The important role of study abroad in the preparation of competent teachers for the 21st-century globalized world cannot be underestimated. Yet, the percentage of teacher education programs that have incorporated study abroad into their curriculum is still negligible. While there are approximately 5.3 million emergent bilinguals in U.S. K-12 public schools, and they constitute the fastest growing sector of K-12, the demographics of teachers have changed very little, with most of them being White, middle-class, monolingual, and monolithic females. Additionally, teacher education curricula do not incorporate the appropriate training for the accommodations that must be made in order to educate culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students effectively. As a result, teachers continue to have difficulties meeting the demands of today’s pluralistic society. Based on this premise, this exploratory study surveyed education majors participating in a summer study abroad program in Spain to determine their expectations and perceptions about the program with a focus on the sociocultural and linguistic dimensions of the prism model. Findings revealed that the students expectations were in consonance with the framework, indicating their dispositions toward acquiring the required knowledge and skills for the implementation of biography-driven instruction (BDI). The data also revealed the appropriateness of the study abroad program for preparing educators for BDI.

We examined the APA [American Psychological Association] RESOLUTION on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (APA, 2021) and while doing so have noted several problems. The APA (2021) resolution report is largely flawed in terms of theory, logic, and science. It relies almost exclusively on sexual minority theory when many other theories might be useful. It relies upon seriously flawed logic, treating SOCE as unchanged and unimproved over the past six decades. In addition, it relies upon very weak and limited science, overlooking recent reports on SOCE outcomes, not considering effect sizes for SOCE treatments, treating correlational results as causal, and often overlooking ways of testing more complex models of SOCE. The same limitations apply to much of the material reported in APAs book edited by Haldeman (2022a), therefore not deserving a separate review. As such, we concluded that readers of the APA (2021) resolution report or Haldeman (2022a) for that matter, would walk away with unequivocal, one-sided, and misguided information about the topic of SOCE and therefore a condensed fact-checked critical analysis is presented.

T.S Eliot read and quoted the great European mystics, among them Richard of Saint Victor and Saint John of the Cross and was influenced by the Biblical prophets. Their works coincide not only in religious believes, but there is a parallelism between Eliots linguistic devices and style and religious concepts like the disappearance of the Ego. The expression of the mystical experience through images implies a theory of imagination which uses visible things to explain the invisible and provides a source for meditation, in the same way as Eliot understands poetry as a means to make humanity aware of its need to turn to God.