WE mus take a proactive approach to preventing sexual violence in higher education
For years, many academics have questioned the importance — even the justice — of requiring college students to master standard English. The discussion 20 or 30 years ago was about a student’s right to his or her own language — the implication being that the rest of us have no right to impose "our" language on those who are not native or proficient speakers. More
recently we’ve heard claims that the English language is itself discriminatory, even racist.
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
The Halton Catholic District School Board may be on the verge of deflating one of the biggest bubbles in Canadian public education. Later this month, the school board will consider ending its French immersion program.
Many middle-class parents will find this heretical, as they have flocked to the program in droves over the last decade. But just as the GTA’s frenzied housing market experienced a much-needed return to sanity, it is high time for our schools to be released from the spell of French immersion.
French immersion programs started in the 1970s as a nation building effort in what had then become an officially bilingual country. For years, it remained a small boutique program within most school boards. However, within the last decade, enrolments across the country have exploded.
“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.
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.
From pro-rape chants at St. Mary's University in Halifax to misogynistic Facebook posts by some dentistry students at Dalhousie University, sexual assault has become a contentious topic on Canadian campuses.
Over the course of six months, CBC News contacted 87 university and major colleges across Canada to request the number of sexual assaults reported on each campus to the institution between 2009 and 2013.
Here's that data, searchable by school.
It’s usually late in the job interview when I pose one of my favorite questions to faculty and administrative candidates — after they’ve already spent a good amount of time talking about their work in the loftiest of terms. They’ve described their guiding values and philosophies and touted their most-successful projects and lessons. That’s when I say: “So far we've talked about the visionary aspects of your position. Now I'd like to talk about the execution. Specifically, much of teaching/administrating is small and procedural. Tell me how you handle the ‘boring basics.’”
The National Survey of College Counseling Centers (previously the National Survey of Counseling Center Directors) has been conducted since 1981 and includes data provided by the administrative heads of college and university counseling centers in the United States and Canada. The survey attempts to stay abreast of current trends in counseling centers and to provide ready access to the opinions and solutions of colleagues to problems and challenges in the field. The areas addressed cover a range of concerns including current concerns, innovative programming, and a number of other administrative, ethical and clinical issues. A directory of all participants is provided.
Background/Context: Schools have attempted to address stratification in black and Latino students’ access to higher education through extensive reform initiatives, including those focused on social supports. A crucial focus has been missing from these efforts, essential to improving the effectiveness of support mechanisms and understanding why they have been insufficient: how students experience these reforms.
Post-Secondary Education in Ontario: Managing Challenges in an Age of Austerity 905 Region - January 2013
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
This is not really a new question for educators. We’ve always assigned some type of homework, and there have always been students who do not come to class ready to learn. However, the flipped classroom conversation has launched this question straight to the top of the list of challenges faculty face when implementing this model in their classrooms. By design, the flipped model places more emphasis on the importance of homework or pre-class work to ensure that in-person class time is effective, allowing the instructor and the students to explore higher levels of application and analysis together. If students are unprepared, it leads to frustration, stress, and anxiety for everyone.
A friend recently was attempting to describe for me the purpose of a committee devoted to studying public education on which he sits. In a sense, he began, all we’re trying to do is “wrap our brains around these utterly complex matters.” His point is well taken, especially when one reads, for example, a report such as the one my colleague David Steiner prepared for the Bertelsmann Foundation, “Educational Achievement and Reform Strategies in the United States of America,” (2001) in which, after pages of truly elegant prose, he concluded that much of public education is really a mess.
Online courses have for years driven enrollment growth at community colleges, but as more students take their
chances in the job market, institutions face new challenges to retain them, a new study found.
During the height of the recent recession, community colleges saw double-digit percentage growth in their online courses, according to the Instructional Technology Council, which is affiliated with the American Association of Community Colleges. But the ITC’s most recent survey of trends in online education at two-year colleges shows growth last academic year sat at 4.7 percent -- the lowest in about a decade.
The reading and math skills of 15-year-old immigrant students, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between 2000 and 2012, vary across regions of Canada.
Regional variations were also observed in the high school and university completion rates of youth who immigrated in Canada before the age of 15, as measured in 2011.
Context: There is growing interest in the integration of meditation in higher education.
Purpose: Here, we review evidence bearing on the utility of meditation to facilitate the achievement of traditional educational goals and to enhance education of the “whole person.”
Research Design: We examine how meditation practices may help foster important cognitive skills of attention and information processing, as well build stress resilience and adaptive interpersonal capacities through a review of the published research literature.
Conclusions/Recommendations: We offer directions for future research, highlighting the importance of theory-based investigations, increased methodological rigor, expansion of the scope of education-related outcomes studied, and the study of best practices for teaching meditation in educational settings.
Active learning is "anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things
they are doing" (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, p. 2).
Felder & Brent (2009) define active learning as "anything course-related that all students in a
class session are called upon to do other than simply watching, listening and taking notes" (p.
2).
Active learning strategies can be as short as a few minutes long.
Active learning techniques can be integrated into a lecture or any other classroom setting
relatively easily. Even large classrooms can involve learning activities beyond the traditional
lecture format.
More of this year’s freshman class expects to participate in at least one protest while they’re in college than at any other time in the last 50 years. The portion of all students who claim to be these prospective protesters? 10%. Among black students, the proportion rises to 16%.
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.
The idea that a Ph.D. can prepare you for diverse careers — not just for the professoriate — is now firmly with us.
ost doctoral students in the arts and sciences start out with the desire to become professors. But that’s not where most of them end up. By now, most graduate advisers understand that their doctoral students will follow multiple career paths. And increasing numbers of professors and administrators are trying to help students do that.
The number of Ph.D.s who pursue nonfaculty careers varies by field, of course. But the reality in many disciplines is: f you’re teaching a graduate seminar with eight students in it, only two of them, on average, will become full-time faculty members. What happens to the rest? And as important, how do they feel about where they end up?
Those questions raise a different one for graduate faculty: How do we assess our efforts to train Ph.D.s for myriad careers? It’s one thing to try to help, and another to know that we are helping.
Who should we be looking at? What should we measure? And how?