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Early College High Schools (ECHS) are defined as "small schools where students can earn both a high school diploma and two years of college credit toward a bachelor's degree" (Early Colleges, 2005). ECHSs are designed as places of learning to help young people progress toward the education and experience they need to succeed in life and in family-supporting careers. The Utah County Academy of Sciences (UCAS) is innovative in its approach in assisting Hispanic students. As Hispanic students enter an Early College High Schools (ECHS) program such as the Utah County Academy of Sciences (UCAS), it is clear that no single theory of academic achievement entirely explains why some students succeed in school and others fail, nor can just one type of program answer everyone's needs. As Hispanic students enter an ECHS program such as UCAS, it is clear that it is vital to understand school achievement as a combination of personal, cultural, familial, interactive, political, and societal issues, and this means understanding the socio political context in which education takes place. UCAS represents just one kind of attempt in a specific setting to begin to respond to the multifaceted needs of students of color. The purpose of presenting an overview of this experimental program in this article is to provide an example that will aid other educators and policymakers as they conceptualize and implement their own unique approaches to the challenge and promise of multicultural education.

How people experience, interpret, and enact time--personally, collectively, and transcendentally--is educationally significant. One's temporal hopes and fears, limitations and potentials, are the fundamental stuff out of which is forged "the constitution of human life in time." In this article, the author offers various perspectives on individual, cultural, and spiritual time, suggesting alternatives to the reductionist linearity in most federal agendas for educational "reform." He also offers a few suggestions about how to bring these alternative views of time to fruition in various educational contexts. "At the biographical level," he discusses helping students deal with psychological rupture through narrative reconstruction. He also stresses the importance of encouraging teachers to explore the autobiographical dimensions of their own sense of calling, current practice, and goals. Furthermore, he argues for the importance of teaching both teachers and students to respectfully examine various "cultural views of time." Finally, he discusses how "spiritual commitments regarding time" are vital because they buttress the delicate personal, political, and cultural edifice of many teachers' calling and practice.

Much has been written over the last two decades on the difficulties that many Latino students continue to face in U.S. public schools. In this article, the authors look at some of the most pressing of these problems in a particular middle-school in a Rocky Mountain state (which the authors called "Madison Middle School"). The authors examine these issues from the point of view of a first-year Latino teacher at that school, whom they called "Carlos," through extracts from a journal that he kept during that first year as a novice teacher of color. Unlike most studies that deal with the problems of Latino public school students, this study also allows individuals to have an insight into a Latino teacher's "own" internal and institutional dilemmas as he helps his students makes sense out of theirs. (Contains 1 note.)

In order for teachers to reflect deeply upon themselves, they need powerful models and images to guide their introspection. In teacher reflectivity, as in the therapeutic processes, psychic energy must ultimately be "contained" by models and modalities that enable one to make sense out of one's inner and outer experiences. This enables those experiences to form the basis for the transformation of self, setting, and other. In this article, the author would like to introduce and employ a model that he believes can enrich teacher reflectivity at biographical, political and spiritual levels. The author is speaking of alchemy--and specifically, Carl Jung's psychotherapeutic interpretation of it. In the last major phase of his career, Jung, the father of archetypal psychology, turned to the lost art and arcane texts of alchemy in his researches, claiming that alchemical processes subtly embodied and richly symbolized the psycho-spiritual transformations that occur in the course of deep therapy. He asserted that "the world of alchemical symbols definitely does not belong to the rubbish heap of the past, but stands in a very real and living relationship to the most recent discoveries concerning the psychology of the unconscious." In this article, the author shows how alchemy in its psychotherapeutic contexts offers especially rich symbols for exploring oneself as a teacher.

Various psychoanalysts have written about the implications of psychoanalytic theory for teaching and learning. Although many curriculum scholars have offered their personal interpretations of the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to education, there is very little in the educational literature about what psychoanalysts "themselves" have had to say about the acts of teaching and learning since the rise (and, some would suggest, decline) of psychoanalysis over the last century. This study examines a wide range of educational themes that emerge from a reading of various psychoanalysts over the last eight decades. In general, the psychoanalysts argue that, in order to be existentially authentic, teaching and learning must involve the teacher and student in all their psychodynamic complexity as emotional and ethical beings. I also examine the psychodynamic concepts of transference, counter-transference, and object relations in some depth because they have figured prominently in psychoanalytic discourse about education. (Contains 9 notes.)

The present study is a follow-up study to the initial study that appeared in "International Journal of Leadership in Education", 7(3), 257-284. In this second study, the authors compared the standtrays of the students in the first study with the sandtrays that they did at the end of their one-year program in BYU's Leadership Preparation Program (LPP). They found that doing standtray work helped their students concretely embody both the positive and problematic sides of their experiences in the LPP. Comparison of entering and exiting sandtrays revealed: 1) a wide range of strengths as well as room for improvement in the program and 2) how other professors of educational leadership might use sandtray work in order to both broaden and deepen their students' experiences as prospective administrators. (Contains 7 figures and 1 note.)

