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Women's colleges and universities persist around the world, even as the vast majority of tertiary institutions are open to men and women. In nearly every nation, women can attend even the most elite formerly all-male universities, and in several nations women are the majority of all college students. Questions therefore arise about the continued need for a single-sex sector in the 21st century. In this study I examined the contribution of these institutions to their national systems of education and society. I used a qualitative, comparative, multiple case study approach to understand 14 diverse women's colleges and universities in nine nations on five continents. Five key roles emerged: access, campus climate, gender empowerment, leadership development, and cultural paradox. I make recommendations for research and practice.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to better understand how gender is constructed at a women's college. Specifically, the researchers use Judith Butler's (1990) work on performativity to frame how members of the campus community perceive transgender students are integrated into the college. Through semi-structured interviews with faculty, staff, and students, three themes emerged: transgender students are both invisible and hyper-visible and they experience a certain degree of oppression in their lives, oppression that carries with it unique circumstances due to the location of this study. The influence of these themes on the campus community and on what it means to be a women's college when gender is considered as performance are explored. Finally, implications of the findings for research and practice are also considered. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

At the moment of its founding in 1911, Connecticut College for Women exhibited a curricular tension between an emphasis on the liberal arts, which mirrored the elite men's and women's colleges of the day, and vocational aspects, which made it a different type of women's college, one designed to prepare women for the kind of lives they would lead in twentieth-century America. Connecticut was a women's college that simultaneously embraced the established brand of education practiced by its prestigious Seven Sister neighbors and forged its own path by integrating elements of home economics, municipal housekeeping, and professional/clerical training into its academic program. For forty years Connecticut College for Women achieved a balance between those two opposing poles of its curriculum. By the early 1950s, the curricular landscape was changing in the nation and on the Connecticut College campus. Post-World War II industrial expansion ushered in a new emphasis on science education on American college campuses. The Truman Commission had declared in 1947 that higher education was in the national interest and had predicted a boom in college enrollment by 1960. Nationally there was a shift from endeavoring to educate a well-rounded generalist to a technically adept specialist. The major local change was in Connecticut College's leadership. The College's president was no longer Katharine Blunt, whose academic training in chemistry, first at Vassar and then at the University of Chicago, had manifested itself in applications to food science. In historical accounts of Connecticut College for Women, the president who followed the long Katherine Blunt era, Rosemary Park, is frequently lauded for reestablishing the primacy of the liberal arts in the curriculum. Park and faculty leaders in the 1950s steered the Connecticut curriculum away from the vocational areas that had been offered as major options and minor electives from the College's opening semester in September 1915. The Connecticut College that emerged from the Rosemary Park era was an institution that had pruned some of the curricular offerings that had been central at its founding. In removing the home economics program, Connecticut College let go of the field where its longest-serving president, Katharine Blunt, had achieved prominence. Also gone by the end of Park's tenure were other programs that had expressed Connecticut College's difference at its birth, such as secretarial courses. (Contains 204 footnotes.)

What makes the difference between a good teacher and a great one? Knowing one's content is important, but having strong leadership skills can tip the scales from mediocrity to excellence. The best time to begin practicing being a teacher leader is during the preservice years. By practicing leadership skills, one can begin to view oneself not only as a teacher, but also as a leader with the capacity to guide and direct others. This article highlights a collaborative preservice teacher leadership experience between three teacher certification candidates who were enrolled in their final semester of student teaching and three of their professors (the authors and one of their colleagues). The preservice teacher participants were chosen based on perceptions of potential leadership attributes, with students representing three of the programs within Texas Woman's University (TWU) College of Education (general education, special education, and bilingual education/English as a Second Language). The preservice teachers collaborated with their three professors to create and lead a panel presentation for high school students interested in education careers during a breakout session at the Future Educators Association[R] (FEA) 2010 national conference in San Antonio, Texas. Creating this presentation gave the preservice teachers the chance to learn leadership skills that, in turn, gave them the confidence, tools, and encouragement to serve as teacher leaders.

