Christ-animated graduate education in America: Can we redeem a Protestant failure?

Unlike the liberal arts college, American graduate education started as and continues to be a secular affair. The last four decades, however, have produced growth in both the number and quality of Christian graduate programs. The question we asked is: do American Christian institutions engage in graduate education Christianly? To answer this question for Protestants, we undertook a theologically-guided discourse analysis of the 638 graduate programs at the 41 top ranked Protestant Christian universities in the United States. In particular, we looked at the marketing, objectives, and curriculum. We found only one-third of the graduate programs demonstrated even one piece of evidence demonstrating Christian distinctiveness.

Pre-6G Graduate Education of Communications Engineering

As sixth-generation (6G) communications have been widely discussed in the past 2 years, it is now the right time to investigate the potential impacts of 6G communications on the current graduate education system of communications engineering. In this article, we articulate a set of existing problems with the graduation education of communications engineering and analyze the trends and challenges of pre-6G graduate education of communications engineering. By this article, we not only aim to diagnose the existing problems with corresponding trends and challenges but also to call for proactive measures coping with them. Besides, we would also like to use this article to encourage more and more brave undergraduates to participate in communications engineering, a fast-changing and far-reaching discipline.

Humanistic Mentoring in Graduate Education

In a global health pandemic context, a group 16 of education Master's students met voluntarily with their tutors in a virtual research support seminar, during the Saturday mornings of the first and second semester of 2020. This study aimed to know to what extent did mentoring and human tutoring characteristics emerge in a virtual research seminar experience. Through a qualitative research approach that included the analysis of the conversations and dialogues of the recorded sessions, insights showed that some of these characteristics emerged naturally along with the sessions, but as time passed, emotional and personal aspects were appearing more often than some others, showing that students felt more comfortable talking about themselves and supporting their classmates, as well as expressing their academic doubts and project thoughts freely because of humanistic tutoring approach. Most of them achieved the goal of finishing their project chapters on time. The humanistic and professional characteristics of teachers emerged as the main factors to develop this humanistic tutoring approach.

Lessons Learned From the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Implications for Pharmaceutical Graduate Education and Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in changes in the way we teach at all levels of education globally. This chapter specifically focusses on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on MS and PhD programs in pharmaceutical sciences in schools/colleges of pharmacy in the United States. Potential expectations to bring the pandemic in control by rolling out the vaccine gives us hope, but there is an unmet need of medicines to treat patients affected by the disease. The impact of the pandemic on pharmaceutical sciences education has been on the pedagogy of teaching, research, mentoring, writing, and enrollment. This has also affected the progression of students in their programs as well as their stress levels and well-being. The role of administrators and accreditation agencies is critical in supporting graduate education by providing leadership and directions for the successful outcomes of these programs. Challenges and opportunities for these graduate programs are discussed in this chapter.

Training Spiritual Caregivers

This chapter explores graduate theological education as a field that produces both discourses of spirituality and the professionals who provide what is increasingly called “spiritual care.” As taught in chaplaincy programs, the case of spiritual care illustrates how “spirituality” is produced by religious institutions in a pragmatic effort to train chaplains for work in the secular institutions that employ them. The chapter shows how, based on the history of chaplaincy graduate education programs and their students’ religious backgrounds, programs adapt the content of their curricula and their approaches to religious diversity to prepare their students for work with a wide range of religious and nonreligious people across secular institutions. It concludes by outlining what this case contributes to broader scholarly conversations about the institutional production of “spirituality” in the current American context and the role of theological education in that production.