Are Women More Emotional Than Men? This idea that men and women think, talk, and understand things differently has existed for decades—inspiring books, college courses, research studies, and countless sitcoms. The truth is much more complicated and nuanced, of course.
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.
I'm in charge of campus life at Good Little College, where we pride ourselves on working harmoniously and making everyone happy with dorm life and student activities. My assistant director, "Etta," a recent college graduate in her first professional job, is in charge of the arts program, which brings speakers, writers, and entertainers to our isolated little town. She oversees a student intern, who gets a chance to learn to do publicity, catering, and other arranging.
"Franny," this year's intern, had spectacular qualifications but has been an almost total flake. She's under the thumb of a boyfriend, "Petey," whose demands have controlled her life. ("I can't come to any meetings this week—Petey keeps texting me that he's feeling lonely. He needs me.")
Here's the last straw. Franny (who told us all this) washed Petey's laundry as usual and brought it to his room, where she found a classmate, "Germa," naked in his bed. (Petey'd gone out to buy beer.) Franny was so distraught that she didn't write the press release or contact the caterer or do anything for the appearance of Mr. Bigwig Political Figure—who wound up with an audience of 20 people. There wasn't even a microphone.
Speaking to an audience at Western University last week, Prime Minister Trudeau earned a round of appreciative applause by referring to it as the “Harvard of Canada.” It’s a harmless enough conceit: “Harvard of the North” t-shirts are sold at university souvenir shops across Canada. But of course, there is no Canadian equivalent of Harvard, with its prestige, limited enrollment and its $60,000 tuition. And really, it’s just as well.
When it is remarked that Canada does not have a university with the international stature of a Harvard or an Oxford, it is usually with an air of wistful regret. Or perhaps it’s used as another example of how Canadians are in thrall to the “tall poppy syndrome”: a tendency to disparage the achievements of those who have excelled. And sometimes the lack of an elite university is seen as evidence of how Canadians under-appreciate the benefits of higher education.
Why are writing groups so difficult to sustain? How can they be cultivated and nurtured? We would like to share our
experiences of being a productive and successful writing group over the last seven years. We began with seven
non-tenured and/or contractual members who saw academic writing as an important process for developing research ideas and, consequently, for career growth. We also recognized that it was vital to have a circle of friends where everyone can receive supportive critique and informative feedback on their writing. Over the years, the group has grown to include 17 academics at all ranks and stages.
We often hear that peer review is an excellent opportunity for reciprocal student learning. In theory, this makes sense. Since an instructor can only dedicate a certain amount of attention to each student, peer review allows students to receive more feedback and engage more frequently in the content they are learning. Research shows this benefits both the students who receive and provide feedback.
Even though your toughest students are just kids at the mercy of emotions they don't understand or can't control, it can be hard for a teacher to stay calm and not take these ongoing behavioral problems personally. My advice: it's time to hit the reset button!
Tough kids are usually covering a ton of hurt. They defend against feeling pain by erecting walls of protection through rejection. Efforts to penetrate those walls by caring adults are generally met with stronger resistance expressed through emotional withdrawal and/or offensive language, gestures, and actions. Like a crying baby unable to articulate the source of its discomfort, these kids desperately need patient, determined, and affectionate adults with thick skin who refuse to take offensive behavior personally. Here are some ways to connect or reconnect with students who make themselves hard to like.
I knew grad school would be difficult, but I was surprised to find one way in which I wanted to work harder: learning
how to talk about science. I grew up seeing science misrepresented or misunderstood in the news and pop culture. I
thought the relationship between science and society needed repair, and I saw scientists’ isolation as part of the
problem. So I couldn’t believe that my Ph.D. program was willing to release me into the world without teaching me
how to talk to people outside academe.
This report assesses the University of Ottawa’s economic, social, and community impact.
As a leading research-intensive institution with a unique bilingual education mandate in Ontario, the university is currently, and is positioned to continue to be, an important generator of ideas, an innovation leader, a national top-10 research facility, a magnet for domestic and international talent, a collaborative learning network for graduates and faculty, an expert advisor to companies and governments, and a force in provincial and national innovation.