Women adult students face particular constraints when pursuing degrees. This paper uses focus group data to explore the educational pathways, barriers, and supports of women students. Women's educations are shaped by personal and structural gendered forces, including family, economic, and workplace issues. Women report conflict over short-term sacrifices versus long-term gain for their families and experience stress from the competing demands of family and school roles. They also rely on families for support. When families and academic communities value the student role, women are better able to balance their roles and cope with the stress of returning to school.

Saint Mary's College, a single-gender Catholic institution in northern Indiana with approximately 1,600 students, has just revised a general education curriculum that had been in place for nearly forty years. The board of trustees unanimously approved the new curriculum in April 2010. In this article, the author discusses seven key lessons learned along the way.

The feminized labor of composition studies is usually seen as being in service of, or subservient to, literary studies, ignoring composition's disaffective position against other fields, specifically creative writing. Viewing composition studies' complex labor histories in tandem with the meteoric rise of creative writing allows for a new way of historicizing writing instruction and writing program administrator successes and failures. Analyzing WPA work through an archival case study of one woman's college faculty postwar, specifically the WPA May Bush and the poet Randall Jarrell, illustrates how the disciplinary rise of composition and rhetoric against creative writing was fraught with gendered labor issues still relevant to the struggles of women WPAs today. (Contains 9 notes.)

This study examined the experiences of gay male undergraduate students enrolled at a traditional women's college using the framework of queer theory. Using data collected from student interviews, journals, and document analysis, the findings offer insight into how institutional space as well as peer culture impact identity. The students reported the need to identify with peers across a range of individual characteristics. Conclusions and implications for practice are offered.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have received inadequate funding since their inception. This has challenged the development of programs and infrastructure, the adoption of technology, and the recruitment of faculty and students. Yet among HBCUs there are standouts that, despite unequal funding patterns in comparison to predominately White institutions (PWI), have developed curriculums that propelled their institutions to greatness. Spelman College, a historically Black women's college (HBWC), is one of the nation's premier historically Black liberal arts institutions, and its prestigious and enduring legacy has been greatly influenced by both its curriculum and its financial resources. Using the Spelman College presidential administrations as an organizational framework, this article seeks to highlight the role of philanthropy in the evolution of the Spelman College curriculum and provide recommendations to other HBCUs based upon the actions of Spelman College presidents.

Recent educational policies have altered scholastic experience. It is the contention of the authors that contemporary school experience may therefore, for some individuals, be distressing. This study is concerned with the identification of stress-related behaviours of sixth-form pupils within female single-sex, selective, scholastic environments. The sample consisted of 420 girls drawn from two comparable schools. The study was conducted using qualitative and quantitative methods. Administration of a questionnaire at three intervals within one academic year permitted sustained reflection upon responses. The qualitative questionnaire findings permitted generation of themes, later investigated through focus groups. SPSS was used to analyse responses to scaled questions. The keeping of a research diary served to illuminate meaning and to capture anecdotal evidence, which is so easily lost within a busy school environment. In addition, the opinions of a number of relevant professionals were sought. The study concluded that some members of the sample population encounter demands emanating not only from assessment incidents, but also from a range of other sources inherent to the system of sufficient magnitude, duration and intensity to engender school-related stress. Within the study the ways in which school-related stress may present are identified; these include, for example, physical effects, subjective effects, effects upon work and effects upon relationships. An evaluation of current relevant support mechanisms is offered and recommendations for change are made. (Contains 1 table and 8 figures.)

In this article, the author shares her experiences and challenges in teaching university-level studio art classes for Muslim women in Kuwait. In Kuwait, popular interpretations of the "Quran" (the Koran), the Muslim holy book, prohibit the use of nude models. The author describes how she had to find alternatives to Western tried and true teaching methods, adapt her teaching methodologies to students with limited exposure to studio arts, and learn to see through her own veil of illusions about Arab women. As an artist and arts educator the author has learned that teaching studio arts in a Muslim society is like creating a semi-abstract painting--experience, emotion, and perceptions are distilled and projected through the mind's eye, whether on a canvas or in a culture. (Contains 8 figures.)

