This is the first article in a series designed to help you create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) using myIDP, a new Web-based career-planning tool created to help graduate students and postdocs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals. To learn more about myIDP and begin the career-planning process, please visit: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.
Essential ingredients to gaining buy-in. The obstacles? Where does accountability for student retention rest?
I started my first semester as department chair this fall. While I had an afternoon of training over the summer, it didn’t prepare me for the job. I’ve already made a ton of mistakes, my colleagues are treating me differently and I feel extremely isolated. I haven’t written anything this semester, and I’m kicking myself for agreeing to a three-year term.
I honestly don’t know how I’m going to make it through the rest of the academic year. I’ve tried reaching out to other new chairs on my campus, but when we get together we just end up complaining about how awful the job is (and that makes me feel even worse).
I don’t know what I’m doing and why this is so hard. I need to do something over this break to make things better or figure out how to quit. Please tell me there’s something I can do to make things better.
Sincerely,
Chair in Despair
With the rise in online and hybrid courses at the post-secondary level, many institutions are offering various online learning readiness assessments to students who are considering these instructional formats. Following a discussion of the characteristics often attributed to successful online learners, as well as a review of a sample of the publicly available online readiness surveys, an application of one representative tool is described. Specifically, the Distance Education Aptitude and Readiness Scale was administered in both hybrid and face-to-face sections of beginning post-secondary French across a two-year span. Differences in scores between groups, as well as the relationship between scores and grades are examined.
FREUD commented on the insults heaped on man since the Renaissance. He suggested that all the discoveries made by man in recent centuries have automatically, as it were, become techniques of debunking. And he saw psychoanalysis in this light too, as meeting resistance bewcause of its wound to human pride.
Thompson Rivers University (TRU) recognizes that all members of the University community should be able to work, tach, and learn in an environment where they are free from harassment, discrimination, and violence. Sexual activity without consent is sexual assault. Sexual assault is a criminal offence in Canada.
On university campuses across Ontario, students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, trans, two-spirit, non-binary, questioning, or who otherwise identify as Queer (LGBTQ+) face varying levels of discrimination, harassment, and exclusion. Without pathologizing being LGBTQ+, it is important to recognize the increased mental and physical health concerns associated with the marginalization these students routinely face.
he Conference Board says we need to train more PhDs in Canada. Good. Now, where will they work?
A widely noted report last week by the Conference Board of Canada gives Canada an “A” grade for its overall performance in education and skills, up from a B last year. We also rated an A and B, respectively, in terms of the percentage of Canadians who’ve completed college and university. The only black mark in the board’s otherwise relatively positive review is a D for the number of PhD graduates the country produces.
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
Accessibility offices are encouraging students with autism to turn to their peers for support through university life.
When accessibility specialist Jamie Penner started at the University of Manitoba in 2009, a series of eye-opening client meetings made him reconsider how the institution was accommodating students with an autism spectrum disorder. “One of my first students on the spectrum had a course in ancient history covering some battle. I asked him what the lectures were like and he really only could remember or focus on the fact that they used a certain weapon in the battles. He was paying attention, he was listening, but he got so sidetracked,” Mr. Penner recalls.
On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology to the for-mer students of Canada’s Indian residential school system, calling it a “sad chapter in our history.” That chapter is part of a broader story: one in which the Canadian government gained control over Aboriginal land and peoples, disrupted Aboriginal governments and economies, and sought to repress Aboriginal cultures and spiritual practices. The government, often in partnership with the country’s major reli-gious bodies, sought to ‘civilize’ and Christianize, and, ultimately, assimilate Aboriginal people into Canadian society. The deputy minister of Indian Affairs predicted in 1920 that in a century, thanks to the work of these schools, Aboriginal people would cease to exist as an identifiable cultural group in Canada.
