As the year 2015 has begun, a worldwide racialized conversation continues about the inability of police, judicial systems, and public policy to address what Derrick Bell (1992) has long framed as the “permanence of racism” (see also Knaus, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 1999). Race riots and police brutality in Ferguson and the Charlie Hebdo murders and their aftermath in Paris punctuate a constant backdrop of racialized policy-making, violence, and inequity. While small, short-lived protests sprang up in reaction to these events, systemic and long-term responses to the larger global context of racism are less common and largely not deemed media-worthy. Within the U.S. context of charges of sanctioned, racialized police brutality representing American racism being framed around the killing of individual Black men, larger arguments about the role of public education in challenging the very conditions that lead to such racism become silenced.
There was a time not too long ago when the person with the most technical knowledge got promoted fastest. But hat’s often no longer the case.
Once someone gets promoted, technical skills become less necessary, and interpersonal ones become more critical in their place. You’ve probably already heard that emotional intelligence is a top factor in companies’ hiring decisions, but it plays a major role in how employers choose to promote their team members, too. This isn’t exactly news; in a 2011 Career Builder survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers and HR professionals, 71% said they valued emotional intelligence over IQ in general, and 75% said they’re typically more likely to promote an employee with high emotional intelligence and a comparatively lower IQ than one where that ratio is
flipped.
Faculty members play a central role in the development, implementation, and long-term sustainability of online and blended education programs. Therefore, faculty recruitment and retention strategies for these programs must align with the needs of the faculty. This article highlights the results of an institutional study conducted at a public comprehensive university in 2012 that examined factors influencing faculty participation and retention in online and blended education. This article also provides a comparative overview of the results of a similar institutional study conducted at The George Washington University (GWU) in 1997 that examined factors influencing faculty participation in distance education. The original surveys from the 1997 GWU study were updated for the 2012 Armstrong study. The results revealed that while technology and learning platforms have continued to evolve over the past 15 years, many of the needs and concerns of faculty are relatively similar. The results also revealed that faculty involvement is quintessential in the development and expansion of online and blended programs as well as in the design of faculty development initiatives.
The flipped classroom model—or any active, student-centered learning model—relies heavily on students being
prepared and ready to engage in the learning activities. If students are unprepared, then it limits what they can do, how deeply they can engage with the material, and how meaningfully they can connect with other students. It also challenges you to determine how to proceed. Do you give a quick lecture to recap the pre-class content so everyone is on the same page? Do you give the unprepared students an alternative assignment? Do you kick them out of class? Do they earn an F in the course?
Jenny: For much of the history of the Career Talk column, we’ve focused on faculty careers. But in the coming months, we are going to turn to a different topic, and explore the career paths and concerns of M.A.s, A.B.D.s, and Ph.D.s who opt for careers in campus administration.
Julie: Let’s start with the hiring process. How does it work? What application materials will you need? How is it different from a faculty search?
First, it’s important to understand that, while all colleges and universities have similar missions, they operate in very different ways. Administrative offices may have come into being organically or strategically. The same office — say, international programs — may report to university life at one institution but to the provost at another. When you start applying for a particular administrative position, it’s wise to figure out the office’s place within the institution because that will affect the way you write your letter and contextualize the job.
Any time a student moves from high school into postsecondary education, or from postsecondary into the workforce,
stakeholders on either side of the transition seem to say to the other side, “You got this, right?” Postsecondary institutions might say that secondary schools need to better prepare students for PSE, while employers might argue that higher ed does not produce enough “job ready” graduates. But these gaps are not necessarily any one group’s fault, as the entire school-to-work journey has been siloed into a number of distinct services that are in dire need of bridging. With no group focused on the spaces between the silos, it should come as little surprise that these points of transition represent some of the most challenging times in the school-to-work journey.
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).
Aboriginal peoples in Canada face multiple and systemic barriers to attaining and succeeding in post-secondary education. A long history of discrimination, including the legacy of residential schools, and chronic government underfunding of Aboriginal education has contributed to low high school completion rates, a widening gap in post- secondary attainment, and the lowest labour market
outcomes of any group in Canada.
PSE–Business Partnerships in Canada
Partnerships between post‑secondary education and business are crucial to Canada’s competitiveness and prosperity. They enhance student learning, facilitate research and commercialization, and increase local and regional economic development. These partnerships are becoming common in Canada, and use increasingly innovative, complex, and diverse organizational structures. However, PSE institutions, businesses, and community stakeholders could take steps to generate more of the
economic and social benefits that Canadians expect.
One of the most serious problems facing colleges and universities today is that so many students leave before finishing their studies. When students drop out, it is bad for them because they lose huge future career and income potential; bad for the institution they leave because of lost reputation, revenue, and opportunity to make a difference in the students’ lives; and bad for society because of the need for an educated work force that is able to compete in the global marketplace.
Although there are many reasons students drop out, 12 research-validated risk factors, often in various combinations, help account for why most students drop out. These risk factors apply at a wide variety of
institutions of higher education. Here are the risk factors and the means to mitigate them.
Human capital is key for economic growth. Not only is it linked to aggregate economic performance but also to each individual’s labour market outcomes. However, a skilled population is not enough to achieve high and inclusive growth, as skills need to be put into productive use at work. Thanks to the availability of measures of both the proficiency and the use of numerous types of skills, the Survey of Adult Skills offers a unique opportunity to advance knowledge in this area and this paper presents and discusses evidence on both these dimensions with a particular focus on their implications for labour market policy. This paper explores the role played in the labour market by skill proficiency in the areas of literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. It also shows how skills use, not only proficiency, affects a number
of key labour market phenomena, such as the gender wage gap. Finally, the paper combines information on skill proficiency, educational attainment, skill use and qualification requirements to construct indicators of qualification and skills mismatch and to explore their causes and consequences.