The global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite long-held prejudices and the lack of role models. Previously, when equality was not firmly established as a key issue on international or national agendas, women's colleges played a great role in mentoring female scientists. However, now that a concerted effort has been made by governments, the academic community and the private sector to give women equal opportunities, the "raison d'etre" of women's universities seems to have become lost. This paper argues otherwise, by demonstrating that women's universities in Japan became beneficiaries of government initiatives since the early 2000s to reverse the low ratio of women in scientific research. The paper underscores the importance of the reputation of women's universities embedded in their institutional foundations, by explaining how female scientific communities take shape in different national contexts. England, as a primary example of a neoliberal welfare regime, with its strong emphasis on equality and diversity, promoted its gender equality policy under the auspices of the Department of Trade and Industry. By contrast, with a strong emphasis on family values and the male-breadwinner model, the Japanese government carefully treated the goal of supporting female scientists from the perspective of the equal participation of both men and women rather than that of equality. Following this trend, rather contradictorily, women's universities, with their tradition of fostering a "good wife, wise mother" image, began to be highlighted as potential gender-free institutions that provided role models and mentoring female scientists. By drawing on the cases of England and Japan, this paper demonstrates how the idea of equality can be framed differently, according to wider institutional contexts, and how this idea impacts on gender policies.

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908. To what extent were students at Southern public women's colleges complicit in contributing to what Joan Marie Johnson has called the "culture of segregation" promulgated by racialized constructions of Southern, American, and female identity? What role, if any, did these colleges play in breaking down racial divisions and promoting interracial understanding? And how did students' racial attitudes change over time? To address these questions, this article explores student attitudes on race through the lens of their public writing. To better allow the setting of these student voices against the context of their schools' histories, this article focuses largely on two of these institutions, Florida State College for Women (FSCW) in Tallahassee and North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) in Greensboro, with supplementary evidence from the remaining campuses to provide both corroboration and counterpoint. Although students express a continuum of attitudes, both within and across institutions, this article finds that student treatment of African Americans in their writing often offers a more sympathetic range than that of contemporary elite white clubwomen and professional women writers. (Contains 64 footnotes.)

Historical scholarship has traditionally focused on the commonalities uniting Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon, the two leading antebellum women's educational reformers in New England. This essay shifts that focus by contrasting their educational philosophies and exploring the implications their differences had for the development of American women's collegiate education. Despite Beecher and Lyon's similar religious and educational backgrounds, a combination of childhood socio-economic differences and adult theological differences underlay disparities regarding which class of women each sought to educate, what social roles Beecher and Lyon thought these women should be educated to play, and what curriculum each believed would best accomplish their purposes. By contrasting the educational philosophies of Beecher and Lyon, the author shows that the Seven Sisters' decision to copy the liberal arts curriculum of elite male colleges was not a forgone conclusion, and neither was their high price tag. Their curriculum and the student population they targeted resulted from the ferment of ideas about gender, theology, and class generated by debates between Lyon, Beecher, and other female educational reformers in the middle of the nineteenth century. The author explores the formation of these ideas in order to clarify the ideological choices made in the design of American women's colleges--and their long-range implications. (Contains 45 footnotes.)

Many undergraduate liberal arts institutions offer computer science majors. This article illustrates how quality computer science programs can be realized in a wide variety of liberal arts settings by describing and contrasting the actual programs at five liberal arts colleges: Williams College, Kalamazoo College, the State University of New York at Geneseo, Spelman College, and Calvin College. While the example programs differ in size, mission, and the nature of their home institutions, all take advantage of their liberal arts setting to offer rich computer science educations. Comparing these programs to each other and to the latest ACM/IEEE Computer Society computer science curriculum shows that the liberal arts programs are distinguishable from the ACM/Computer Society recommendations, but at the same time are strong undergraduate majors. (Contains 9 tables.)

