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.
Perhaps the best career advice I ever received came from my Reiki teacher, Marty Tribble, who cautioned, “The
absence of a strong yes is actually a no.”
This advice ran counter to decision-making practices I’d developed over the years, especially during my own
academic job search. I’d talk with colleagues and confidants, consider my goals and priorities, create spreadsheets
comparing choices and weigh the relevant information. I’d work to make a well-informed decision, taking in others’
advice and ultimately pursuing the pathway that I “should” follow. Though these were useful practices, what I found
is that I’d get into trouble whenever acting from the place of “should.” I was inadvertently shutting out my own
intuitive compass and relying on external guidance systems.
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.
In writing, there’s an adage that says, "Show don’t tell." The millennial students in my creative-writing classes are
immersed in a world that constantly tells them things, and then tells them those things are important. When I walk
into our classroom, I am just another voice telling them things.
It’s hard to differentiate my voice from the thousands of others talking at them — the 24-hour news cycle, the spam
emails, or the Twitter feed of a world leader or a pop star. Faced with such an incomprehensible volume of data, it
can be overwhelming to try separating the truly important from the things falsely labelled "important." Detachment
becomes a survival strategy.
In my educational leadership work, I’ve talked with administrators and faculty from across the country who are interested in creating safer and more supportive, engaging, and inspiring school
environments.
But we are confronted with the challenge of disengagement in America’s schools. Simply put, schools are places here too many kids do not want to be. And when this happens, they vote with their feet to leave, or stay and truggle, dissociate, or worse. A Gallup study showed that 24 percent of fifth graders were disengaged. That percentage grew to 39 percent for middle school students and 56 percent of students in high school. (And that 56 percent doesn’t include all those disengaged youths who had already dropped out.)
It’s well known that being bilingual has cognitive benefits: switching between two languages has been compared to mental gymnastics. But now, research suggests that mastering two languages can fundamentally alter the structure of your brain, rewiring it to work differently than the brains of those who only speak one language.
It’s hard to pick up a publication these days without reading something about blended course design or the flipped classroom. Even mainstream media have begun to cover these new approaches to teaching and learning that put more emphasis on active learning.
But despite their growing popularity, defining blended learning and flipped learning is more difficult than one would expect. Both models have a variety of definitions, and many consider the flipped classroom a form of blended learning. The Sloan Consortium has one of the most precise definitions, defining blended as “instruction that has between 30 and 80 percent of the course content delivered online.” For the sake of this report, we’re using a more broad definition of blended learning as a course that uses a combination of face-to-face and online learning.
This study focuses on culturally endorsed implicit theories of leadership (CLTs). Although cross-cultural research emphasizes that different cultural groups likely have different conceptions of what leadership should entail, a controversial position is argued here: namely that attributes associated with charismatic/transformational leadership will be universally endorsed as contribut- ing to outstanding leadership. This hypothesis was tested in 62 cultures as part of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Program. Universally endorsed leader attributes, as well as attributes that are universally seen as impediments to outstanding leadership and culturally contingent attributes are presented here. The results support the hypothesis that specific aspects of charismatic/transformational leadership are strongly and universally endorsed across cultures.
According to the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS), immigrants accounted for 21% of Canada’s overall population, and among those who immigrated to Canada between 2001 and 2011, 41% held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Yet immigrants are less likely than the Canadian-born to be employed, and those who are employed are more likely to be overqualified relative to their occupation. They are also less likely to be working in an occupation that matches their field of study. The degree to which immigrants experience these disadvantages varies according to how long they have been living in Canada, with more established immigrants (those who have lived in Canada 10 years or more) showing higher employment rates and education-to-occupation match rates than immigrants who have not been in Canada as long.
Everything about the college presidency today seems to be unsettled, including the career pathways new presidents take on the way to the top job on campus.
Current presidents face a slew of new challenges as demographics drive colleges and universities to enroll increasingly diverse student bodies with new sets of needs, as financial constraints impose harsh realities on institutions, and as technology threatens to upend the campus and the workplace. At the same time, the professional ladders leaders climb on the way to becoming presidents is changing -- just as a large number of long-serving presidents are expected to soon retire.