The purpose of this document is to provide information and guidance to post-secondary Boards in the conduct of their responsibilities. These guidelines are intended to be supplementary to orientation materials provided by post-secondary institutions to their Board members. The information contained in this document has been made available solely for convenience. The official statutes must be consulted for purposes of interpreting and applying the law. For simplicity, these guidelines may use a single term or general terms where many terms may exist across different types of institutions. In this document “the Ministry” refers to the Ministry responsible for post-secondary education.
In the national conversation about career opportunities for Ph.D. candidates, we hear a lot of dialogue about faculty
resistance and solutions for how faculty members can become more supportive of students considering wider career options. What we don’t hear as much about is student resistance to career exploration. I recently met with a student who told me he had no intention of considering anything but faculty jobs. He told me it was a waste of his time to take on any work during his program that was not teaching or research, since he was going to be a professor.
Every morning, before the coffee kicks in, I unload the dishwasher. This is more or less mindless work, but there often comes a moment when I'm forced to pause. I take out the silverware basket, put it on the counter, and look at the disorganized jumble: forks and spoons and knives sticking out every which way. For a split second, I am overwhelmed with a kind of paralysis — I don’t know where to begin. Of course, I soon snap out of it and start putting everything away.
That strikes me as similar to what instructors — particularly novice ones — face at the beginning of the fall semester.
It can be overwhelming to think of all of the objectives you have for your students. In my own writing courses, I want my students to learn how to construct an argument and how to write good sentences. I want them to understand the place of research, and how to integrate outside sources into their writing. Of course to become good writers, they need to be good readers, understanding how other writers create. And what about learning how to draft and revise? Trying to balance that glut of important skills, my head can become very muddled, very quickly.
A university education can provide an individual with greater employment options, higher income potential, and improved health and quality of life, yet young persons from rural areas remain less likely to attend university than their urban counterparts. This study explores the perceived personal, social, and cultural factors that might create barriers for young persons from rural areas. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 individuals living in rural areas in Alberta, aged 18 to 23 years, who had not attended univer-sity. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, we identified 11 major themes, which were then organized into a conceptual model to illustrate the interacting nature of these factors and their influence on a person’s decision to pursue a university education. An examination of this model and its associ-ated themes may help reveal the possible barriers young persons from rural areas experience when deciding whether or not to attend university.
Une formation universitaire peut permettre aux individus d’avoir un plus grand nombre d’options d’emploi et de meilleurs salaires, en plus d’améliorer leur santé et leur qualité de vie. Malheureusement, les jeunes des milieux ruraux demeurent moins enclins à fréquenter l’université que leurs homologues citadins. Cette étude se penche sur les facteurs personnels et socioculturels perçus qui pourraient ériger des barrières limitant l’accès universitaire aux jeunes adultes des milieux ruraux. Une étude basée sur des entrevues semi-structurées a été réalisée auprès de 17 individus âgés de 18 à 23 ans habitant en milieu rural albertain et n’ayant pas fréquenté l’université. Avec l’analyse interprétative de phénomène, nous avons répertorié 11 thèmes majeurs, que nous avons regroupés en un modèle conceptuel afin d’illustrer la nature des interactions entre ces facteurs et leur influence sur la décision des personnes d’entamer des études universitaires. L’examen du modèle et des thèmes associés pourrait révéler les barrières possibles auxquelles font face les jeunes adultes issus de milieux ruraux lorsque vient le temps de choisir d’étudier ou non à l’université.
On October 17 1990, the members of the Canadian Federation of Students presented the first edition of its alternative funding model for post-secondary education. The proposal, entitled Strategy for Change, articulated students’ concerns about public funding for post-secondary education, as well as problems with federal student financial assistance programs.
In the intervening seventeen years since the first version of this document was published, federal funding and student aid policies have changed substantially, as have many provincial approaches to post-secondary education. Perhaps the single over arching trend is the federal government’s retreat from a leadership role in broad higher education policy.
It is a common practice at universities to have students complete end-of-term questionnaires about their courses and instructors. Sometimes called student evaluations of teaching (SETs) or student questionnaires on courses and teaching (SQCTs), these are often used to make decisions about faculty tenure and promotion without an appreciation of their limitations. These uestionnaires could be good for capturing the student experience, but responses are inherently influenced by factors outside of the professor's control, including the subject being taught, class size, and the professor's gender, race, or accent. Further, the comment sections in these anonymous questionnaires can and have been vehicles of harassment.
