Two institutions with major diversity initiatives have their work cut out for them in terms of improving campus climate for minority graduate students. Studies released by a student group at Yale University and by a graduate school at the University of Michigan suggest ongoing concerns that could have implications for retention as they work toward diversifying the Ph.D. pool. And since many minority undergraduates are pushing colleges and universities to find and hire more minority Ph.D.s as faculty members, these findings could have an impact at all the places that might do so.
It would be a shame if the lesson learned is simply to remove the controversial bits from your course.
The issues of freedom of speech and transgender rights, highlighted by recent events involving a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, remind me of my first year as a university instructor in the late 1990s, when I taught a communications course on advertising at York University. (Yes, I understand that the status of a TA is different than that of an instructor, but I think for the purposes of this anecdote, the principles are similar.)
While teaching the course, I saw an ad for Sauza tequila in the campus newspaper. It featured a photo of an attractive, swimsuit-wearing woman, with the phrase, “She’s a He,” written across her chest. The ad’s tag line read: “Life is Harsh, Your Tequila Shouldn’t Be.” (The ad didn’t identify the model, who in fact was Caroline Cossey, a transgender model.)
Generation Z is destined to be the most researched of all generations in history. We understand consumer habits, how Generation Z communicates, even the exact details of how the media influences them. Living under a digital microscope, todays 15- to 18-year-olds are savvy. They have a comprehensive understanding of what they want an
es to technology and education. And with this comes great expectations.
Employers are uniquely positioned to encourage positive financial behaviors in their early career workers, say human resources leaders at three universities.
“By leveraging the full range of the institution’s resources,” says Laurita Thomas, associate vice=president for human resources at the University of Michigan (U-M), “employers can create the right climate to promote Gen Y’s financial wellbeing.” Here are some of the ways, according to Thomas, that employers can set early career workers up for success:
You heard about it happening to others. Perhaps the victim was a graduate student in a seminar, or an administrator at a high-stakes meeting. Maybe it was a young scholar at an academic conference where passions for a subject tend to run high and unbridled egos may roam. But you never really thought it would happen to you — until it does. Blindsided. Maybe the full impact didn't sink in until after the fact: You’d been smacked by an academic sneer.
From tracking the use of crack cocaine in Brazil to examining the effects of air pollution on children in Mexico to exploring
the impact of mining operations on local economies, the most recent phase of the Canada-Latin America and the Caribbean
Research Exchange Grants (LACREG) program supported more than 30 international research projects in a wide range of
disciplines and countries.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto”1—a statement Dorothy made to her dog, Toto, in The Wizard of Oz—sums up reasonably well the point I want to make in this article. That is, as literacy educators no longer con-strained (or protected) by older, more familiar 20th-century print-centric modes of communicating, we may at times feel challenged to keep pace with students’ preferences for producing and learning with multimodal texts that combine moving and still images, sounds, performances, icons, symbols, and the like. Often digitally mediated, these texts are familiar and freely available to youth who have access to the Internet. Indeed, a small but growing body of research suggests that young people’s ways of telling, listening, viewing, and thinking in digital environments may fac-tor into their self-identifying as literate beings (e.g., Alvermann, 2010; Livingstone, Bober, & Helsper, 2005; Ito et al., 2008; McClenaghan & Doecke, 2010; Rennie & Patterson, 2010; Skinner & Hagood, 2008; Thomas, 2007; Walsh, 2008). Although this research on young people’s online literate identities has implications for classroom practice, the liter-ature remains largely untapped by teachers, school library media special-ists, and literacy teacher educators. Why is this so? Just as importantly, what does this literature have to offer?
Canadian nursing students are calling for changes to the current entry-to-practice exam which they say is loaded with American content and lacks crucial Canadian context.
The calls were made Friday at the Canadian Nursing Students' Association national conference in Winnipeg. More than 400 nursing students gathered for the event and many signed a related petition.
The new exam was developed by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing in the United States and replaced the Canadian Registered Nurses Exam in 2015.
Students must pass the new exam to be able to practice nursing. If they fail, they can retake it after 45 days.
Dark economic times have come to the province. The Premier, under pressure from business groups, appoints a prominent citizen to review the government‟s finances. His report proposes dramatic cuts to most social programs and the public sector, including education. There is no broad -based public consultation involving public servants, teachers, doctors or university faculty.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups
in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
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.
To evaluate old and new directions we must keep objectives sharply in mind. Of late, articulately explicit discussion of the objectives of international exchange has fortunately been supplanting the vaguer statements of pious hope that sprang from the unanalyzed convictions that exchange is inherently a Good Thing. A brief review of the principal objectives that have been advanced is made easy by the availability of an excellent summary by the Committee on Educational Interchange Policy.1 From the generally expressed purposes of sponsoring groups, the Committee lists the following in
descending order of frequency:
GLOBE is a research program focusing on culture and leadership in 61 nations.
Students waste about one-fifth of class time on laptops, smartphones and tablets, even though they admit such behavior can harm their grades, a new report [1] found.
The average student uses those devices for “nonclass purposes” -- in other words, texting, emailing and using social media -- 11.43 times in class during a typical day. Since the survey was first conducted in 2013 [2], the number of times students check their devices has increased from 10.93, according to the results.
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.
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?
This paper proposes a new measure of skills mismatch that combines information about skill proficiency, self-reported mismatch and skill use. The theoretical foundations underling this measure allow identifying minimum and maximum skill requirements for each occupation and to classify workers into three groups, the well-matched, the under-skilled and the over-skilled. The availability of skill use data further permit the computation of the degree of under and over-usage of skills in the economy. The empirical analysis is carried out using the first wave of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) and the findings are compared across skill domains, labour market status and countries.
“Any time a student learns, at least in part, at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and, at least in part, through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace. The modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.”
The most significant piece of the definition is the “element of student control” highlighting the flowing instructional models to enable improved student-centered learning, giving students greater than before control over the time, place, path, and/or the step of their learning tracks.
Even among the business savvy, it’s not at all uncommon for these marketing terms to be thrown around almost interchangeably, when they actually mean very different things and play very different roles in business development and promotion. So we thought it was high time to clear it up and help you know and understand the difference so you can be better informed buyers and users of marketing, design and branding services.
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study. In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.