The Ontario government recognizes the importance of ensuring equality of access to postsecondary
education (PSE). One group that has been and continues to be underrepresented in PSE is students with
disabilities. As a response, the Ontario government has made improvements to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, with the end goal of making Ontario a more accessible province for people with disabilities by 2025. In addition to making changes to legislation, there has been increased funding for students with disabilities, with more than $47 million allocated in 2010-2011 to help these students achieve success in PSE. The Ontario government now also provides targeted funding for students with learning disabilities (Tsagris and Muirhead, 2012).
Disable the Label
Improving Post-Secondary Policy, Practice
and Academic Culture for Students
with Disabilities
Released December 4, 2014
1673 Barrington St S TUDENT SNS.C A . Halifax, NS B3J 1Z9
ii
Abstract
Building on StudentsNS’ quality and accessibility values, this report discusses the systemic barriers that persons with disabilities face when pursuing post-secondary education. Providing an in-depth discussion of the supports and challenges found within the academic system, this paper begins to re-conceptualize how disability is viewed and accommodated. Nova Scotia has made great strides toward enabling persons with disabilities to access post-secondary education in the past several
decades, but we still have a long way to go. Persons with disabilities remain among the most underrepresented and underemployed groups in Canada. Ensuring persons with disabilities have access to and adequate support during postsecondary
education is fundamental if we want this to change. Programs aimed at increasing persons with disabilities’ participation in post-secondary education, and in the work force are often insufficient. Similarly, the supports offered by postsecondary
institutions (funded through the province) could be improved to better support students with disabilities. We make suggestions for the post-secondary system to further develop present accessibility measures and improve the quality of education delivered to students with disabilities. Recognizing that providing support for students with disabilities is not purely an academic matter, this report will be complimented by future reports on campus health services, social determinants of access to post-secondary education, and discrimination and human rights.
The Blended Synchronous Learning Project sought to investigate how rich‐media technologies such as web conferencing, desktop video conferencing and virtual worlds could be used to effectively unite remote and face‐to‐face students in the same live classes.
Increasingly university students are opting to learn from off‐campus, often due to work, family and social commitments (Gosper, et al., 2008; James, Krause, & Jennings, 2010).
Typically universities will cater for remote students by providing access to asynchronous resources via Learning Management Systems, meaning that off‐campus students miss out hronous Le
on the benefits of synchronous collaborative learning such as rapid teacher feedback, realtime
peer discussions, and an enhanced sense of connectedness.
Student wellness is an essential component of academic success in higher education and subsequent opportunities in the labor market. The Ohio State University Office of Student Life’s Student Wellness Center uses a model that includes nine key dimensions of wellness: career, creative, emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, social and spiritual.
Cooperative learning is an example of how theory validated by research may be applied to instructional practice. The major theoretical base for cooperative learning is social interdependence theory. It provides clear definitions of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning. Hundreds of research studies have validated its basic propositions and demonstrated that cooperative learning (compared with competitive and individualistic learning) increases students’ efforts to achieve, encourages positive relationships with classmates and faculty, and improves psychological health and well being. Operational procedures have been derived from the validated theory to implement cooperative learning in university classes, including those needed to implement formal cooperative learning, informal cooperative learning, and cooperative base groups.
Originally, I had thought of using Journey to Joy as a title for this work. However, an actual trip changed my mind. On one leg of a recent summer vacation, I convinced my husband Hank to take a back road rather than the faster highway. I have always loved the back-road route. It’s more scenic, more calming, and usually much more interesting. Having talked my spouse into traveling this way, I was enjoying the scenery when I realized this was the way of joy—not to joy. So also is it in teaching. It is possible to experience joy along the way, not only as a final destination.
In May 2010, I was on my way to The Teaching Professor conference. At Chicago’s busy O’Hare Airport a businessman helped me out when we both missed our connecting flights. As we settled at the new gate to await departure, he asked the topic of my upcoming presentation. When I told him that it was about the joy of teaching, he remarked that I must certainly be talking about summer. Too many people have a similar view, and too many of them may even be teachers.
This collection is about pursuing a joyful journey in college teaching. It is meant to encourage other faculty who do the challenging work of teaching. Prompted to share these thoughts after hitting a slump in my own teaching a few years ago, this slim volume is part memoir and part advice for others.
