In this commentary, I reflect on the value of qualitative research methodology classes. As I show in my discussion of the classes I teach, what students learn from the class is not solely a methodological approach to inquiry, but a different (and for many, a new) way to ask questions, and as I suggest, to see the world anew.
here are three basic ways that I hear faculty talk about difficult dialogues—in-class dialogues that were planned ut did not go particularly well; in-class hot moments that were not anticipated and that the faculty member did not eel equipped to handle; and difficult dialogues that happen during office hours or outside of class.
n all three instances, faculty are challenged to use skills they may not have learned at any point in their disciplinary raining. That lack of skill can actually cause them great angst, and in the most extreme situations, cause them to avoid addressing important issues directly.
Faculty at colleges and universities across Ontario today are busy. They spend their days juggling lectures, student and faculty meetings,grading, and research in an attempt to provide students with the most broad and up-to-date education possible while at the same time furthering the research in their chosen field.
Will it always be this way?
What will a professor at a college or university be doing in 2020 and how might we understand the changed nature of their work as an opportunity?
Background: Via the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), stronger accountability proponents are now knocking on the doors of the colleges of education that prepare teachers and, many argue, prepare teachers ineffectively. This is raising questions about how effective and necessary teacher education programs indeed are. While research continues to evidence that teachers have a large impact on student achievement, the examination of teacher education programs is a rational backward mapping of understanding how teachers impact students. Nonetheless, whether and how evaluations of teacher education programs should be conducted isyet another hotly debated issue in the profession.
A look at the sexual harassment policies at Canadian universities.
The recent decision of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal in the case of Fariba Mahmoodi, a student who accused her professor of sexual harassment, has once again focussed attention on a controversial issue. Ms. Mahmoodi complained to the tribunal that Donald Dutton, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and UBC as his employer, had sexually harassed her. The tribunal agreed, awarding her a total of $13,000 including $4,000 for injury to her dignity, feelings and self-respect, and $5,200 for counseling expenses.
Shifting from an emphasis on teaching to learning is a complex task for both teachers and students. This paper reports on a qualitative study of teachers in a nurse specialist education programme meeting this shift in a distance education course. The study aimed to gain a better understanding of the teacher-student relationship by addressing research questions in relation to the students' role, the learning process, and the assessment process. A didactical design comprising three phases focusing on distinct learning outcomes for the course was adopted. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with teachers and were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The results indicate a shift towards a problematising and holistic approach to teaching, learning, and assessment. This shift highlighted a teacher-student relationship with a shared responsibility in the orchestration of the learning experience. The overall picture outlines a distance education experience of process-based assessment characterised by the imposition of teachers’ rules and a lack of creativity due to the limited role of ICT merely as a container of content.
Keywords: Distance education; higher education; e-learning
Friendships can blossom naturally between scholars and students, but are they always problematic? Nina Kelly
navigates the boundaries.
It's a common cliché: the worldly professor who charms and mesmerizes his adoring young student.
Mathematician John Nash, captured in the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind, was one of them. As was biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
And recently, University of British Columbia creative writing professor Steven Galloway officially joined the club when he apologized via his lawyer for having a two-year affair with one of his students.
The disclosure follows a year-long controversy surrounding Galloway's abrupt dismissal over "serious allegations." Few details have been revealed; the matter is currently under review.
Like other major Canadian universities, UBC doesn't prohibit professors from dating students — although conflict of interest rules require them to disclose the relationship to a superior and recuse themselves from any decisions that may affect the student.
But it prompts the question: In an era of increasing discussion of sexual harassment on campus, should universities
allow relationships between faculty and students at all?
Faculty members at various institutions debate the pros and cons of shielding freshmen from themselves (or least their performance) in the form of "covered" or "shadow" grades on transcripts.
Like any big institution, the Toronto District School Board has problems with equity. And as at any big institution, those problems are familiar.
Put broadly, Toronto public schools are places where wealthy and/or white students are more likely to have their individual needs met, and succeed, while poor and/or Indigenous and black students are most likely to be suspended, and drop out. The playing field is not level.
And it’s well-established that specialized programs are sites of that inequity, largely filled with Toronto’s most privileged children (save those who go to private schools), the ones from homes stocked with art supplies, whose parents know how to successfully advocate for their kids.
In the second edition of Six Lenses for Anti-Oppressive Education: Partial Stories, Improbable Conversations, editors Bic Ngo and Kevin Kumashiro bring together multiple perspectives that examine, analyze, and bring to the fore systemic oppressive social relations. They investigate racism, (hetero)sexism, white privilege, classism, and the global neoliberal economic system, as well as offer tools—or lenses—for conceptualizing anti-oppressive education.
