Abstract
This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their non-union counterparts.
We then explore whether particular kinds of bargaining unit structures are more conducive to achieving stronger academic freedom provisions. Finally, we consider whether academic freedom can be exercised effectively by sessionals, whether unionized or not. We conclude that unionization does help to produce stronger academic freedom protections for sessional faculty and that faculty association bargaining unit structures are most likely to help deliver this outcome. We further conclude that academic freedom is difficult to exercise for sessional faculty, regardless of union status, but that unionization offers greater protections for sessionals facing repercussions as a result of asserting their academic freedom.
Keywords: academic freedom, sessional instructors, contract faculty, faculty associations, unions, bargaining unit structures
Would you believe me if I told you that young Canadians likely had a major impact on the outcome of the 2015 Canadian general election?
Probably not. That’s because we have continually heard over and over that young people are politically disengaged. Few pay attention to politics. Few vote. And there is plenty of evidence that supports these claims. Elections Canada estimates that during the 2011 federal election, only 39% of Canadians aged 18 to 24 showed up at the polls. In 2008, it was 37%, down from 44% two years earlier.
But the 2015 Canadian election may have been the start of a political awakening of a new electoral powerhouse in Canada.
I was looking at one of my old teaching and learning books, Kenneth Eble’s 1988 book The Craft of Teaching. Some parts are now a bit dated, but many are not. It was one of those books that greatly influenced how a lot of us thought about teaching and learning back then.
But I found something in the book that was even older. Eble includes a discussion of and several quotes from an 1879 book actually the ninth edition) by Josiah Fitch titled The Art of Questioning. Eble writes that it’s a small book and was originally aimed at British Sunday school teachers.
Is there a tipping point at which students who take a blend of online and in-person coursework are doing too much online? That question goes to the heart of something called the online paradox.
The online paradox has inspired much debate, and it describes two seemingly contradictory things. The first is
that community-college student who take an online course are more likely to fail than are those who take it face-to-face. The second is that community-college students who take some online classes are more likely to complete their
degrees than are those who don’t take any.
If you walk into any dollar store in Canada you'll notice three things. First, things are cheap — not surprisingly, usually a dollar. Second, outside of food, nothing is made in North America. Third, they're often packed with customers.
The dollar store is a microcosm of what's wrong with our economy. In the closing days of the Cold War, the grinning avatars of hard conservatism — Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney — helped to kick start a new global order that would supposedly bring prosperity to all by removing barriers to the free flow of investment capital and trade. Once the Berlin Wall fell, the last real barrier to a globalized world economy disappeared and it was full steam ahead.
Over two decades, governments and technology corporations followed suit by adding one brick after another to the ziggurat of the globalized economy: NAFTA (1988 and 1994), the invention of HTML and thus the Internet (1991), the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations (1986-94), the WTO (1994), conservative Work Bank policies (from the 1990s on), the concentration of mass media in fewer and fewer hands, the Web 2.0 (2004 and on), deregulated financial markets under George W. Bush, smartphones (starting with Blackberries in 2003). The new order had its global markets, global communications network and a friendly banking system in place. This ziggurat is now more or less complete, with only a few outliers like North Korea beyond the pale.
I knew grad school would be difficult, but I was surprised to find one way in which I wanted to work harder: learning
how to talk about science. I grew up seeing science misrepresented or misunderstood in the news and pop culture. I
thought the relationship between science and society needed repair, and I saw scientists’ isolation as part of the
problem. So I couldn’t believe that my Ph.D. program was willing to release me into the world without teaching me
how to talk to people outside academe.
Many international comparisons of education over the past 50 years have included some measure of students’ opportunity to learn (OTL) in their schooling. Results have typically confirmed the common sense notion that a student’s exposure in school to the assessed concepts, operationalized in some sort of time metric, is related to what the student has learned as measured by the assessment. What has not been demonstrated is a connection between the specifics of what students have encountered through schooling and their performance on any sort of applied knowledge assessment such as PISA. This paper explores this issue in 2012 PISA which, for the first time, included several OTL items on the student survey. OTL demonstrated a significant relationship with student performance on both the main paper-and-pencil literacy assessment as well as the optional computer-based assessment at all three levels – country, school and student. In every country at least one if not all three of the constructed OTL indices – exposure to word problems, formal mathematics topics, and applied mathematics problems – demonstrated a significant relationship to the overall PISA measure of mathematics literacy as well as the four sub areas of change and relationships, shapes and space, quantity, and uncertainty and data. Additionally, results indicated that variability in OTL was related to student performance having implications for equality of opportunity.
This section contains policy, procedures and guidance used by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada staff. It is posted on the Department’s website as a courtesy to stakeholders.
In recent years, there has been a vigorous cottage industry of websites and publications (most but not all on the political right) trying to generate controversy about college professors who say or believe things outside the rather narrow mainstream of public opinion.
The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, Campus Watch, The College Fix, Breitbart, and College Insurrection, among others, devote themselves with some regularity to policing faculty speech, and then presenting it — sometimes accurately, mostly inaccurately — in order to inflame public outrage and incite harassment of academics who expressed verboten views. Because American law gives very wide latitude to malicious speech for partisan political ends, there is little legal recourse for faculty members subjected to such harassment. But we may still ask: How ought colleges and universities respond to these (often orchestrated) onslaughts against professors?
