Teaching introductory archaeology courses in U.S. higher education typically falls short in two important ways: the courses do not represent the full picture of who contributes to reconstructing the past, and they do not portray the contemporary and future relevance of the archaeological past. In this article, we use anti-colonial and decolonial theories to explain the urgency of revising the introductory archaeology curriculum for promoting equity in the discipline and beyond. We detail the pedagogical theories we employed in revising an introductory archaeology course at a small liberal arts college in the United States and the specific changes we made to course structure, content, and teaching strategies. To examine the impacts on enrolled students and on who chose to enroll in the revised archaeology curriculum, we analyze student reflection essays and enrollment demographics. We found that students developed more complex understandings of the benefits and harms of archaeological knowledge production and could articulate how to address archaeology's inequities. We also found that enrollment in archaeology courses at the college shifted to include greater proportions of students of color. These results support the notion that introductory archaeology courses should be substantially and continually revised.

Due to their age and lifestyle, female students in general are at an increased risk of various forms of sexual violence. Particular sociocultural contexts also form the background of gender-based violence in professional and academic structures. Yet despite institutional and legal efforts to protect (potential) survivors of sexual violence from primary (and secondary) victimization, persistent assaults demonstrate the reluctance of organizations and individuals to fully accept women’s experiences as being physically and psychologically harmful. Based on quantitative and qualitative data obtained in the context of the European research project “Gender-Based Violence, Stalking and Fear of Crime”,1 this article presents a comparative analysis of the prevalence of sexual violence, feelings of safety (or a lack thereof) and the reasons for (non-)disclosure for five European countries. A dataset of about 21,000 responses from German, British, Italian, Spanish and Polish students indicates that sexualized violence is a major problem at universities and that it has yet to be recognized as such. This – added to the fact that it is generally suppressed or concealed by universities – makes it society’s problem as well. The article discusses widespread social myths about victims and perpetrators, the role of the new media in victimization, and the issues of universities’ responsibility for their students (through institutional policy and specific responses to incidents of gender-based violence). The results presented here demonstrate the contradictory perceptions that students have in regard to their experiences and the nature of sexualized violence in an academic environment.

Using recent data, this study examines the affirmative action programme of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), the first Brazilian university to implement admissions quotas. The article analyses admissions records and finds that both the ratio of applications per place and minimum admission scores are considerably lower among quota students; scores in the admissions test are associated principally with socio-economic factors rather than racial ones; preparatory courses for the university's admissions tests do not appear to be a substitute for the quota system in terms of improving access; few quota applicants would be admitted in the absence of the system; and the applicants who displace others come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. The article concludes that it is necessary to improve the quality of basic education in Brazil in order to enable disadvantaged applicants to compete.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ethos of interculturalidad in Mexico's recently founded universidades interculturales. On the basis of documentation and interviews with faculty in five universities, institutionalisation of intercultural higher education within the state sector can be seen to have created a space in which the politics of recognition meet the radical ideas of educators in the tradition of constructivism and educación popular. Intercultural higher education does not select students on the basis of race, but the location of the campuses and the content of courses are designed to attract indigenous students. The introduction of field research early in the undergraduate course should transform the relationship between students and their communities of origin, and prepare them for leadership roles. The article concludes with a critique of what it calls ‘hard’ multiculturalism.

University and academia are, due to its nature, its structure and its inside relationships, a perfect breeding ground for the conflicts, disputes, problems, and grievances. In these settings, mediation is one of the dispute resolution mechanisms most used by University Ombudsperson. However, the special characteristics of university contexts make it necessary to consider and evaluate elements that may have a bearing on the effectiveness of the process and outcomes of the mediation. In this paper a model of contingent intervention in mediation processes articulated in three dimensions is put forward: a) level of balance or symmetry of power between the parties involved; b) the foreseeable temporal perspective of the relationship between them; and c) level of formalization of the mediation process. Based on the interaction between the three dimensions, a series of proposals will be formulated in order to design different strategies of intervention for mediation processes in university settings. Practical implications of this contingent model and future research on this topic are discussed.

In this paper, the relations between academic goals and various indicators that define the quality of the learning process are analyzed. The purpose was to determine to what extent high, moderate, or low levels of academic goals were positively or negatively related to effort regulation, the value assigned to academic tasks, meta-cognitive self-regulation, self-efficacy, beliefs about learning control, and management of time and study environment. The investigation was carried out with a sample of 632 university students (70% female and 30% male) and mean age of 21.22 (SD=2.2).The results show that learning goals, or task orientation, are positively related to all the indictors of learning quality considered herein. Although for other kinds of goals—work-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals—significant relations were not found with all the indicators, there was a similar tendency of significant results in all cases; the higher the levels of these goals, the lower the levels of the indicators of learning quality.

This ethnographic article discusses how race emerges between discourses of class and space at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Following a legal decision, this academic institution was required to implement racial quotas to combat social exclusion and raise the number of ‘black’ students in public higher education. A crucial question is whether such racially based policies help redress social inequalities, or whether they actually increase discrimination by reifying ‘racial’ differences in Brazil. I argue that the social diversity promoted by quotas at the university stresses certain urban tensions and unequal dynamics that come to be reflected within the university. However, it also reveals novel and positive paths by which policies can negotiate these contrasts.