In 2005, the report issued by the Rae review of college and university education in Ontario, Ontario: A Leader in Learning, re-stated an estimate that 11,000 new university faculty would be required by 2010. No source was cited, nor any of the assumptions that underlie the conclusion. OCUFA subsequently conducted an analysis that showed Ontario universities would have to hire nearly 11,000 full- time faculty between 2003 and 2010 to replace retiring professors and to reduce the student-faculty ratio to a level at comparable US institutions and at which Ontario could be a true leader in learning
This exploratory comparative study examines the meaning-making experiences of six sexual minority males attending college or university in Canada or the United States. All of the participants identified as sexual minority males who were cisgender, out to family and/or friends, and between 20 and 24 years of age. In particular, the participants spoke about the intersections
between their race, gender, and sexual orientation as salient aspects of their multiple identities. Using a blend of qualitative methods, including case study, phenomenology, and grounded theory, I identified four themes that emerged from the data: (1) engagement in a social justice curriculum; (2) involvement in LGBT student organizations or resource centres; (3) experiences
of discrimination and dissonance; and (4) engagement in reflective dialogue. I discuss the implications of these themes for professional practice and future research.
La présente étude comparative exploratoire examine les expériences de recherche de signification de six hommes de minorité sexuelle fréquentant des collèges ou des universités au Canada et aux États-Unis. Tous les participants se sont définis comme des hommes cisgenres âgés entre 20 et 24 ans et ayant dévoilé leur homosexualité soit aux membres de leurs familles respectives, soit à des amis. Les participants ont entre autres identifié le recoupement de race, de genre et d’orientation sexuelle comme étant les principaux aspects de leurs multiples identités. À l’aide d’une variété de méthodes qualitatives
dont la phénoménologie, la théorie ancrée et des études de cas, j’ai relevé quatre thèmes récurrents parmi les données recueillies : (1) la participation à des programmes d’études en justice sociale; (2) l’implication dans des organisations estudiantines ou des centres de ressources pour LGBT; (3) l’expérience de discrimination et de dissonance; et (4) l’engagement
dans un dialogue réfléchi. Je discute des conséquences de ces thèmes en milieu professionnel et en prévision de futurs projets de recherche.
Many people question the need for special scholarships and bursaries specifically targeted at certain demographic roups, but the need for these scholarships goes beyond levelling the playing field for all students. The costs of iscrimination are not just shouldered by those on the receiving end; discrimination imposes costs to us all when it prevents some of our most productive members from playing an active role in society.
Part-time faculty teach approximately 58% of U.S. community college classes and thus manage learning experiences for more than half (53%) of students enrolled in community colleges (JBL Associates, 2008). Often referred to as contingent faculty, their work is conditional; the college typically has no obligation to them beyond the current academic term. At many colleges, the use of contingent faculty began with hiring career professionals who brought real-world experience into the classroom. Historically, colleges also have hired contingent faculty when enrollment spiked, the college needed to acquire a particular type of expertise, or full-time faculty members were not available to teach a particular course.
Increasingly, however, contingent faculty have become a fundamental feature of the economic model that sustains community college education. Because they typically have lower pay levels than fulltime faculty and receive minimal, if any, benefits, part-time faculty are institutions’ least expensive way to deliver instruction. As public funding, as a percentage of college costs, has steadily declined—and as colleges have been forced to find ways to contain costs so they can sustain college access—the proportion of part-time faculty has grown at colleges across the country. Today part-time faculty far outnumber full-time faculty at most colleges.
The number of postdoctoral researchers that burn out at an early stage of their career seems to be increasing, and
mental health has been a hot topic at universities and institutes across the world. The scientist in me always wonders why it is this group that is particularly at risk? Funding struggles, job insecurity and pressure to perform are obvious contributors but do they explain the whole picture? In this post, I dare to suggest that dangerous habits of thinking commonly found amongst the scientific community may also play a role. Do any of the following seem familiar
“Increased domestic and global access to higher education,” writes Amy Lee in her 2017 book Teaching Interculturally: A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Intercultural Development, has resulted in having “multiple diversities in any given classroom or academic program.”
Graduates themselves are often unsure of where to look for opportunities outside academe.
An aggressive new policy that seeks to ensure a more diverse student population in the Faculty of
Education’s Bachelor of Education program has been approved by Senate.
Under the recently approved policy, 45 per cent of new applicants to the program will be admitted based on the applicants identifying themselves as being from several “diversity” categories. The remaining 55 per cent will be admitted based on highest admission score.
The goal of the policy, which has been in development since 2012, is to ensure that graduates of the U of M education program help to create a more diverse teaching force in the province, representing the “cultural, ethnic,
regional and social diversity of Manitoba.”
The role of copyright within the Canadian education system was once an issue of interest to a relatively small number of scholars, librarians, authors, and publishers. With limited means to copy and distribute educational materials, the primary battle was over payments for photocopies of works that were distributed...