Quebec's francophone universities are sites of widespread sexual violence where many are victimized repeatedly, according to results of an online survey released today.
The violence ranged from verbal sexual harassment to sexual assault.
A research team based at the Université du Québec à Montréal surveyed 9,284 people who work or study at six of the province's French-speaking universities.
Since the mid-1990s, there has been an alarming trend on college campuses nationwide: an increase in the number of students seeking help for serious mental health problems at campus counseling centers. In the past decade this shift has not only solidified, but it also has reached increasingly higher levels.
Search committees have a list of six to 10 usual questions they ask every candidate interviewing to be a department chair or dean. There is the icebreaker question ("What attracts you about joining us here at Prairie Home University?"), the leadership question ("How do you deal with conflict?"), and the fund-raising question ("What is the largest private gift you have asked for and
received?").
But of all the questions asked and answered, the one that has proved to be the most complex is the diversity
question.
Twenty-one-year old Christian McCrave feels like he did his part.
He got good grades in high school and completed a four-year degree at the University of Guelph in southwestern Ontario. He studied mechanical engineering, in part because he thought it would land him a job.
It hasn't.
"I actually thought that coming out of school that I would be a commodity and someone would want me," McCrave said. "But instead, I got hit with a wall of being not wanted whatsoever in the industry."
McCrave says he believed in the unwritten promise of a post-secondary education: work hard at school, and you'll end up with a good and stable job.
Now, he's not so sure.
This article focuses on high school to university transitions for Indigenous youth at universities in British Columbia, Canada. The study is premised on an Indigenous research design, which utilizes the concept of visioning and a storywork methodology (Archibald, 2008). The results challenge existing in-stitutional and psychological approaches to transitions in revealing that they are deeply impacted by a variety of lived experiences and that a visioning process is vital to Indigenous youths’ participation in university. The paper concludes with implications for practitioners working in educational and Ab-original community-based settings.
While more information than ever is available about autism, there are still prevalent stereotypes: The “Rain Man” stereotype of the severely impacted person with savant skills, and the less severely impacted “Bill Gates” stereotype, a scientifically or mathematically brilliant person with limited social skills.
Stereotypes, by definition, are oversimplifications, which means that many layers and nuances are frequently missed.
We’re at that time of the academic year when the daily details begin to pile up. Teach a class, grade assignments, schedule advisees, and prep for tomorrow. It may not feel like a grind just yet, but it does require lots of focused energy, which makes this a perfect time for a quick reflection on why we teach. For some, teaching is just a job; it’s a paycheck necessity. But for readers of a blog on teaching and learning, I’m pretty sure we’re in it for something more than the bucks, which tend to be pretty modest anyway.
What if traditional high school transcripts -- lists of courses taken, grades earned and so forth -- didn't exist? That's the ambition of a new education reform movement, which wants to rebuild how high schools record the abilities of students -- and in turn to change the way colleges evaluate applicants. Sounds like quite a task. But the idea is from a group with considerable clout and money: more than 100 private schools around the country, including such elite institutions as the Dalton School and the Spence School in New York City, plus such big guns as the Cranbrook Schools in Michigan, the Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and Miss Porter's School in Connecticut.
The organizers of the effort believe all kinds of high schools and colleges are ready for change, but they argue that it will take the establishment to lead this particular revolution. Organizers believe that if more than 100 such elite private schools embrace a new transcript, they will attract supporters in higher ed who will embrace the approach for fear of losing top applicants (both in terms of their academics and ability to pay). And then the plan could spread -- over perhaps a decade -- to public high schools as well. Along the way, the group hopes to use the ideas of competency-based education -- in which demonstration of mastery matters and seat time does not -- to change the way high schoolers are taught.
As the provincial government releases new strategies for strengthening international student recruitment and retention, concerns have arisen about the stresses on international students.