When on a journey, you need several things. You need a map, or at least a general idea of where you are going—some kind of a plan. You need fuel or a ticket—some means to move you forward. And, it is often helpful to have a navigator either in the form of a device such as a global-positioning system (GPS) or a companion who will provide directions and assistance to guide you along the way. Most everything else (such as food, shelter, and more fuel) you can obtain along the way. This work is like the navigator that offers direction.
Being on a journey requires being open to the unexpected. So, too, is the journey of joy in teaching. My personal journey of joy has entailed acceptance and even anticipation of the surprises along the way. This outlook brings greater satisfaction and pleasure. As a student of teaching for 35 years, I offer my individual perspective as a way to help others find joy along the way.
Remember how you felt during your first semester of teaching? Excited? Nervous? A little over-whelmed? At times you even might have wondered how the school could give you a job with so much responsibility and so little training.
Now you’re a seasoned educator making the move from faculty to administration. And guess what? You’re excited, nervous, and a little overwhelmed. And, once again, you wonder how the school could give you a job with so much responsibility and so little training. Inadequate preparation, unrealistic expectations, and increased workload can create undue stress on faculty members making the transition to department chair or other levels of administration. This special report features 14 articles from Academic Leader newsletter that address many of the challenges faced by new leaders, from establishing a leadership
style to redefining relationships with former peers.
Here are some of the articles you will find in Academic Leadership Development: How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator:
• Look Before You Leap: Transitions from Faculty to Administration
• Translating Teaching Skills to Leadership Roles
• The First 1,000 Steps: Walking the Road from Academic to Administrator
• Why New Department Chairs Need Coaching
• 10 Recommendations toward Effective Leadership
This report will help new administrators navigate the potential minefields and find their
voice when it comes to leading effectively. It also may remind experienced leaders what it
was like that first year in hopes that they might reach out to help make someone else’s
transition a little easier.
Rob Kelly
Editor
Academic Leader
The Getting Online (GO) Project, funded by the federal (Canadian) Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES, formerly the National Literacy Secretariat), commenced in May 2007. The project was to assess the potential in Canada of technology-based professional development (PD) for literacy instructors and coordinators working actively with adults, a group chronically under-funded for PD, but eager to communicate with each other and to acquire more preparation in their jobs. The project’s fi rst
phase addressed the need for current information on literacy workers’ general experiences with online PD and related technologies, and their resulting attitudes toward this mode of learning. (In phase 2 of the GO Project, pilot training modules on the use of online tools and strategies were developed and pilot tested with literacy workers, as suggested by the survey results. More detailed information on the project is available from the website shown above.)
71% of our StudentVu Panel will be living at home for the summer, without plans for travel (30% simply said ‘no’ to travelling, while 38% stated they didn’t have the money). This leaves a bit of time for relaxing, catching up with friends and, of course, a summer job. We asked the StudentVu Panel about their job plans for the summer, and their answers revealed some interesting
things about the summer job market.
Most online students, even those who are successful, will tell you it takes an extra dose of motivation to stay on top of their assignments compared to the traditional classroom. In fact, the anytime/anywhere convenience of online learning sometimes makes it too convenient … to procrastinate, forget about, and become otherwise disengaged. No wonder online courses have an
attrition rate that’s 10 – 20 percent higher than their face-to-face counterparts.
For faculty teaching in the online classroom, this reality underscores the importance of having activities that build student engagement and help create a sense of community among their geographically dispersed students.
There is national and international recognition of the importance of innovation, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship for sustained economic revival. With the decline of industrial research laboratories in the United States, research universities are being asked to play a central role in our knowledge-centered economy by the technology transfer of their discoveries, innovations, and inventions. In response to this challenge, innovation ecologies at and around universities are starting to change. However, the change has been slow and limited. The authors believe this can be attributed partially to a lack of change in incentives for the central stakeholder, the faculty member. The authors have taken the position that universities should
expand their criteria to treat patents, licensing, and commercialization activity by faculty as an important consideration for merit, tenure, and career advancement, along with publishing, teaching, and service.This position is placed in a historical context with a look at the history of tenure in the United States, patents, and licensing at universities, the current status of university tenure and career advancement processes, and models for the future.
When Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence MOOC made headline news in 2011, one of the early predictions was that quality education at mass scale and at low cost was around the corner. Given our research center’s interest in the productivity of educational interventions, we have been watching for evidence that MOOCs are cost-effective in producing desirable educational outcomes compared to face-to-face experiences or other online interventions. While the MOOC phenomenon is not mature enough to afford conclusions on the question of long-term cost-effectiveness, this study serves as an exploration of the goals of institutions creating or adopting MOOCs and how these institutions define effectiveness of their MOOC initiatives. We assess the current evidence regarding whether and how these goals are being achieved and at what cost, and we review expectations regarding the role of MOOCs in education over the next five years.
In this workshop, key strategies that integrate quality ideas with quality change processes will be presented as they apply to concrete change situations.
Participants will learn about effective approaches to each of the following levels: within school success; success across schools and regions; and how to relate to the state and federal levels. Specific examples will be examined at each level. Next generation reform will be identified related to factors that will deepen and accelerate learning required for future societies through powerful
new pedagogies linked to digital resources.
Abstract The challenge of teaching sustainable development in higher education can mean that students—as future citizens—are left without insight, commitment, or a sense of their position regarding meaningful beliefs and actions related to sustainability. A paradox arises when educators approach a sustainability curriculum that has the potential to transform students’ thinking and actions, with a reductive and non-substantive pedagogy. This paper uses an epistemological and pedagogical analysis of relevant literature to redefine, clarify, and provide a more systematic and holistic understanding of a transformative pedagogy required for learning. The central thesis juxtaposes three sustainability curricular positions with three pedagogical models that vary decidedly in their emphasis on the prerogative of the learner’s prior knowledge and beliefs, the engagement of the learner, and the potential for critical thinking and transformative learning. It is found that a transformative pedagogy overcomes and eliminates the paradox, helping societies become more sustainable.
Résumé Parce que l’enseignement du développement durable représente un vrai défi pour les éducateurs, les étudiants sont privés de connaissance, d’engagement, et de compréhension de leur position à mieux connaître et à maîtriser tous les aspects du développement durable. Un paradoxe se pose lorsque les éducateurs abordent un programme d’études sur le développement durable avec le potentiel de transformer la pensée et les actions des étudiants avec une pédagogie réductrice. Une analyse épistémologique et pédagogique de la littérature a été utilisée pour redéfinir, clarifier et prévoir une compréhension plus systématique d’une pédagogie transformative nécessaire pour l’apprentissage du développement durable. La thèse centrale juxtapose trois positions curriculaires pour enseigner le développement durable avec trois modèles qui varient résolument dans leur accentuation sur l’apprenant et sa connaissance préalable, son engagement et son potentiel de la pensée critique et de l’apprentissage transformateur. L’article révèle que la pédagogie transformative surmonte et élimine le paradoxe, et ainsi aide la société à devenir plus durable.
Student wellness is an essential component of academic success in higher education and subsequent opportunities in the labor market. The Ohio State University Office of Student Life’s Student Wellness Center uses a model that includes nine key dimensions of wellness: career, creative, emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, social and spiritual.
The programs featured in this research represent the two main approaches to international teaching assistant (ITA) preparation in Canada. The first is a traditional or general Teaching Assistant Training Program (TATP), in which ITAs participate in twenty hours of preparation for teaching in an interdisciplinary cohort, together with Canadian graduate students. The second program, ‘Teaching in the Canadian Classroom’ (TCC), is a training program designed especially for ITAs. ITAs participate in twenty hours of preparation for teaching in an interdisciplinary cohort, but only with other ITAs. Both programs include video-recorded microteaching sessions, during which teaching assistants (TAs) receive detailed feedback on a ten-minute lesson that they teach. Both programs also include modules on effective teaching techniques. What makes the ‘Teaching in the Canadian Classroom’ program unique is that it includes a substantial intercultural communication
component. This component addresses cultural differences in the role of instructors and students, expectations for student engagement in Canadian classrooms, and communication strategies that may help ITAs bridge cultural differences in communication styles with their students and their supervisors.
Research is hardly easy. As Martin Schwartz points out in his 2008 essay “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research,” solving research problems requires us to immerse ourselves in the unknown. However intimidating it may be to overcome this infinite amount of ignorance, we believe there is a special set of traits that will equip an under-graduate researcher to successfully solve research problems. Creativity, judgment, communication, organization, and persistence are all equally important skills to make the leap from gaining knowledge from others’ discoveries to making discoveries on your own. Having and honing these skills, skills that encompass every level of research in every disci-pline, are key to an undergraduate developing the founda-tion for a successful career in research. As a group of under-graduate researchers and mentors, we want to motivate students to solve problems and make discoveries, and to start a discussion on how to forge the right path for each student toward research success. Following is our list of key skills.