As Gallagher (2016a, p. xv) points out, universities, as well as offering an education, also deliver degree
certificates to those students who successfully complete their studies. Along with this credential, a student
receives a transcript that indicates the grade achieved (usually in the form of a grade point average)
together with details of the courses taken and the individual grades for these courses.
This state of affairs does not serve most undergraduate students well: the graduating student’s credential
and the associated transcript indicate the extent of the student’s knowledge of content, but neither directly
conveys any information to employers about the level of the student’s skills. As a result, employers, in
respect of most undergraduate degrees, must infer the level of skills from information about content
knowledge.
Dengting Boyanton, author of Teachers and Students as Co-Learners: Toward a Mutual Value Theory, experienced “extreme culture shock” when she left her native Chinese educational system to begin graduate study in education at the
University of Virginia in 2003. Despite the fact that she had been an enthusiastic and successful learner in her home country, Boyanton often felt perplexed and disappointed regarding the behavior expected of her in U.S. classrooms. She was inhibited about speaking up in class, afraid to ask questions of her professors or classmates, and insecure about offering her opinions and comments.
Boyanton’s international student colleagues, with whom she shared her feelings, reported experiencing the same negative emotions. When Boyanton began questioning American-born students about their classroom experiences—with the goal of helping herself and other international students adjust to American classroom culture—she discovered to her surprise that American students also felt alienated, invisible, and lonely in their classes. For example, one Caucasian male student
told her, “Like most new students here, you feel lonely, nobody knows you, nobody talks to you, and nobody seems to care about you either” (p. xvii).
Quality teaching and how to assess and award it, continue to be an area of scholarship and debate in higher education. While
the literature demonstrates that assessment should be multifaceted, operationalizing this is no easy task. To gain insight into
how teaching excellence is defined in Canadian higher education, this empirical study collected and analysed the criteria,
evidence, and standards for institutional teaching awards from 89 institutions and 204 award programs across Canada. The
majority of awards included criteria such as specific characteristics of teaching performance and student-centredness; while
activities that had impact outside an individual’s teaching practice were also prevalent, including campus leadership, scholarship
of teaching and learning, and contributions to curriculum. Lists of potential sources of evidence were heavily weighted towards
student perceptions and artefacts from instructors’ teaching. Recommendations for individuals and institutions wanting
to foster excellence in teaching are offered along with suggestions for future research.
Keywords: teaching, awards, excellence, assessment, criteria, evidence, standards
Preamble
This investigation arose as a result of the Brock University Administration’s handling of a series of complaints laid under the University’s Respectful Work and Learning Environment Policy [RWLEP]1 against five members of Brock University (henceforth referred to as the respondents), namely Drs. Ana Isla and Cathy Van Ingen (members of the Brock University Faculty Association), Dr. June Corman (then Associate Dean of Social Studies and hence not a member of the Faculty Association), and teaching assistants Ian Wood and Tim Fowler (members of CUPE Local 4207). The complaints were filed by Brock University Roman Catholic Chaplains, Brs. Raoul Masseur and German McKenzie.
My first boss, the chairman of my department when I was a young lecturer, was Wilfrid Harrison. Even though there was approximately 40 years’ difference between our ages, I would have described Wilfrid as a friend.
He was a distinguished and influential figure in many ways: the first person to be appointed a teaching fellow in politics alone at an Oxford college, a former editor of Political Studies and a founding member of the Political Studies Association – which still awards a major prize honouring his name. He was also the founding professor of the department, at the University of Warwick, in which I spent 35 years.
When Wilfrid retired, properly and traditionally at the age of 65, he sold all his books, severed all substantive contact with universities and devoted himself to his wife, his daughters, his dogs and his cooking (my memories of the latter are centred on the observation that whisky and cream seemed to feature in all his dishes).
Educational Consulting Services (ECS) has supported every college in Ontario in the planning of their campuses and buildings. The focus of this work has been the reconciliation of the colleges’ education and training missions with their infrastructure. As campus and space planners, ECS has assisted in enhanced space management, transformation of facilities, and improved utilization.
This report is a compendium of observations and a high level commentary on the question of capital funding. It was prepared at the request of ACAATO and draws on ECS’s experience in Ontario and other jurisdictions. The report also draws on
information provided by college administrators for this study.
The more open universities are about where their PhDs are getting jobs, the better equipped current students are to
forge their own career paths.
At most colleges and universities, summer offers a blessed break from the regular meetings of the academic year. It’s a relief to have a few months’ free from having to jockey for air time, listen to long-winded people opine on matters they know little about, navigate petty factional skirmishes, or shore up colleagues whose ideas are routinely shot down.
Now that it’s September, the prospect of returning to meeting-heavy days may seem enervating. But what if we made 2019-20 the year in which we change the traditional dynamics of our meetings? Could we find ways to make them more productive, less
contentious, and more open to voices that usually get muffled or silenced?
We live in a world where economic, social and personal fulfillment depends less upon what we know, and more upon what we are able to learn, how we think and the degree to which we are able to respond to change around us. As centres of learning and discovery, universities play a crucial role in this process. Universities transform the lives of people, who in turn transform
our communities, our country and the world.