This essay examines women's commencement addresses presented from 1910 to 1915 at Vassar College. These addresses are significant because they reveal the students' rhetorical education and the "available means" upon which these women drew in developing a public voice. By prompting reflection and the potential for change, the commencement addresses also demonstrate the civic importance of epideictic rhetoric. (Contains 14 notes.)

Librarians from Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) report on an empirical evaluation of the relevance and value of Infoasis (http://www.zu.ac.ae/infoasis), a Web-based information literacy tutorial developed and tailored to the Arab student population of the Emirates. After the successful implementation of this project, questions arose about the value of maintaining Infoasis, given the time intensive nature of this activity. Was the tutorial relevant and useful to students? Was it being used by students, and what factors contributed to the engagement (or not) of students with the tutorial? Survey results concluded that students found the tutorial both relevant and useful to their studies and that the design features tailored to the needs of the undergraduate Arab population were effective in ensuring usability. Reasons for poor usage of Infoasis outside the classroom are discussed. (Contains 8 tables, 2 figures and 24 notes.)

Since their creation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, women's colleges in America have undergone many significant changes. In 1960, over 230 women's colleges were in operation; over the next forty years more than 75 percent chose to admit men or shut their doors entirely (Miller-Bernal, 2006a). This chapter will shed light on the dilemmas facing women's colleges when pondering coeducation. It will look specifically to Lesley College's decision about coeducation as a case study that reveals the challenges facing many single-sex institutions. Underlying this analysis is one central question: What does the future hold for women's colleges?

In this article we present two programs we have developed at Bryn Mawr College designed to effect socially just change on our campus and beyond. Both programs create forums for dialogue across differently positioned community members and ensure that students assume leadership roles in these efforts. In our discussion we describe the programs, identify their shared premises, and discuss preliminary findings--both benefits and challenges--from our ongoing study of participants' experiences in the programs. We highlight the kinds of personal changes participants experience as they pave the way for institutional change, and we emphasize how students lead all participants down the still unfolding paths these programs chart.

The authors describe an interdisciplinary course team-taught by an economist and a sociologist. Historically mindful of the less than amicable relationship between these disciplines, these colleagues developed a course that attempted to illuminate the different perspectives of economics and sociology in relation to selected health themes. Such a course is either rare or unique. It served as a general social science (core) requirement and as a major elective for sociology majors. The article describes course mechanics, pedagogy and assessment, course content, and institutional barriers. In particular, the article highlights some of the unique problems that exist in offering such a course--problems that are either less severe or nonexistent in more traditional courses. (Contains 2 notes.)

This study utilized a data set of categorical responses measuring the gender role views of students (N = 701) from a prestigious, Midwestern, all-male, Catholic high school. Incongruence between student self-perceptions and the realities of gender role miseducation and the embracement of sexist ideology were readily apparent. Findings suggest that all-boys' schools are improved if they (1) co-opt parents to become active partners in promoting women's awareness, (2) adopt meaningful anti-sexist curriculum that is K-12 articulated throughout the district, (3) find a way to capitalize on gender friendliness that students bring into the school as freshman, sensitivities that somehow become eroded by their senior year, and (4) recruit and retain a student population that reflects racial, economic, and religious diversity--characteristics that appear to have an impact on school climate that is more female sensitive. Male graduates from single-gender schools tend to become leaders within their community, thereby necessitating a need for anti-sexist, critical pedagogy. Educators cannot assume that appropriate gender role education for students who attend schools with no opposite-sex peers will come from parents, or that school influence will be meaningful and balanced without a concerted effort on the part of the administration. (Contains 4 tables.)