Ontario’s faculty understand the value of student feedback, but the manner in which this feedback is sought, and the ends to which it is used are problematic. The goal of student questionnaires should be to inform the understanding of the teaching and learning experience, not to punish faculty for their class size, instructional innovations, gender, or skin colour.
To consider these issues, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) has set up a working group with experts in methodology, research ethics, and human rights. The group has been tasked with developing a deeper understanding of how student questionnaires are currently being used at Ontario's universities, defining the limitations of these questionnaires, and developing proposals for ensuring that these questionnaires are used appropriately. The working group is expected to release its report and recommendations later this year. What follows is a summary of the group’s findings so far.
Most teachers enter the profession with strong ideals regarding the work they are about to undertake, and the impact this work will have on the students they teach. A good number of those who apply to faculties of education will report that teaching is something they have dreamed of doing since they were, themselves, young children. Others will tell stories of teachers encountered throughout their own schooling – teachers who, through effective teaching strategies, personal encouragement and modeling, influenced their decision to pursue a teaching career. Conversations with teacher candidates entering their first years of professional life are, in many cases, full of hope, passion and the expectation that, through their work as teachers, they will be able to inspire, excite, and make a similar impact on the lives of the young people with whom they work.
Conversations with teachers who have spent some time in the profession often reflect a tempering of the high ideals with which they began their careers. While they are still hopeful about the work they are doing, there is a sense from many teachers that factors beyond their immediate control prevent them from fully realizing their original vision of what their professional life was going to be like. In short, there is often a noticeable difference between the teacher they aspire to be and the teacher that they feel they are required to be.
It sometimes seems like there are two tribes in undergraduate teaching: STEM and the humanities. Despite the growing appeal of interdisciplinarity, and the budding campaign to turn STEM into STEAM, courses in the two realms remain very different.
Nowhere is the gap more noticeable than in methods of assessment. STEM courses still tend to use testing, while those in the humanities rely on student writing. For whatever reason — a tendency to teach the way we were taught, a lack of time to get creative with course design, a belief that students need to learn “the basics” before moving on to anything else — most of us fall into one of those two camps — testing or writing — when it comes to assessing our students. In all the years that I’ve taught English and rhetoric courses, for example, I only ever gave tests when I was required to do so by college or department policy. I’ve always believed that student writing was the best way to measure learning in my classes.
Students cheat. Educators struggle to respond, sometimes blaming themselves for not making courses sufficiently interesting or relevant and sometimes engaging in a battle of wits or technologies with their students to prevent cheating. Sometimes we in higher education try to address cheating as a moral problem and sometimes as a pedagogical one. Another way to understand cheating, however, is to borrow an insight from Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, namely, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
To make the comparison that one should never properly make, Higher Degree Research (HDR hereafter) supervision shares with parenting its status as that topic about which every person has an opinion. Watching other people supervise can be as exacerbating as observing a nonchalant parent whose child is throwing food in a café. When a postgraduate student takes directions that one could never possibly recommend, it is easy to imagine that better training was possible, that bad choices were made at crucial junctures, and that somewhere sits a parent reading the newspaper while the floor gets covered in spaghetti. The neglectful supervisor, like the neglectful parent, is easily viewed as a person of a certain type, such that quotidian discussions of supervision practices easily deteriorate into a moral commentary on personal virtues and vices. Although providing short-lived pious pleasures, the urge to judgment can be damaging to higher degree research cultures. Supervision practices need to be understood not as expressions of a moral disposition (friendly, mean, forgiving) or achievements of profound intelligence (the cult of the inept genius), but as institutionally responsive practices within a
broader tertiary system that remains unclear about what higher degree research should achieve, and apprehensive about what its graduates should aspire to afterwards.
They are now the majority of students worldwide, their expectations are different, and universities must step up to
the challenge or be left behind.
Most universities focus on traditional students – those who enter straight from high school, study full-time and live on or near campus. However, non-traditional students – older, part-time and often returning to their education midcareer – are actually the majority of students and their expectations can be very different, said Joseph Aoun, president of Boston’s Northeastern University. “They’re telling us, ‘Things are changing, wake up.’”