What myths about constructing a teaching persona merit review? Teachers regularly exchange general advice about how to establish an identity in the classroom. Like most myths, these contain kernels of truth, but we believe their conclusions require a critical look. What are your beliefs about teaching persona, how it develops, and the role it plays in student learning?
BY UNDERSTANDING HOW THE BRAIN WORKS, educators are better equipped to help students with everything from focusing attention to increasing retention. That’s the promise of brain-based learning, which draws insights from neurology, psychology, technology, and other fields. Bringing this information to the classroom can help teachers engage diverse learners, offer effective feedback that leads to deeper understanding, and create a rich learning environment that attends to students’ social and emotional needs along with their developing brains.
Chances are, you already know more about brain-based learning than you think you do. When you introduce topics to your students, do you begin by activating prior knowledge? That helps learners build on what they already know, strengthening connections in the brain. Do you use tools like graphic organizers, songs, or rhymes? These strategies help students represent their thinking visually, kinesthetically, and phonetically. These techniques all deserve a place in your tool kit because they get the brain primed for learning.
Canada has enjoyed exceptional and sustained economic growth for the past 15 years – strong commodity prices have created a currency advantage in export markets, the R&D collaboration between universities and the private sector is strong, post-secondary education attainment is one of the highest amongst OECD countries, the overall unemployment rate has fallen, and the number of small and medium enterprises have risen in the last decade. However, as international competition for talent and capital continue to intensify, now may be the time to review one of the critical elements for any economy – skills and learning.
One of the oldest — and most tired — debates in the education world is about skills versus content. For years, especially in K-12 circles, teachers, administrators, and education researchers have debated whether skills or content are more important for students to learn.
The apparent dichotomy has proven surprisingly sturdy. In an April 2016 report on skills as “the new canon,” The Chronicle detailed an effort at Emory University to shift faculty focus toward teaching the skill of using and evaluating evidence. The story quoted Emory lecturer Robert Goddard, who worried that the move to skills-focused courses was “doing a disservice to the students by not having a more coherent, uniform body of content to deliver.” Such a conception suggests a zero-sum game: More time spent on skills necessarily means less time spent on content.
But if a consensus has emerged in this long-standing debate, it’s one that pushes against an either/or approach.
Small and simple ways to improve your academic writing
In the past few decades, those of us working in institutions of higher education have seen an instructional paradigm shift. Given the growth in research on learning, our views of how people learn best have developed over the last few decades; from behaviorist perspectives of learning, we have also come to understand learning from cognitive and social perspectives. (For a more in-depth discussion of these issues, see Barkley, Major, and Cross, 2014, as well as articles in this special issue). This development has caused higher education instructors to modify their instructional practices as a result. Many instructors have moved away from a sole diet of traditional lecture, with the occasional short-answer question to the class in which students listen, repeat, and occasionally apply, toward a modified menu of pedagogical platforms in which, much of the time, students are active participants in the learning process. Higher education faculty, then, have gone about this task of engaging students actively in learning in a number of important ways by adopting a range of instructional approaches.
Background/Context: The assessment of students, along with teachers and school systems, has largely taken place within a context of positivist science. An enormous range of scholarship now challenges the positivist paradigm, offering a social espistemological alternative. This alternative invites a re-examination of assessment processes and their policy implications.
Halfway through this past semester, I sent an email to a student asking him, among other things, about his poor attendance and participation in my course. In response, after some earnest apologies and promises to do better, the student wrote: “My expectation for this class was to learn how to write and read at a college level. But so often, I feel like I am taking a gender issues class and not a writing and reading course — which frustrates me.”
The class in question is called “Writing and Reading,” and is indeed focused on helping students become “college level” writers and readers. But of course, to practice reading skills you actually need to read something. So I designed a course that focuses on feminism and related issues. About half of our readings have something to do with feminism, gender, or sexuality (the other half are readings about the writing process).
I have been teaching for 20 years, and after a range of adjunct and visiting gigs and two tenure-track jobs (one of which ended because the institution was on the verge of financially collapsing after the economic crash in 2008), I am up for tenure and promotion this year. As virtually every tenure-track professor experiences, I, too, have had to make choices about when, where, how and why to speak out and about what, and have had to weigh issues of silence and voice against the hope and need for job security, health insurance, retirement benefits and the like.
I have had to decide what is worth it and what is not when I have been on the brink of making my viewpoints clear to the campus community and the larger community.
Being untenured is the ultimate manifestation of “You just have to know how and when to pick your battles.” If President Trump could have been an adjunct or tenure-track professor first, perhaps he would be less impulsive and reactive, thinking before tweeting, speaking, banning and dictating.