Aboriginal people in Canada have long understood the role building healthy, thriving communities.
Despite significant cultural and historical differences, Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis people share a vision of learning as a holistic, lifelong process.
Increasingly, governments, Aboriginal organizations and communities are making decisions and developing policies that reflect a better understanding and awareness of an Aboriginal perspective on learning. However, the effectiveness of these
decisions still typically rely on conventional measurement approaches that offer a limited—and indeed incomplete—view of the state of Aboriginal learning in Canada. Current measurement approaches typically focus on the discrepancies in educational attainment between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth (in particular, high-school completion rates) and often overlook the many aspects of learning that are integral to an Aboriginal perspective on learning. As a result, conventional measurement approaches rarely reflect the specific needs and aspirations of Aboriginal people.
This situation is not unique to Canada. In a recent report, the United Nations stated “it is of utmost importance that Governments, indigenous peoples, donors and civil society organizations work together to ensure that special [measurement] approaches are devised to coincide with the aspirations of indigenous peoples. Without a comprehensive understanding of Aboriginal people's perspective on learning and a culturally appropriate framework for measuring it, the diverse aspirations and needs of First Nations, Inuit and Métis across Canada will continue to be misinterpreted and misunderstood.
This research uses the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) to compare participation in postsecondary education (PSE) in Ontario to such participation in other Canadian regions. We begin by presenting access rates by region, which reveals some substantial differences. University participation rates in Ontario are in about the middle of the pack, while college rates are relatively high. We then undertake an econometric analysis, which reveals that the effects of parental income are quite strong in the Atlantic provinces but much weaker elsewhere, including within Ontario. We also find that the relationship between high school grades and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores (measures of academic “performance” and “ability”) differ by region and are generally strongest in Ontario. From this perspective, Ontario would appear to have a relatively “meritocratic” system, where those who are more qualified are more likely to go to university and where overall attendance rates are less affected by family income. Interestingly, the effects of parental education, which are generally much stronger than family income, are similar across provinces. Understanding the reasons underlying these patterns might warrant further investigation.
Executive Summary
The main objective of this report is to learn about the state of knowledge regarding the role of
financial literacy as a complex barrier to postsecondary attendance.1 To achieve this goal, the
report contains a literature review of existing studies in the area, as well as an environmental scan of existing programs and initiatives. When possible, the focus of the report is on low-income high school students in the context of making decisions regarding postsecondary education. In this ideal setting, financial literacy will be defined as knowledge of all the costs, benefits, and available aid associated with postsecondary education. In reality, there are few studies and existing programs that fit this ideal profile. However, we have identified several studies that share these characteristics to a large extent. Specifically, we describe and discuss 21 related studies and 34 related programs. Although most studies and programs are Canadian, we also broaden the scope somewhat to include countries with similar postsecondary systems as Canada (e.g. the United States, the
United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand). Our literature review focuses on Canadian and American evidence, and has uncovered several important findings. First, the cost of a postsecondary education is vastly overestimated by the public at large and by low-income youth in particular. In contrast, the economic benefits to attending university are generally underestimated (equally for low- and high-income households). Whether knowing about the costs and benefits matters for pursuing a
postsecondary education is less clear given the lack of convincing evidence in this area.
While awareness of student financial aid is not necessarily an issue, it appears that knowledge of aid is limited. This may be related to the complexity of student financial aid, which is not only costly, but may also represent a barrier to some students.
A non-negligible portion of students are loan averse, which means that they will avoid grant opportunities when they are coupled with an optional student loan. This is the case even though the loans can be refused or invested at zero repayable interest.
Research also demonstrates that helping students complete their financial aid and postsecondary application forms has a large impact on application and admission rates. In contrast, offering information to students (without application assistance) is generally not sufficient to affect behaviour. Finally, once in university, the majority of undergraduates follow a budget and regularly pay off their credit card balance each month. This suggests a certain degree of awareness and control regarding their finances, which may help them repay their loans on time and avoid defaulting.