In the current vernacular, co-education means the education of the sexes together within an institutional setting. Once a phenomenon, today, women enjoy nearly equal status on campuses that were at one time bastions of "maleness." Moreover, the counter-culture revolution of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, ushered in a new dimension of co-education aside from "mixed" classes (females/males), when student protests led to co-ed dormitories, an unthinkable arrangement only a few decades before. Yet, an older version or interpretation of co-education existed prior to the turn of the 20th century and well until the mid-century mark. What the literature uncovered was a definition of co-education that preceded the admission of females into institutions of higher education. The earlier definition of co-education referred to the education of Negroes and Whites within the same institution of higher education (Thompson 1945, 522). This writer became intrigued with the background literature on co-education, especially legal cases, that dealt with co-education as a racial issue rather than a gender issue. The racial issue was intriguing because it called into question if resistance to co-education of the sexes at the turn of the 20th century up to the mid-century mark, had, in fact, any foundation in the resistance to coeducation of the races following the Civil War. The presidents of two Virginia institutions, Mary Washington College and Madison College, approached the issue of co-education from quite different perspectives. Thus, the comparison and contrast of these two institutions serve as a lens through which one might view co-education in a broader context, one that involves any number of southern states, for nowhere was resistance to co-education stronger than in the south.

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the relationship between gender and female leadership styles in a single-sex academic institution in Saudi Arabia. Design/methodology/approach: Essentially, a qualitative research approach that utilised a single case-study methodology was adopted. As part of this research, seven in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers of the all-women's Saudi academic institution. Findings: Evidence suggests that the interviewed female leaders of Manar College are inclined to adopt stereotypical attributes of feminine qualities of leadership. They also tend to prefer a democratic, interpersonally-oriented and transformational style rather than autocratic, task-oriented or transactional style of leadership. In essence their leadership styles seem to agree--to a large extent--with the mainstream view on women's ways of leading. Research limitations/implications: Despite the depth and richness of collected data, this research--as with all case studies--suffers from a limited ability to generalise the findings due to small sample size. It could thus be of interest for future quantitative-based research to test the findings and propositions of this research on a representative set of single-sex academic institutions in order to determine whether their leaders are trapped in stereotyped visions of leadership. Originality/value: Various studies have examined the relationship between gender and leadership styles in educational establishments. In this regard, the paper argues the need and relevance of considering single-sex academic institutions, a perspective that has not yet received sufficient attention in the educational leadership literature. (Contains 3 figures.)

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women's colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women's education in speaking and writing. (Contains 4 notes.)

This paper describes a study of online discussion forums as tools for promoting higher-order thinking. The study was carried out in a women's university in the United Arab Emirates. Data, in the form of online discussion forum transcripts, were collected over a 20-week semester and were analysed according to a model developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2001). Discussion forum postings were analysed for evidence of higher-order thinking and were placed within one of the model's categories of "triggering", "exploration", "integration", or "resolution". The researchers did find evidence of higher-order thinking processes. The results showed that the majority of postings were either categorised as "exploration" or "integration". The results also supported the notion that the correct conditions need to be present in order for higher-order thinking to arise. The findings suggested that the initial teacher prompt or question may have had a bearing on the nature of learners' postings. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

This study uses case study analysis to explore the ways that Spelman College, a historically Black women's college, promotes the attainment of African American women in STEM fields. Although limited to one institution, the findings shed light on the ways that institutional characteristics, policies, and practices may mitigate the barriers that limit attainment of African American women in STEM fields. Drawing on the findings, the paper concludes with recommendations for improving policy and practice as well as recommendations for additional fruitful research.

Sociologist Mabel Agnes Elliott was elected the fourth president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1956-1957 and was the first woman to hold this position. She was an anti-war activist, a feminist and a creative and diligent writer. Yet she experienced many challenges. The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept an active file on Elliott for approximately 30 years, she was the victim of discrimination by her male colleagues at the University of Kansas where she spent much of her career and Professor Robert E. L. Faris used many of the ideas from her "Social Disorganization" textbook without attribution. In spite of her research productivity her salary was frozen for 18 years. Once she began teaching women at Chatham College she found an institution that appreciated her many talents and rewarded her appropriately. Even so, in a male-dominated discipline, her contributions to criminology and social disorganization have been nearly forgotten.

