Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
Hilda Neatby, the author of So Little for the Mind, which stirred up a national debate about education in the 1950s, finds an unlikely ally in Michel Foucault. Both believe that progressive education, grounded in scientific pedagogy, is a means of domination rather than liberation. Both trace its roots to the 18th-century Age of Reason, which, according to Foucault, gave birth to the “disciplinary society” and, in Neatby’s view, destabilized the balance between faith and reason. Although they are philosophically far apart (Foucault, a Nietzschean; Neatby, a Christian), they have a startlingly similar appraisal of the progressive school.
You’ve heard it a million times: being in school isn’t the “real world,” and the longer you’re in school, the less you know about how that “real world” functions. The laws that govern everything and everyone else, especially in the working world, haven’t been applying to you. And you -- the coddled, brainy, time-wasting human being who dares to think that intellectual pursuits are worth valuable years of your life -- you are in for a loud wake-up call. Just wait and
see.
Contrary to popular and judgmental opinion, however, your doctoral experience is some of the best working world experience you can get. The clearer you are about why that is the case, the more it can help you survive -- and sometimes thrive -- both in graduate school and in whatever jobs or careers come later.
At most colleges and universities, summer offers a blessed break from the regular meetings of the academic year. It’s a relief to have a few months’ free from having to jockey for air time, listen to long-winded people opine on matters they know little about, navigate petty factional skirmishes, or shore up colleagues whose ideas are routinely shot down.
Now that it’s September, the prospect of returning to meeting-heavy days may seem enervating. But what if we made 2019-20 the year in which we change the traditional dynamics of our meetings? Could we find ways to make them more productive, less
contentious, and more open to voices that usually get muffled or silenced?
Several years ago, I served as the acting dean of Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters -- one of
our institution’s three core colleges with 20 departments, programs and centers, 250 faculty members, and a mix of
graduate and undergraduate offerings. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know another part of the university
and experiment with running a college with a very different structure. At the same time, knowing the appointment
was for just a single year made me approach it rather differently than my usual (and concurrent) gig as the dean of
Lyman Briggs College, a residential undergraduate science college with 2,000 students and no formal sub-units.
Academic program reviews — or APRs, as they are known in administrative-speak — are both a blessing and a curse.
A well-executed internal review can be a blessing when it leads to a helpful external review that allows your department to shine and be appreciated for its strengths. The curse, of course, is that someone (often the department chair) has to convene a committee (not another committee!) of faculty members (already feeling overburdened) to write a self-study before any external reviewer can be brought to campus for a "tweed on the ground" evaluation of your program.
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 controversies continue to bedevil universities, highlighted most recently by the stunning episode at Wilfrid Laurier University. That a teaching assistant in a communications program would be reprimanded for showing video clips of a debate on the use of gender-neutral language is almost incomprehensible.
Academic freedom is not absolute, and there are some reasonable constraints that govern its application. But none have been offered that justify Wilfrid Laurier’s rebuke of the teaching assistant. She appeared to have been encouraging debate and civil discourse on a topic about which people disagree. That, indeed, is a key function of academic freedom, and of the university itself.
Canada’s colleges and institutes foster innovation that supports economic growth and social development. They improve the productivity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and community partners through the development of new and improved technologies, processes, products and services.
This fact sheet provides a summary of the Colleges and Institutes Canada 2014-15 Survey of Applied Research Activity based on 113 responses from our members.
CHICAGO -- Community college leaders across the country are looking through the hundreds of courses in their catalogs and trying to find a way to streamline their offerings in order to get students to completion.
That's because the days of students taking courses without direction is no longer acceptable if colleges hope to get them to complete within a reasonable time, with a degree and minimal student debt.
Governments are increasingly looking to international comparisons of education opportunities and outcomes as they develop policies to enhance individuals’ social and economic prospects, provide incentives for greater efficiency in schooling, and help to mobilise resources to meet rising demands. The OECD Directorate for Education and Skills contributes to these efforts by developing and analysing the quantitative, internationally comparable indicators that it publishes annually in Education at a Glance. Together with OECD country policy reviews, these indicators can be used to assist governments in building more effective and equitable education systems. Education at a Glance addresses the needs of a range of users, from governments seeking to learn policy lessons to academics requiring data for further analysis to the general public wanting to monitor how its country’s schools are progressing in producing world-class students. The publication examines the quality of learning outcomes, the policy levers and contextual factors that shape these outcomes, and the broader private and social returns that accrue to investments in education.
Canada needs skills of all kinds to remain competitive in the global economy. Today’s students are the workforce of tomorrow, and their education will shape Canada’s future prosperity. Graduates across all disciplines are reaping the rewards of a university education. They’re armed with the hands-on learning experience, entrepreneurial spirit and interdisciplinary skills that will help them succeed in an evolving labour market.
Universities offer innovative and diverse learning experiences that equip students to adapt, collaborate, lead and learn throughout their lives, and they can do even more with the partnership and commitment of the government and private sector.
Collaboration helps to develop many of the key skills that will be required of students for their future success. Students can develop many of these so-called “soft skills,” or Essential Employability Skills, by engaging in group work and other forms of collaboration (Ontario Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development 2005). Collaboration leads to greater retention, improved student achievement, and increased self-esteem and metacognition, and it can be used to facilitate active learning and to promote inclusion by increasing contact among diverse groups (Bossert 1988; Bowman, Frame, and Kennette 2013; Hennessey 1999; Kennette and Frank 2010; Kramarski and Mevarech 2003; Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin 2007; U.S. Department of Education 1992). Despite the many benefits of group work, instructors are sometimes hesitant to use it due to some of its well-known pitfalls
(social loafing, disputes, individualized grading, student bemoaning, etc.).
A growing body of research shows that college students who enroll full-time, taking even 12 credits’ worth of course work in a single semester, are much more likely stick with college, save money and eventually graduate.
Yet while the researchers behind these studies encourage efforts to nudge more students to go full-time (ideally taking 30 credits in a year), they warn against neglecting the many who will continue to attend part-time because of work and family demands -- currently only 38 percent of community college students are enrolled full-time, according to the American Association of Community Colleges.
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.
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.
There was no substantial deterioration in the earnings and employment patterns of young postsecondary graduates between 2005 and 2012—a period that included the economic recession of 2008 and 2009. A new study found that this outcome held even when graduates from specific fields of study were examined. Using linked data from the 2006 Census, the 2011 National Household Survey, and tax data from 2005 to 2012, the study examined Canadian-born 25- to-34-year-old men and women with a high school diploma, college certificate or bachelor's degree. Annual wages and salaries as well as full-year, full-time employment rates were compared before and after the recession of 2008 and 2009. Full-year, full-time employment involves at least 49 weeks worked per year, mainly for 30 hours or more per week. The dollar figures are expressed in 2012 constant dollars to account for inflation.