While competency-based education is growing, standardized tools for evaluating the unique characteristics of course design in this domain are still under development. This preliminary research study evaluated the effectiveness of a rubric developed for assessing course design of competency-based courses in an undergraduate Information Technology and Administrative Management program. The rubric, which consisted of twenty-six individual measures, was used to evaluate twelve new courses. Additionally, the final assessment scores of nine students who completed nine courses in the program were evaluated to determine if a correlation exists between student success and specific indicators of quality in the course design. The results indicate a correlation exists between measures that rated high and low on the evaluation rubric and final assessment scores of
students completing courses in the program. Recommendations from this study suggest that quality competency-based courses need to evaluate the importance and relevance of resources for active student learning, provide increased support and ongoing feedback from mentors, and offer opportunities for students to practice what they have learned.
On February 25, 2016, the Ontario government announced a major redesign of the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) with the goal of making postsecondary education more accessible, affordable and cost transparent. In launching the redesign, the government said that “for Ontario to thrive in the knowledge-based economy, the government needs to ensure all members of society are given the opportunities, as well as the tools, they need to succeed” (Ontario Ministry of Finance, 2016).
OSAP is Ontario’s umbrella financial-aid program for students at publicly-assisted colleges and universities and approved private institutions. OSAP is jointly funded by the province and the federal government, and offers students combinations of repayable (loan) and non-repayable (grant) assistance for eligible education related and living costs on a needs-tested basis.
An Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 352 member speaks to a man crossing the union�s picket line at Fleming's Sutherland Campus during a faculty strike on Monday, October 16, 2017. Union members, including college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians, hit the picket line Monday after negotiations between it and the College Employer Council fell flat. JESSICA NYZNIK/Peterborough Examiner/Postmedia Network
While the balancing power of collective bargaining is a positive force, Ontario's provincial government was right to order striking community college teachers back to work.
The past several decades have seen an interest in learning surge. It’s always been part of our educational endeavors, but the recent focus on it has been intense—that is, for teachers. Our interest is not shared by most of our students. They are still pretty much all about grades, preferably those acquired easily. They will work for points, but not very enthusiastically, if at all, without them.
Queen's University students who attended a controversial costume party last weekend could be punished for violating the school's code of conduct — a set of rules implemented by many universities that includes off-campus, non-academic behaviour.
But Timothy Boyle, a Calgary-based lawyer who has represented students involved in university disciplinary cases, said many schools may be extending their authority too far.
"Fair enough they have certain standards to expect of you as a student while you're on campus," he said. "But now ... they want to extend themselves past their university boundaries and start regulating [students'] affairs while they
are off campus. That has to be a great concern."
Mentoring is one of the many aspects of faculty positions that are not generally taught, even though it is crucial in higher education. Faculty members are expected to advise undergraduates, graduate students and colleagues, although rarely with any support or recognition for this work. As a result, faculty members often mentor as a response to how they were mentored: a cold and distant adviser may serve as a cautionary tale or a role model.
Leadership is an elusive concept. We each define it in our own terms and redefine it as we progress through life. But we are not at a loss for models and formulas of leadership. Our world provides us with many examples of leaders and prescribed routes to becoming leaders ourselves.
A lot of Ontario teens are feeling anxious and depressed, and their numbers have grown. That’s the take-away from a large-scale study that’s been tracking students in the province for the last 20 years. One-third of the students in the survey were found to have moderate to severe symptoms of psychological distress – an alarming leap from two years earlier, when only one-quarter of students met the same threshold.
Now comes the hard part: figuring out why high schoolers are increasingly describing their lives as overwhelming, anxiety-inducing and stress-filled, and how to help them early because the higher up the grades you go, the worse the situation tends to get. Grade 12s, for instance, were four times more likely than Grade 7s to report high levels of stress, and more than twice as likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor. Older teens were significantly more likely to think about suicide. Yet they were no more likely than younger teens to seek help.
For the second consecutive year, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto has been ranked the 11 best educational institution in the world by the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.
OISE also placed highest out of all institutions in Canada, and was one of only two Canadian universities within the top 15 spots. The University of British Columbia placed 13, followed by McGill at 35.
The push-back was strong when we sought to increase the diversity of teachers through a modified admissions policy in our education degree program.
The makeup of the Canadian population is changing rapidly. The percentage of the population who identify as Indigenous is increasing; the percentage of new immigrants who are from racial, ethnic or linguistic minority groups is growing; those who identify as LGBTQ are feeling increasingly safe to be open about their identities; and individuals with disabilities are making dynamic contributions to Canadian society. Although our communities are becoming increasingly diverse, the makeup of the teaching profession remains relatively stagnant, with white, female teachers making up more than 80 percent of the teaching force. While our communities are becoming richer with diversity, the teaching profession is not.
For the past 18 years, I have worked at the same university. I see some distinct advantages in that — most notably, that I haven’t had to look for another job in all that time. There is also something to be said for avoiding the pains of relocating. And staying put has allowed me to establish really rewarding ties with the surrounding community.
But there are also serious problems for any academic who pursues a faculty career in one place. As my Twitter friend John Warner recently noted, perhaps the most common way for professors to get a raise is to apply for a job elsewhere. Then, if you get a job offer, you take it to administrators at your current campus and try to get them to match the salary and benefits you would receive if you changed jobs.