Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Spring 2024

Education

Summer 2004

Stories about growing up

Pamela Smith Hill isn’t one to forget her roots.

Born and raised in Missouri, Smith Hill set one of her novels, A Voice from the Border, in the Show-Me state, and another, Ghost Horses, in South Dakota, where she lived and worked for nearly a decade.

And her early training as a newspaper reporter-long ago in Springfield, Missouri-is part of the reason for her success today as a writer of award-winning books and short stories for young women and girls, she says. “As a reporter, I had the chance to listen to people, to the way they talk, and to observe details of their own … » More …

Summer 2004

Listening to His Heart

As a student at WSU in the late '60s, Ken Alhadeff questioned authority with zeal. "I was part of a group of folks that marched down the streets of Pullman to President Terrell's house with torches, demanding that the Black Studies Program not be eliminated. It was a war between us and those insensitive, bureaucratic regents," says Alhadeff . . . who is now a regent.

» More ...
Fall 2005

Dillard finds the world in a village in Africa

In June 2001, at the village of Mpeasem in Ghana, West Africa, Cynthia Dillard was enstooled as Nkosua Ohemaa Nana Mansa II.

“To be enstooled,” she explains, “I was bathed and dressed, then to music and dancing, joined in a procession of the local chiefs as they seated me on the stool that symbolizes that authority. I was named for an early queen mother of the village. It was an intense honor.”

For Dillard, an associate professor at The Ohio State University (OSU), the roots of that experience extend back to Washington State University, where she received a master’s degree in 1987 and a doctorate … » More …

Fall 2009

Elevating engineering in the schools

Sean Neal is good at math, but one bit of geometry he can’t master involves moving ten feet up and two feet over. The wheelchair-bound teen isn’t able to climb into a combine to help harvest his family’s wheat fields.

While Neal’s dad was carrying him up a ladder and helping him into the operator’s seat, his math teacher at Garfield-Palouse High School was pondering ways to nudge students toward careers in which they could use their number-crunching skills. Jim Stewart thought an engineering design contest might do the trick. A former baseball coach, Stewart knows kids like to compete. Sure enough, his Gar-Pal design … » More …

Summer 2009

In from the fields

A dozen preschoolers puff into plastic wands, shrieking as soap bubbles kite across the classroom. Sylvia Guzman, 29, sits cross-legged on the floor, next to a poster showing ways to calm down (put hand on tummy, take deep breaths). She reads aloud in Spanish: “There are three amigos.” She points to the book. The children flock around. She turns the page. “Four armadillos. How many armadillos? Let’s count them.” They count together—“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro”—as one boy stomps errant bubbles. “Look. Five cows,” she says. “What does a cow say?” Everyone moos in unison.

Guzman, a Distance Degree Program student at Washington State University, has … » More …

Winter 2001

Beyond Outcomes

For the first time in the 126-year history of college-level writing programs, a single scholarly book focuses on one university’s writing program.

Beyond Outcomes: Assessment and Instruction Within a University Writing Program tells the story of Washington State University’s Campus Writing Programs. Beyond Outcomes fully describes a set of innovations that have become models for the nation: the University Writing Portfolio, a system of peer-led group writing tutorials at the freshman and the junior levels, and an “expert rating system” that Brian Huot, co-editor of the journal Assessing Writing and a leading expert on writing assessment, has called one of the most promising developments in … » More …

Winter 2007

Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning

If you’re a parent seeking a quality model for secondary education for your child, you will be intrigued and encouraged in reading Robert Littlejohn ’83 and Charles T. Evans’s Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning. If you’re a Washington State University grad, you’ll want to see what a Cougar Ph.D. in botany-plant physiology (Littlejohn) contributes to the educational arena, specifically in providing a Christian paradigm for classical learning. What makes this book valuable is the credibility it brings to a field often littered with well-meaning attempts at Christian education that lack either the faith dimension or the balanced educational dimension. Littlejohn brings … » More …

Fall 2004

The Renaissance of American Indian Higher Education: Capturing the Dream

 

Much of the effort of American Indian education in recent years has been to reverse the effects of the deadly programs of the past, when the schools most Indians had access to were procrustean institutions, to which they were required to adjust, or fail. The intent of this book is to document the story of the Native American Higher Education Initiative (NAHEI) and the concept of the tribal college movement. The NAHEI is identified as a partnership of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation with the tribal colleges and universities, three federal schools, four national American Indian educational organizations, and mainstream institutions of higher education whose … » More …