The amount of resources being poured by Western universities, companies, and governments into creating educational content to be exported (via the Internet) to other cultures is astounding. Those assigned to accomplish this task are left with the great challenge of meeting the needs of learners who come from cultures that are foreign to them, and who often have very different abilities and expectations than originally assumed. This study explores the cultural competence in the lived experience of 12 professionals who have been involved with such efforts. Often they have had to question their assumptions, recognizing flaws in their own thinking and in the organizations that support them, and tried to alter their practice accordingly. Their awareness of cultural differences and the importance and impact of these differences in their practice will be discussed.

This paper examines the image of the teacher as a shaman. The shaman must suffer a wound in order to learn how to guide and heal others. Similarly, the teacher must suffer three types of wounds in order to maximize his or her professional, intellectual, and existential growth. These are the vocative wound, the interpretive wound, and the transferential wound.

Alan Block's (2004) major criticism of the authors' study revolves around the notion that they have attempted to quantify their students' sense of calling in an existentially inauthentic, spiritually delimiting way. For, as he puts it, "identifications of presence are impossible." The authors cannot accept this pronouncement if only for the simple reason that doing so would probably bring to a screeching halt every creative activity from artistic production to phenomenological inquiry, all of which more or less aim at not only "identifying" presence but actually "enabling and embodying" it--and doing so in a way that might help others engage in similar projects. Indeed, the entire phenomenological turn in educational research rests upon just these assumptions and hopes--assumptions and hopes that inform their own work. The authors contend that Block seems to object to their study because he sees embedded in it an affront to the specific historico-theological framework that matters so deeply to him. His evidence of this is that their work is putatively riddled with a New Ageism that he has uncovered in their simple reporting of the fact that, for some of the participants in their study, figures of Christ as well as mythic figures and some characters from popular culture seem to have spiritual significance. As an exposition of his "particular" interpretation of a "particular" faith, Professor Block's pointed pronouncements make for interesting homiletics. Unfortunately, they have, in the authors' view, very little, if anything, to do with "their actual study"--one that has, happily for Block, provided him an occasion to expound on the deeper mysteries and finer points of faith and salvation. Certainly, Block has the right to offer such views--yet, a response to an exploratory bit of educational research is hardly the most fortuitous or appropriate format in which to do so. His "response" is simply all out of proportion to the matter at hand. The authors' study was simply an attempt to look at how some of the deeper commitments of a few members a specific faith community might come to bear on each participant's reflectivity and practice, and whether any patterns seemed to naturally emerge in this phenomenological analysis. To do this, the authors used a concrete too--one that was both literally and methodologically "grounded"--to allow those commitments to emerge in as authentic a way as possible--and one that they hoped would encourage other researchers to inquire into the important synergy of faith-commitments and educational practice in their "own" local contexts and specific communities of discourse.

The authors describe and use a psychotherapeutic modality known as sandtray therapy in order to help thirteen veteran teachers in the graduate educational leadership program at Brigham Young University reflect on the biographical, critical, and spiritual dimensions of their sense of calling as educational leaders. The authors first look at findings from the group as a whole. After that, they look in depth at four individual sandtrays.

Many images of the teacher in the current literature on teaching and teacher reflectivity can be seen as aspects of the Jungian image of the teacher as an archetype of spirit. These images--the teacher as philosopher, prophet, Zen master, and priest--correspond to what I call dialogical, civic, ontological and incarnational spirituality, respectively. I examine the possibilities and perils inherent in each of these visions of teaching. I also show how viewing teaching in archetypal terms provides a way of including the spiritual domain in both the theory and practice of teaching. The pedagogical, biographical and political dimensions of a teacher's calling and practice are important. However, examining the spiritual dimension of teaching can add to and interact with these other dimensions in ways that will enrich an understanding of what it means to be a teacher. (Contains 4 notes.)

Results of 7-question, 45-60-minute interviews with 9 Mormon teachers asking them to reflect on the spiritual side of teaching. Teachers were asked, for example, are there spiritual values that you think are important to pass on to your students? Reports and analyzes answers to this and other questions. Draws implications for teachers, administrators, and education professors. (Contains 38 references.) (PKP)

Discusses the need to address spiritual beliefs in teacher education, arguing that: because spiritual impulses are so primary for many people, they must be addressed in teacher education; educators must recognize and cultivate students' spiritual motivations to teach and foster reflectivity; and student teachers must learn what they can legally discuss in class about personal spirituality and formal religious doctrines. (SM)

An Overview of the Utah County Academy of Sciences, with Special Reference to its Benefits for Hispanic Students Early College High Schools (ECHS) are defined as 'small schools where students [...]