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S. women's colleges in new ways as they sought to preserve and strengthen their individual institutions and to secure a future for women's colleges as an institutional type. Using as its focal point the Women's College Coalition (WCC), a national organization founded in 1972 to represent the interests of such institutions, this article draws on archival sources and oral history interviews to consider the strategies by which women's college presidents collectively addressed their mutual concerns. These strategies included networking, gaining access to money and influential people in philanthropic foundations and the government, and savvy use of research data and the media to help make the case for their colleges to new audiences. During a time of dynamic environmental change for women's single-sex higher education, this group of presidents used the Coalition for the various purposes of image making, research, and advocacy as they sought to sustain the institutions they led. (Contains 97 footnotes.)

This case study briefly explores how an online, multimedia learning module based on a Cognitive Apprenticeship higher level pedagogy can positively affect students achieving the learning outcomes of a Constructivist project-based curriculum in a blended e-business management program in the Middle East. The cohort in this program is nonnative speakers of English and have significantly reduced life experience and independent learning opportunities relative to many of their international counterparts. The proposal of this endeavor is to support students prior to the start of the constructivist aspects of the project itself. This article attempts to answer the question, which type of support is effective in giving students the scaffolding they need for successful achievement of project learning outcomes without quelling the benefits of working in a constructivist learning paradigm. Results from the sample questioned reveal that such modules are useful for this cohort prior to the start of the group project work with the important caveat that instructors participate effectively in the online mentoring. (Contains 1 table and 11 figures.)

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as "vacuous" themes, this archival study examines women's compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms. By focusing particularly on two related hybrid forms--the letter composition and the sermon composition--this article demonstrates the discursive nature of women's intellectual work as it circulated within and beyond seminary walls, in both written and oral forms, serving as localized evidence of a gendered antebellum epistolary culture. (Contains 27 notes.)

Stimulating the interest of students in biological sciences necessitates the use of new teaching methods and motivating approaches. The idea of the self-expression assignment (SEA) has evolved from the prevalent environment at the College for Women of Kuwait University (Safat, State of Kuwait), a newly established college where the number of students is low and where students have varied backgrounds and interests and are being instructed biological sciences in English for the first time. This SEA requires each student to choose a topic among a long list of topics and interact with it in any way to produce a finished product without the interference of the course instructor. Students are told that the SEA will be graded based on their commitment, creative thinking, innovation in developing the idea, and finishing up of the chosen assignment. The SEA has been implemented in three introductory courses, namely, Biology, Introduction to Human Nutrition and Food Science, and The Human Body. Many interesting projects resulted from the SEA, and, based on an administered survey, students assessed this assignment very favorably. Students expressed their pleasure of experiencing freedom in choosing their own topics, interacting with such topics, learning more about them, and finishing up their projects. Students appreciated this type of exposure to biological sciences and expressed that such an experience enhanced their interest in such sciences.

This study examines predictors of academic success in a private women's college. We investigated academic factors (e.g., high school grade point average, standardized test scores) and socioeconomic status (e.g., parents' occupation, need for financial aid) as possible predictors of academic success among White and non-White students. Data was collected archivally from 299 former students at a small, Midwestern private women's college. We found that academic factors were good predictors of college success in general but especially for White students. Among non-White students, only high school grade point average (G.P.A.) and class rank predicted college success. Students who indicated a need for financial aid tended to have higher G.P.A.s than those who did not indicate such as need. Our results indicate that women's institutions should carefully consider the use of standardized test scores when evaluating non-White applicants.