The recent decision by the University of California, Berkeley, to restrict public access to free online educational content has raised questions about whether other colleges and universities will do the same to avoid legal action.
The university this month announced it will remove audio and video lectures currently available to the public on platforms such as iTunes U and YouTube. Berkeley said it reached that decision after determining that retroactively making the content accessible to people with disabilities would be “extremely expensive.”
Berkeley has pledged to create new publicly available content that conforms to web accessibility standards, but restocking its online libraries will take a long time -- its decision to remove content encompasses tens of thousands of publications. The university’s YouTube channel, for example, includes 9,897 videos.
As I contemplate my syllabi for a new semester, I possess renewed hope for students eager to discuss anything at 8 a.m., yet I have taught long enough to know that I will simply appreciate clean clothes and brushed teeth. As reality sets in, I add to my grading criteria an element that I hope will encourage engagement from even the most timid learners.
Often labeled “participation points,” this topic has been explored from myriad perspectives in any number of books and articles published in the last 20 years. Some approaches to participation include using discussion to facilitate teaching and learning, implementing standard-based grading to eliminate participation points, or creating rubrics for participation to make standards visible to the students.
Now that more that 75 percent of the instructors teaching in higher education in the United States do not have tenure, it is important to think about how the current political climate might affect those vulnerable teachers. Although we should pay attention to how all faculty are being threatened, nontenured faculty are in an especially vulnerable position because they often lack any type of academic freedom or shared governance rights. In other words, they are a class without representation, and they usually can be let go at any time for any reason. That type of precarious employment, which is spreading all over the world to all types of occupations, creates a high level of professional insecurity and helps to feed the power of the growing managerial class.
If we don’t move quickly, Canada risks seeing many of these young, bright minds take their talents elsewhere.
Ambitious, skilled and often multilingual, international students are a great source of talent. They fill jobs and create
new ones through innovation and entrepreneurship — Silicon Valley is a prominent, international example. Research by the Conference Board of Canada shows immigrants help expand and diversify Canada’s global trade. International students could do the same, helping Canada trade in markets such as Asia, where economic growth is greater than in the U.S. and EU — Canada’s largest trading partners.
Workshops on how to encourage class participation are a staple of teaching and learning centres across the
country. However, little of that advice is geared to the needs on an oft-neglected subset of introverted university
students: the ones who aren’t shy.
Even though Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, was a
bestseller, and her TED Talk has been viewed more than 10 million times, I’m not sure that our postsecondary
teaching and learning community has fully appreciated its implications.
If we want to encourage all of our students to participate in class, we have to accept that shy students are not
necessarily introverted. And introverts are not necessarily shy.
Right near the core of education, just past tolerance and just short of affectionate connectivity, is the idea of
empathy. University of California Berkley's Greater Good Science Center explains empathy:
The term "empathy" is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally
define empathy as the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine
what someone else might be thinking or feeling.
This document was written by a working group of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies* and is intended to promote and facilitate discussion on the doctoral dissertation of the 21st century among those responsible for or undertaking doctoral education. The outcome of these consultations will help inform the development of a series of recommendations by the working group.
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
TORONTO — Two Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t accept female
students in their classes.
Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, while Algonquin
College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a
campus in the city of Jazan.
The provision of blended learning strategies designed to assist academics in the higher education sector with the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for effective teaching with technology has been, and continues to be, a challenge
for teaching centres in Canada. It is unclear, first, whether this is an ongoing issue unique to Canada; and, second, if it is not unique to Canada, whether we might be able to implement different and/or more effective strategies based on what others outside Canada are doing. Teaching centre leaders in Australia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, Scotland, and the United
States (n=31) were interviewed to explore how their units used blended learning strategies. Findings suggest that, as in Canada, there is a “value gap” between academics and leaders of teaching centres regarding teaching development
initiatives using blended learning strategies.