fear for the future of democracy in the 1930s and 1940s led university educators to redefine the purpose of general education as preparation for democratic citizenship. This mobilized social scientists to engage in curricular reform and experiment with progressive pedagogical practices in new general education courses. These courses have been overlooked in the scholarship on general education, which focuses on Great Books courses and educators’ efforts to create a common culture linked to Europe. Uncovering these courses demonstrates that general education was an important part of higher education’s commitment to democracy. Mid-twentieth-century social science general education was an innovative form of political education aimed at preparing independent-minded, engaged citizens with democratic values.

In the late 1970s Iranian student activists in the United States worked to educate the American public on the history of the US-Iranian relationship and the long-term consequences in Iran of the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that placed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the Iranian throne. The students directly challenged local and state governments to respect freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and pushed President Jimmy Carter to keep his promise of injecting human rights into American foreign policy. Iranians studying in the US were not monolithic in thought, but they shared the common goal of liberating Iran from Pahlavi’s despotic rule and creating an Iran free of American intervention and Cold War geopolitics.

The Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) sought to democratize the nation’s education system; pupil guidance was expected to play a key part of this process. American reformers promoted new guidance practices (e.g., the comprehensive collection of students’ personal data, guidance interventions based on the case-study method, an expanded homeroom curriculum) that emphasized the psychological adjustment—translated as tekio (適応)—of students to school and society in a new Japan. By tracing the evolution of prewar and postwar Japanese guidance discourse, this study examines how American pupil guidance’s emphasis on student adjustment interacted with, and transformed, twentieth-century Japanese education. Drawing from prewar, Occupation-era and post-independence sources, the essay explores three points. First, by comparing prewar life guidance with Occupation-era and post-independence pupil guidance, it emphasizes the important changes effected by tekio-oriented guidance during the late 1940s. Second, by examining the way these practices related to Occupation’s educational democratization, it explores how their psychological approach to democracy defined—and arguably constrained—the dynamism of this broader project. Lastly, the work discusses who supported and opposed this new tekio discourse. American authorities succeeded in garnering the support of many elites in Japanese education (e.g., Ministry of Education officials, leading academics), but other educators remained skeptical.

This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette “Polly” Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing from oral histories, newspapers, and archives in the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, this essay explores Fuller’s and Williams’s travels and the responses they generated to better understand how and why choice-based educational policies, including school vouchers, gained traction, or failed to do so, at the close of the twentieth century. A close-up analysis of one small strand of the transnational voucher movement reveals that educational ideas and policies did not drift naturally from one place to another. To the contrary, they were cultivated; and that cultivation, particularly when done across vastly different contexts, represented both a political act and an expression of power. This essay also prompts historians to understand the global ascendancy of school choice at the end of the twentieth century by looking to other transnational frameworks and ideologies in addition to neoliberalism: decolonization, Indigenous activism, Pan-Africanism, and the “Black Pacific,” among others. Finally, this essay hopes to encourage more historians of education, including Americanists, to peer beyond national boundaries when investigating the cultivation, development, and dissemination of educational ideas and practices. A close analysis of the transpacific travels of Fuller and Williams can serve as a tangible model for how historians might utilize microhistory to reap the benefits of transnational inquiry while avoiding its analytical hazards: broad generalizations, oversimplifications, and cultural misinterpretations.

Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), wrote about many aspects of education including its aims; the education of children, nations, and elites; types of pedagogy; the reform of the university; and the challenges facing educators in an era of “triumphant plebeianism.” The article examines all aspects of Ortega’s educational thought, with a particular focus on his ideas about elites and their education, drawing on writings unavailable in English, including texts not published during his lifetime. At the heart of his writing is a vision of the qualities needed to enable individuals to make what he called a “project” out of their lives along with a powerful advocacy of the non-utilitarian and Socratic pedagogies that would help achieve that vision. The article looks at the balance of radical and conservative elements within Ortega’s educational thought and its relation to earlier “progressive” thinkers, and concludes with an evaluation of his legacy.

I am a cinematic being of the Anthropocene. As a concerned citizen and environmental educator, I immerse myself in film. Gummo is a 1997 film by Harmony Korine that deeply resonates with me as a testament to the capacity and desire for humanity to realise the potential to rise from the epochal fall of the Anthropocene. I propose that my relationship with Gummo as arche-cinema is not just a process of watching and interpreting Korine’s cinematic world, but also (re)projecting my dreams of a new reality for the whole-Earth ecosystem onto the world-out-there. I suggest that my entanglement with Gummo exemplifies my climating and becoming-climate as film in our current human-induced climate crises, and in this way, I argue that I am learning to live-with climate change through film.

The need for more radical forms of learning-centred transformation is increasingly recognised in transformations to sustainability. Yet these approaches to learning remain under-developed and undertheorised especially from a politics and environmental education research perspective. This paper offers a review of an emerging politics of transgression in environmental education research, as developed through an extensive T-learning (transgressive learning in times of climate change) knowledge co-production research programme, spanning eight years, and continuing. The ongoing problem that the research programme seeks to address is how to do transgressive learning in/as environmental education research in times where the fall out of coloniality and fossil capital collide in an increasingly regressive political landscape which Akomolafe and Ladha (2017, pg. 820) describe as “the deadening ideology of late-stage capitalism and its corollaries of patriarchy, rationalism, white supremacy and anthropocentrism.” Through the paper, I seek to highlight a “low theory” (Wark, 2021) of transgressive politics in environmental education research, embodied in practices of transgressive politics as movement in co-engaged T-learning research, which I illuminate through a meta-reflective curational process from the ‘archive’ or T-learning knowledge commons collection.

Informal digital learning of English (IDLE) is a promising way of learning English that has received growing attention in recent years. It has positive effects on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and also creates valuable opportunities for EFL teachers to improve their teaching skills. However, there has been a lack of a valid and reliable scale to measure IDLE among teachers in EFL contexts. To address this lacuna, this study aims to develop and validate a scale to measure IDLE for EFL teachers in Iran. For this purpose, a nine-step rigorous validation procedure was undertaken: administering pilot interviews; creating the first item pool; running expert judgment; running interviews and think-aloud protocol; running the pilot study; performing exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha, and confirmatory factor analysis; creating the second item pool; conducting expert reviews; and performing translation and translation quality check. Findings yielded a 41-item scale with six subscales: IDLE-enhanced benefits (12 items), IDLE practice (five items), support from others (nine items), authentic L2 experience (three items), resources and cognition (four items), and frequency and device (eight items). The scale demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties such that it can be used for research and educational purposes in future.