This article examines the network of women's colleges which emerged in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to women's exclusion from the realm of the university and their desire to participate in higher education. These colleges, run largely along denominational lines, were situated in the major cities with the majority located in Dublin. The pioneering colleges for Protestant women were the Ladies' Collegiate School (1859), later Victoria College Belfast (1887) and Alexandra College Dublin (1866). Colleges for Catholic women emerged from the 1880s, largely as a result of a perceived threat of proselytism, and as a result of the demands of middle-class Catholic women to higher education within a Catholic setting. Run principally by the Dominican, Loreto and Ursuline orders, the most prominent Catholic women's colleges were the Dominican College Eccles Street, Dublin (1882), St Angela's College and High School, Cork (1887), St Mary's University College, Dublin (1893) and Loreto College, St Stephen's Green, Dublin (1893). Whether Catholic or Protestant, these colleges were established with the sole objective of targeting the more prestigious and valuable domains of knowledge, allowing middle class women students access to a range of high prestige cultural and social capital. They offered teaching in the liberal arts, providing participating women students with exposure to a demanding academic curriculum and to participation in the public examination arena. They also promoted membership of college societies--literary, sporting, philanthropic and political, strengthening women's capacity to fulfil a more public and active role in nineteenth-century Irish society. (Contains 62 footnotes.)

At the turn of the century approximately a thousand white Southern women braved the consternation of friends and sometimes family, and traveled hundreds of miles to attend the best Northern women's colleges for an education unavailable to them in the South. For many, the experience was revolutionary: they developed self-confidence, independence, and intellectual curiosity. Being at college and in the North challenged their gender ideology and helped them reconceptualize what a white Southern woman could be and do. A collective biography of Southerners at Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Smith colleges is important because they disproportionately formed an elite female leadership in the New South and forged new roles for women, especially in social reform and education. They melded together new possibilities for independence and leadership learned in the North with traditional Southern gender roles, which stressed dependence and charm for women. Southern women were held to stricter standards of domesticity and dependency than in the North because the intertwined hierarchy of race, gender, and class in the South demanded that no one step out of his or her place. White men even defended the lynching of African-American men in the name of chivalry, under the spurious claims of the black rape of white women. This article addresses the unique experiences of these influential students, heretofore neglected by historians of women's higher education. (Contains 82 footnotes.)

This study compared the experiences of women attending women's colleges with those of women attending coeducational institutions. Analyses of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) from random samples of female first-year and senior students from 26 women's colleges and 264 other four-year institutions were conducted. Women at single-sex institutions were more engaged in effective educational practices and reported higher levels of feelings of support and greater gains in college. With regard to the effect of different backgrounds on college experiences, transfer students at women's colleges were as engaged or more engaged than students who start at and graduate from the same school, and students of color tended to be less engaged than White students. (Contains 6 tables.)

Marlborough School, which was founded in 1889 in Los Angeles, is an independent college preparatory day school for young women. When the author arrived in Marlborough School in 2005, she found that the school was an exciting place to learn but the library was not. However, head of school Barbara Wagner described her vision of the school's future library as a Starbucks, an inspiring image that resonated with the school's intellectual culture and appealed to the author immediately. This article describes how the author and her colleagues planned for the renovation of their school library. Prior to finalizing their plans, she and her colleagues compiled the suggestions made by their students and their faculty. Their responses and wishes, rather than the advice of interior designers, architects, and landscape experts, were implemented without a dime, into SALON@marlborough. (SALON stands for Sense-Making Approach to Learning through Open Access Networking.) (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC) is a 130-year-old independent girls' school in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Teaching students from ages 4 to 18, PLC has a reputation for academic excellence. Geography is a separate subject taught as a part of the core curriculum in the secondary school. The College, which uses principally Macintosh computers, seeks to integrate ICT (information and communication technology) within the curriculum. The introduction of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) is one example of this. After spending seven years exploring how best to integrate this new technology into the Geography classroom, the school has identified eleven key factors considered necessary for a successful integration process.

The article begins by highlighting recent trends and concerns in post-secondary Calculus and Precalculus education. The main purpose of the article is to discuss the transition to a new Precalculus/Calculus I two-semester course at Wabash College, a small liberal arts college for men. Three years of data from the earlier, traditional, sequence are compared to two years of preliminary data from the revised sequence. Learning theories are cited to justify the pedagogical value of the revised sequence and a list of possible sequence texts is provided. (Contains 3 tables.)