A generation ago, college administrators eager to enhance their institution’s international profile might have set up a handful of study abroad programs and sought to host a few overseas students each year. These limited initiatives were often delegated to international programs offices that were understaffed and under-resourced. Those days are long since past. On campuses large and small, urban and suburban, public and private, university leaders increasingly understand the importance
of raising the international profile of their institutions and preparing all students with the attitudes, skills, and knowledge that will serve them well in a rapidly shrinking world.
One of the biggest differences between the experience I had as a student and the experience students have in my classroom has to do with assignments. When I was a student, assignments often had no discernible relationship to what we were doing in class. Oh, we would have to write about a text we read for class. But once the assignment was given out, we were generally on our own — there were no opportunities to work on it in class, to reflect on the skills the assignment asked us to practice, to share and workshop our ideas with our classmates.
The courses I teach are different. A sequence of major assignments form the backbone of the semester. Almost everything we do in class is explicitly linked to one or more of those assignments. We break them down into stages, work on them collaboratively, and discuss the challenges students might face along the way. Like many teachers, I design assignments not just to assess performance, but also to give students opportunities to practice and develop important skills.
A new study appears to offer additional evidence that drivers are less likely to brake for African-American pedestrians trying to cross the street, a phenomenon known as “walking while black.”
Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas also found that the disparity is greater depending on whether the pedestrian is in a high- or low-income neighbourhood: the average number of vehicles to pass by a black pedestrian who was already in the crosswalk was at least seven times higher compared with a white pedestrian in the wealthier neighbourhood, the study’s lead researcher said.
Ontario’s professors and academic librarians are on the front lines of Ontario’s universities. They are uniquely positioned to assess the performance of the sector, and to evaluate the ways in which proposed reforms may impact their institutions and their work.
In early 2012, Ontario-based education media began reporting that the Government of Ontario was entertaining a number of significant changes to the structure, academic content, and program delivery methods of universities. Some of these reported changes were introduced in a leaked discussion paper titled 3x3: Revolutionizing Ontario’s Post-Secondary Education System for the 21st Century. Key proposals within this report include:
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.
This time of year has always been my favorite. Back to school once meant new clothes, new notebooks, and new
hopes of avoiding the dreaded bottom locker. Now, as a professor, I retain the joy I have every August when I get
new colleagues, new students, and yes, new clothes. Mostly though, I’m excited about the opportunity to start fresh
and do a better job than I did the year before.
To begin that process, I revise and enhance my professional networks — because a new academic year should
bring with it new relationships and new opportunities.
I joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as an assistant professor of business and reveled in the thrill of teaching and writing. As I advanced up the tenure-promotion ladder, I assumed various responsibilities to strengthen the institution: chair of this program and that committee and executive director of an institute.
In 2005, the president of my university called to ask if I would serve as the dean of the business school for a year. He’d been conducting a search and hadn’t been able to fill the slot in time for the start of the next academic year. He just needed a placeholder for a short while until he could close the sale with one of a number of candidates.
I was ready for a new challenge. But to leap from scholarship to administration is a big, and often one-way, move. The school really needed help. This wouldn’t be an easy assignment. My faculty friends said that I’d be giving up the professorial life that offered self-direction, flexible hours, and a cloistered world. Academic leadership is lonely and conflict-ridden. And my wife correctly foresaw the distractions, stress, long hours, and travel.
On the other hand, some of my prior work was quite relevant to the school’s needs. The issues at hand mattered a lot to me, and I wanted to rally others to them if I could. For every doubt, a reply came to mind. So I finally accepted.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
The purpose of this qualitative grounded theory study was to assess multilingual models of education by investing how and when to incorporate second and third languages into the curriculum to improve language acquisition.
What annoys me about the teaching profession, more than anything else, is the constant grousing about students. A certain slice of the faculty seems to enjoy complaining about how bad their students are — especially, of course, today’s students, who are clearly worse than any other generation in history. I’ve been hearing the same gripe for my entire 33 years of college teaching.
Research shows when people are curious about something, not only do they learn better, they learn more. It should come as no
surprise, then, that inquiry-based learning is proving to be an effective education model. In fact, one research study found inquiry-based learning produces increases in affective and cognitive outcomes.