It may seem strange to say that professional development—educators going to workshops and conferences, and taking courses—bears little relationship to classroom and school improvement. Similarly teachers toiling away as individuals do not add up to school or system success. What really counts is what happens ‘in between workshops’ or what I call learning is the work (Fullan, 2008).
LEESA WHEELAHAN
This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curricu- lum theory has lost sight of its object—‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and training (VET). VET is
unproblematically positioned as applied, experiential and work- focused learning, and it is seen as a solution for those who are alienated from or unsuc- cessful in more traditional forms of academic education. This article argues that rather than being a mechanism for social inclusion, VET is instead a key way in which social inequality is mediated and reproduced because it excludes students from accessing the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It presents a social realist analysis to argue why VET students need access to theoretical knowledge, how a focus on experiential and applied learning constitutes a mechanism for social exclusion and what a ‘knowledge rich’ VET curriculum would look like.
Keywords: vocational education and training; social realism; applied
disciplinary knowledge; curriculum; knowledge
The provincial government is taking steps to address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC) Calls to Action regarding education and training, including introducing mandatory Indigenous cultural competency and anti-racism training for every employee in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and implementing mandatory learning expectations in Ontario's public education system curriculum.
Student success in post-secondary education is an ongoing concern, however, research has focused on relatively homogeneous university samples. Moreover, Canadian research on predictors of student success is limited. Following
recent trends, we examined non-cognitive, personal qualities, rather than cognitive predictors (e.g., IQ), of student success. Relying on a psychosocial model, we examined age, gender, perceived stress, maternal education, identity style, perseverance, and student engagement as predictors of student success in a multi-site sample of students attending a CEGEP in Quebec (N = 239; Mage = 18.6 years; 68.2% female) and a polytechnic school in Ontario (N = 209; Mage = 20.6 years; 71.3% female). Maternal education and perseverance emerged as significant predictors in both samples. Links between informational identity
and cognitive engagement and student success differed by location. Our findings suggest the need to focus on student perseverance, and to consider identity and cognitive engagement dependent on the educational context.
At the heart of Concordia University’s mission and tradition is respect for every member of its community. The university is committed to equality, dignity, and the building and maintaining of a healthy, safe and respectful environment.
Behaviours commonly associated with rape culture, such as victim blaming, normalizing sexual objectification and violence, are absolutely unacceptable in the Concordia community. As such, sexual violence violates our institutional values, in particular the rights of individuals in our university community to be treated with dignity and respect.
Concordia has taken many important steps to creating a safe environment. It was the first university in Canada to create the position of sexual harassment advisor in 1987 and one of the first to adopt a policy on sexual harassment in the early 1990s. It was also among the first Canadian universities to create an Ombuds Office in the 1970s. In 2013, the university launched the Sexual Assault Resource Centre (SARC) to inform the campus community about consent and prevention, and to provide
survivor support.
The primary factors that shape the health of cal treatments or the conditions they experience. Th conditions have come to be known as the social determinants of health.The importance to health of living conditions was established in the mid-1800s and has been enshrined in Canadian government policy documents since the mid-1970s. In fact, Canadian contributions to the social determinants of health concept have been so extensive as to make Canada a “health promotion powerhouse” in the eyes of the international health community. Recent reports from Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, the Canadian Senate, and the Public Health Agency of Canada continue to document the importance of the social determinants of health.
Background:
In this paper we call for studying school leadership and its relationship to instruction and learning through approaches that highlight the role of configurations of multiple organizational supports. A configuration-focused approach to studying leadership and other essential supports provides a valuable addition to existing tools in school organizational analysis and is particularly useful in examining equifinality and causal asymmetry. Equifinality is the idea that more than one pathway can result in a desired outcome whereas causal asymmetry suggests that the set of conditions that lead to the presence of an outcome need not be the same as the conditions that lead to its absence.
California State University at Sacramento, like more than a thousand other institutions in the U.S., uses the learning
management system Blackboard Learn, but likely not for much longer.
Sacramento State is getting ready to upgrade. And like many institutions in its situation, the university is looking at systems that are hosted in the cloud and delivered as software as a service (SaaS).
Moving to the cloud normally means paying more, but it does come with some benefits. Virtually no downtime is a big one. Software providers can push new features and critical patches to all its customers in the cloud, instead of colleges having to take their systems offline for maintenance. Colleges also don’t need to worry about servers if their systems are hosted in the cloud.
This report summarizes several phases of a multiphase science education
development project occurring between April, 2004 and November, 2009 in three Inuit
communities in the northern Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) Region of Nunavut, Canada.
Although the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) funding for this project is confined to
the development, implementation and evaluation of the influence of Inuktitut-language
place-based resources on Inuit students’ learning, it is believed by the participants of this
project that because of the dissemination forum provided by CCL, the contents in this
report should be a cumulative summary outlining the chronology of the project and its
overall findings. The project, in its entirety, is motivated to assist Inuit school communities
in achieving their aspirations for science education. The project overall focuses on (1)
establishing the current situation in science education in Kindergarten through to Grade 7
in the Qikiqtani communities, (2) identifying developmental aspirations for stakeholders
within the communities and potential contributors and constraints to these aspirations, (3)
implementing mechanisms for achieving identified aspirations, (4) evaluating the
effectiveness of such mechanisms and (5) providing suggestions for further development
projects established to assist Aboriginal, especially Inuit, communities in achieving their
goals for curriculum, in particular, science education. This project attempts to “combine the
views of both worlds” in science education for Qikiqtani students; that is, it combines the knowledge, practices, values, beliefs, and ways of knowing of both the community of scientists and Inuit culture. Equally, it also combines the views of both worlds in achieving these goals through two process development frameworks: Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (a model that identifies teacher attributes and the environment in which they work as determinants on development) and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ, Inuit ways of knowing and doing). This report focuses upon an evaluative overview of all phases of the
development project and the efficacy of this “two-way” model in fostering school development, especially in the area of science education.
