The Venezuelan economy is in free fall. A drop in oil prices and a collapse in confidence in the country’s leadership have caused the economy of the once affluent South American country to contract by 50 per cent since 2013, according to the International Monetary Fund, and inflation to hit 13,000 per cent.
It is naïve to think that a finished teaching product can be created in four semesters of any teacher preparation program. These programs instead provide the knowledge and skills for preservice teachers to begin their journey toward being and becoming skillful professionals and eventually, expert teachers. Toward this end, there are two necessary elements: developing knowledge and engaging in reflective analyses.
Students are the innovators of the future, and to succeed they need access to modern, high-quality programs at Canadian educational institutions. Universities and colleges are built to educate students, develop global citizens, support research, and foster a sense ofcreativity that will benefit Canadian society both socially and economically.
Academic freedom is supposed to protect unpopular views. A case involving an Oberlin professor who claimed that
ISIS is really the CIA and Mossad asks whether that freedom extends to falsehoods.
“Stereotype threat” is a well-known social psychological construct in which people live down or up to the expectations others have of them based their gender, race, age, or other such characteristics. As professors we are careful — or we should be — not to translate our personal beliefs about students’ capabilities into our expectations of how they will perform academically, but we rarely think about how students’ expectations of us affect our performance.
In particular, faculty who are women and/or members of racial minority groups run the risk of becoming stereotype threatened: feeling anxiety about whether they will either confirm or disprove students’ stereotypical beliefs.
If you don’t think students — or all people — have ideas about what a professor looks and sounds like, try this exercise: Ask a few people who don’t know you’re an academic to describe the “average” professor. Undoubtedly they will paint a picture of an older white male who may or may not be wearing a tweed jacket.
Wilkins presents interesting concepts in Education in the Balance: Mapping the Global Dynamics of School
Leadership regarding principles of school leadership. Wilkins notes that innovation and greater ownership are needed in leadership. In the introduction, he identifies that Education in the Balance connects several
related but different fieldseducational policy, globalization, philosophy, the future purpose of schooling,
leadership publications, school effectiveness, comparative education, and academic disciplinary writing
centered around educational geography.
Purpose of Research: In this analysis and synthesis of our recent qualitative and ethnographic studies, we specifically describe the dimensions of local understanding that foster citizenship in the literate community for individuals commonly acted upon as hopelessly aliterate, subliterate, or illiterate due to assumptions surrounding their degree of disability. We contrast these descriptions of local understanding with U.S. education policy that mandates what we believe to be a singular, narrow, and rigid approach to early or initial written language instruction.
Educational research shows that close student-faculty interaction is a key factor in college student learning and success. Most literature on undergraduate mentoring, however, focuses on planned programs of mentoring for targeted groups of students by non-faculty professionals or student peers. Based on the research literature and student and faculty testimony from a residential liberal arts college, this article shows that unplanned “natural” mentoring can be crucial to student learning and development and illustrates some best practices. It advances understanding of faculty mentoring by differentiating it from teaching, characterizing several functional types of mentoring, and identifying the phases through which a mentoring relationship develops. Arguing that benefits to students, faculty, and institutions outweigh the risks and costs of mentoring, it is written for faculty who want to be better mentors and provides evidence that administrators should value and reward mentoring.
Back in 2010 Ontario’s Liberal government began a bold experiment. It launched a plan to bring in full-day
kindergarten for four- and five-year-olds over the next five years.
At the time, the $1.5-billion plan was dismissed by then-Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak as a “frill” or
“shiny new car” that Ontarians could not afford.
Now the results of a new study by researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) provide strong
evidence that the experiment is paying off in spades.
This paper defines and operationalizes definitions of good teaching, scholarly teaching and the scholarship of
teaching and learning in order to measure characteristics of these definitions amongst undergraduate instructors at McMaster University. A total of 2496 instructors, including all part-time instructors, were surveyed in 2007. A total of 339 surveys were returned. Indices of good teaching, scholarly teaching and scholarship of teaching and learning were developed. The data
illustrated a strong correlation between good teaching and scholarly teaching and between scholarly teaching and scholarship of teaching and learning. The perceived value placed upon teaching varied across the different Faculties. New instructors and those engaged in sch larly teaching and scholarship of teaching and learning perceived teaching to be more valued than their
peers.
