In our invited piece, Five Transformative Trends in Higher Education and How They Affect Our Writing, Dr. Jason Lane draws upon his experience as both a practitioner and researcher to identify five trends in higher education, and their impact on how we write as scholars. He argues that higher education has changed significantly since he completed his graduate coursework, including the consolidation of institutions into systems, which now educate 75% of four-year degree students, the internationalization of higher education, and the amazing changes put in motion by new technologies, such as big data and social media. The common thread throughout Dr. Lane’s piece is that scholars must integrate the traditional scholarly foundation with these new realities that are transforming the practice of higher education, while providing research that is accessible to both researchers and practitioners.
As Dr. Jason Lane alludes to, technology is transforming many parts of higher education. Our first peer-reviewed piece entitled Enriching the Participation of Undergraduate Women in Higher Education: A Qualitative Exploration of the Experiences of Female Bloggers, written by Laura Parson and Donna Pearson, examines the relationship between the enrichment of academic experiences and empowerment, and blogging among female undergraduate students. The authors provide a stimulating discussion of how the women in their study grew both individually and as students as a result of their blogging.
Our final peer-reviewed piece, The Black-White Dichotomy of Race: Influence of a Predominantly White Environment on Multiracial Identify, Veronica Jones investigates how and why multiracial students self-identify racially. The author unpacks the participants’ notions of their racial identity within a system that only classifies them within a dichotomy of white and black.
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Five Transformative Trends in Higher Education and How They Affect Our Writing