Americans are obsessed with narcissistic leaders, or at least they have an ambivalence between the ones they like and the ones they promote. A case in point is Real Estate baron and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Not that he is alone. At various times, similar attention and popularity have been heaped by the public and especially by the media for leaders such as Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca and Larry Ellison.
I’ve been ruminating lately about tests and wondering if our thinking about them hasn’t gotten into something of a rut. We give exams for two reasons. First, we use exams to assess the degree to which students have mastered the content and skills of the course. But like students, we can get too focused on this grade-generating function of exams. We forget the second reason (or take it for granted): exams are learning events. Most students study for them, perhaps not as much or in the ways we might like, but before an exam most students are engaged with the content. Should we be doing more to increase the learning potential inherent in exam experiences?
A total of 1,518 on-line interviews were conducted for the study between December 10th and 14th, 2012. The margin of error for a representative sample of this size is 2.5 percentage points within a 95% confidence interval. The margin of error is greater when looking at sub-segments of the population.
Nous cherchons à mesurer l’effi cience d’approches inductive ou déductive à court et à long terme sur l’apprentissage par des élèves de 1re secondaire de savoirs relatifs au complément du nom. Dans le cadre de cette expérimentation, les résultats montrent que l’approche déductive permet une appropriation signifi cativement plus grande, mais uniquement pour des aspects morphologiques. Par ailleurs, il semble que l’approche pédagogique ait moins d’incidence sur l’apprentissage que l’effet-enseignant, peu importe l’approche préconisée par l’enseignant. La discussion des résultats portera sur l’importance
de différentes variables de l’intervention éducative autre que l’approche pédagogique. Mots clés : approche déductive, approche inductive, approches pédagogiques, complément du nom, effet-enseignant, grammaire.
We attempt to measure the ef ficiency of inductive or deductive approaches to short and long-term learning of knowledge about the “complément du nom” by French as a fi rst language secondary 1 students. Our results show that, in the context of our experiment, the deductive approach allows greater appropriation of morphological aspects. Moreover, it seems that the
pedagogical approach has less impact on the learning than the teacher effect, regardless of the approach used. We will discuss our results in putting forward the importance of some conditions of the educative intervention. Keywords: complément du nom, deductive approach, grammar, inductive approach, pedagogical approaches, learning, teacher effect.
Key stakeholders all across higher education -- including boards, policy makers, administrators at all levels, faculty of all types, disciplinary societies, and unions -- increasingly have one. It's time to make it a reality, argues Adrianna Kezar.
This article reports on findings from a scan of 465 policies relevant to the handling of cyberbullying in 74 Canadian universities. It first assesses the commonalities and differences in the policies. Second, it considers how their various lenses—a human rights perspective versus a student conduct perspective, for instance—can affect the directions and outcomes of university
responses. The majority of the policies reviewed were codes of student conduct and discipline, policies on electronic communication, and policies on harassment and discrimination. Most of the policies outlined complaint procedures and possible sanctions, but relatively few addressed prevention of unacceptable behaviours. Only about a third made reference to “cyber” behaviours, suggesting that the university policy environment is not current with the information and
communication technologies that permeate the daily lives of university students and faculty.
YEARLY SUCCESS AND PROGRESS RATES
Background/Context: This exploratory feasibility study assesses a mindfulness program in a fifth-grade classroom. The research discussed herein was built on a previous study targeted at a specific population of children within the classroom and assessed the benefits of teach-ing mindfulness meditation to 7- and 8-year-old children who met criteria for generalized anxiety disorder.
Purpose/Focus of Study: The primary aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the feasibility of a mindfulness training workbook written for young children. The mindfulness workbook uses a fictional character in a storybook format. The goal was to help children understand and access their own mindfulness within the classroom setting without instruc-tion by teachers and without using meditation techniques.
Francophone students represent a unique population within Ontario, and understanding their educational experience is an important factor for developing policies and programs that contribute to their development, both as individual learners and with respect to the linguistic, cultural and economic vitality of the broader francophone community. Over the past few decades, postsecondary education (PSE) has increasingly become a focal point for all Canadians, with research linking length of schooling and levels of education to engagement in the workplace, career stability, occupational status, wealth, stronger social ties, and better psychological and physical health (Pallas, 2000). More recently, federal and provincial governments have linked the strength of the Canadian economy to the expansion of postsecondary enrolment (Industry Canada, 2001; Rae, 2005).
This paper explores the potential of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), to provide new insights into community service-learning (CSL) in higher education.While CSL literature acknowledges the influences of John Dewey and Paolo Freire, discussion of the potential contribution of cultural-historical activity theory, rooted in the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, is noticeably absent. This paper addresses this gap by examining four assumptions associated with activity theory: the rejection of a theory/practice divide, the development of knowledge as a social collaborative activity, the focus on contradictions
in and across activity systems, and the interventionist approach aimed at transformation.
The 2015-16 academic year was one of numerous student protests demanding increases in the admission of
minority students and the hiring of minority faculty members -- not to mention numerous other measures to promote
inclusivity on campus.
But what exactly do students want? While some would say that the various lists of demands of campus protests
provide much of the information, two Dartmouth College professors disagree. On Tuesday they proposed on the
political science blog The Monkey Cage a new way of measuring student interest in different forms of diversity. And they tested their system on students at Dartmouth, an admittedly nontypical student body given that the college is highly competitive in admissions.