A growth mindset, as described by Carol Dweck, is a belief that while individuals are different in many ways in terms of their initial performance, interests, talents, and skills, everyone can improve, change, and grow through application and experience. We believe that one of the greatest school-based factors for improving education today is empowering educators with
opportunities to develop a growth mindset by working together to build skills and strategies to increase the impact of their instruction in the classroom.
Abstract
The emergence of service-learning pedagogies in Canada has received a varietyof critical responses. Some regard service-learning as a public relations effort of universities and colleges; others see it as a countermovement to academic
corporatization; still others consider it part of a wider cultural project to produce self-responsible and socially responsible, enterprising citizens. In this article, we argue that each type of response rests on a different critique of the neo-liberal context of post-secondary education; these critiques, in turn, stem from different conceptions of neo-liberalism: as policy, ideology, or governance (Larner, 2000). Rather than attempt to resolve contradictions among these conceptualizations, we address them as a framework for understanding divergent responses to service-learning. We illustrate the framework with the example of a high-enrolment undergraduate course, and we call for future research and educative engagement with the politics of post-secondary servicelearning that is informed by a multi-faceted analysis of neo-liberalism.
Résumé
L’émergence au Canada de la pédagogie d’apprentissage par le service communautaire a suscité une grande variété de réactions. Certains y voient une opération de relations publiques de la part des universités et des collèges, d’autres un mouvement à l’encontre du corporatisme académique, d’autres encore un volet d’un vaste projet culturel ayant pour but de former des citoyens entreprenants, et responsables envers eux-mêmes et la société. Dans cet article, nous avançons que chacune de ces réactions repose sur une critique particulière du contexte néolibéral de la formation postsecondaire,
découlant elle-même de conceptions diverses du néolibéralisme : comme politique, comme idéologie ou comme gouvernance (Larner, 2000). Plutôt que de tenter de résoudre les contradictions qui opposent ces concepts, nous en faisons le cadre qui permet de mieux comprendre les réactions divergentes face à l’apprentissage par le service communautaire. Nous illustrons ce
cadre en donnant l’exemple d’un cours populaire du premier cycle, puis soulignons le besoin d’entreprendre des recherches et d’étayer, par une analyse du néolibéralisme à multiples facettes, la politique de l’apprentissage postsecondaire par le service communautaire.
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.
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.” 1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common concerns that they share. Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours. 3 Our Mature Student Policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
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.
This report examines community colleges from the perspective of the faculty who deliver their public service – high quality post-secondary education and job training. The report is based on conversations with over 600 faculty at all 24 CAATs,
along with historical research and present-day inquiry into the sector’s financing, management, and operations. The report is focused primarily on perceptions by college faculty that there is a crisis of quality within the college system today.
In Quebec, a new law calls for universities to adopt a code of conduct covering faculty-student relationships.
On December 8, the Quebec government passed Bill 151, an act aimed at preventing and combatting sexual violence on the province’s university and college campuses. Among other things, the new law mandates that universities and CEGEPs (Quebec’s colleges) develop standalone sexual violence policies. British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario all passed similar legislation that came into effect during the past year.
However, Quebec’s new law has generated much discussion because it has a provision requiring postsecondary institutions to adopt policies governing intimate relationships between students and university personnel, including professors and lecturers. Quebec’s minister responsible for higher education and the status of women, Hélène David, said during public hearings on the bill that the government can’t ban such relationships. But, she said universities and CEGEPs would have the authority to do so.
A widely held belief in Canada, as in many countries, is that expanding access to tertiary education is integral to improving national productivity. It also plays into the Canadian sense of
equality of opportunity and the just society.
In addition, Canada is not alone in beginning to experience a decreasing labour force participation rate as the baby boomer generation enters retirement. Even the country’s large immigration flows are not sufficient to compensate for the labour force shrinkage. This puts additional pressure on productivity; across the 20 largest members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, this would need to increase at an average of 0.4 per cent
per year to offset the loss of gross domestic product per capita.
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.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.