If you spend any time listening to other teachers (particularly online, where complaining is almost an art form), you’ll soon hear about an epidemic of grandparents dying in the last two months of the semester , when big assignments are due and final exams start to get closer. Students will do anything to take advantage of us, the chorus sings, and the only defense is a strict adherence to the rules: Sorry, kid, but the syllabus clearly says “no extensions.”
That attitude seems even more desirable when you read some of the criticisms of so-called “permissive-indulgent” instructors. Such teachers “fear doing anything that might create stress for students, stifle their personal growth, or hurt their self-esteem,” writes psychologist Douglas Bernstein. They coddle students, being careful not to be too harsh for fear of discouraging them. Even worse, those faculty “are eager to help students succeed, even if it means lowering standards for success.”
Just a tiny minority of Canadian students choose to study abroad, and that’s a problem. Here’s what some
universities are doing to try to reverse the trend.
Caitlyn Ryall had her doubts – and her fears. Then a third-year material art and design student at OCAD University,
Ms. Ryall weighed the pros and cons of heading abroad for a semester at the University of Southampton in Winchester, England. On the one hand, she felt an excitement and fascination due to her upbringing – her father is a travel writer, and she shared his wanderlust and curiosity about the world. On the other hand, she faced serious challenges: the costs were almost unthinkable (upwards of $15,000), the initial administrative processes seemed to be moving as slow as molasses, and the payoff, in terms of transfer credits, was uncertain. And it would be her first time abroad, without her traditional network of friends and family.
Graduate students need to seek out opportunities for collaboration at every stage of their graduate career. Experience working as part of a team is valuable for Ph.D. students preparing for a rapidly evolving academic job market, and it is indispensable for those pursuing careers beyond academe.
Scholars who study educational equity and inequality in education, academic achievement gaps, and educational opportunity offer a variety myriad of explanations as to how or whether race has any role or impact on educational experiences, access, or opportunity. Indeed, race has been an abiding question in the social sciences and education for several decades.
Despite the debates within both fields regarding the meaning of race, the current popular sentiment among the lay public and many educational practitioners is that on November 4, 2008, America reached a post-racial moment with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. In other words, according to the post-racial discourse, race no longer matters, especially as it relates to people of color. The editors and contributors of this volume challenge this rhetoric and examine how and whether race operates in understanding how issues of access to productive opportunities and quality resources converge and impact experiences and outcomes in education. Hence, the purpose of this NSSE Yearbook is to explain how and why race is a “dynamic system of historically derived and institutionalized ideas and practices” shaped by myriad forces (e.g., power, gender, language, class, and privilege), which determine the quality of educational opportunities, experiences, and resources for people of color in the United States.
A study presented Friday at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting shines some light on the way women are hired for top higher education leadership positions in searches involving third-party executive search firms.
For the study, Harvard Ph.D. student Jeraul C. Mackey obtained access to proprietary data from a search firm that remained anonymous. The data covered almost 500 searches over an eight-year period starting in 2009. Mackey ultimately analyzed a subset of the data covering 250 searches for two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions.
He was able to look at how women candidates fared at each stage of the recruitment process for upper-level positions, finding that women fared better as searches progressed. He was also able to examine recruiters’ preferences about women candidates, finding that the gender makeup of a recruitment team had no discernible effect on whether a search ultimately resulted in a woman being hired.
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.
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.
SIX YEARS AGO, Georgia State University (GSU) gathered a decade’s worth of its historical data with the help of a third-party vendor — some 15,000 student records and 2.5 million grades — and applied advanced analytics. Officials hoped to use this information to uncover early-warning signs for students in danger of dropping out of school.
“FBI Insider: Clinton Emails Linked to Political Pedophile Sex Ring,” declared a blog post just days before the U.S. presidential election.
And earlier this year [2017], an online headline blasted: “BOMBSHELL: Trump and Putin Spotted at Swiss Resort Prior to Election.”
There was only one problem. Neither was true at all. Even the sources were suspect.
The headlines, it turned out, were part of the onslaught of fake news that has proliferated. But for Texas A&M senior Ishanee Chanda, the task of discerning between fool’s gold and gold was a no brainer.
"Critical thinking has allowed me to look at the most recent election and the phenomenon of `fake news' with a careful eye," says Ishanee Chanda
Blended learning is on track to become the new normal in education. The approach combines the best of in-person and online learning, offering students the information they need in the method they need to receive it. According to a recent report from Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, “blended learning significantly outperforms face-to-face classroom instruction.”
When Michael Maccoby wrote this article, which was first published in early 2000, the business world was still under the spell of the Internet and its revolutionary promise. It was a time, Maccoby wrote, that called for larger-than-life leaders who could see the big picture and paint a compelling portrait of a dramatically different future. And that, he argued, was one reason we saw the emergence of the superstar CEOs—the grandiose, actively self-promoting, and genuinely narcissistic leaders who dominated the covers of business magazines at that time. Skilled orators and creative strategists, narcissists have vision and a great ability to attract and inspire followers.
The times have changed, and we’ve learned a lot about the dangers of overreliance on big personalities, but that doesn’t mean narcissism can’t be a useful leadership trait. There’s certainly a dark side to narcissism—narcissists, Freud told us, are motionally isolated and highly distrustful. They’re usually poor listeners and lack empathy. Perceived threats can trigger rage. The challenge today—as Maccoby understood it to be four years ago—is to take advantage of their strengths while tempering their weaknesses.
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.
Background/Context: The assessment of students, along with teachers and school systems, has largely taken place within a context of positivist science. An enormous range of scholarship now challenges the positivist paradigm, offering a social espistemological alternative. This alternative invites a re-examination of assessment processes and their policy implications.
This article explores for a broad audience the changing landscape of education in the digital age, the changing roles of teachers in a technologyrich education system, and the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that teachers will need to have to support students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development in a digital learning environment.
MINNEAPOLIS -- As the former president of two small liberal arts colleges and Pennsylvania’s independent college group, Brian C. Mitchell believes “with all my heart” in the traditional case for American higher education: that it helps produce full and productive members of an engaged citizenry.
“It’s a noble argument, the right argument,” he told an audience at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. But “it just doesn’t matter given the environment,” he said. “It just doesn’t resonate.”
It’s not that Mitchell thinks there isn’t a good case to be made for higher education. And the former president of Washington & Jefferson College and Bucknell University doesn’t accept the idea that colleges and universities collectively face a “doomsday scenario,” as some prognosticators tend to predict.
In an increasingly complex, networked, and rapidly changing world, creativity has taken a central role (Dortier 2015; Runco 2004). There is enormous interest in creativity in education, business, technology research, and emerging fields such as social innovation and design. Coupled with a proliferation of popular as well as academic discourses of creativity, this situation presents researchers with complex, multidimensional challenges that cannot be addressed exclusively from the perspective of one discipline. This new global context requires a transdisciplinary exploration of creativity, particularly since the articulation, expression, and practice of creativity appear to be in flux in society as well as in academia. The networked society, generational differences, and the focus on business innovation have turned attention to collaborative, distributed forms of creativity that have only recently begun to be studied systematically.
It was 7 a.m. on a Sunday in February of 2006 — midway through my second quarter as a Ph.D. student in Irvine,
Calif. — and I had just scared the ever-loving bejeezus out of the weekend custodian. When she opened the door to the German department’s grad-student offices, I don’t think she was expecting to find the legs of a supine 29-yearold woman sticking out from under a desk.
On Saturday, April 1, I attended a conference at the University of Toronto for Black university students aspiring to become medical doctors. Student panelists shared their stories of being either the only or one of very few Black students in their classes at the university's medical school. What struck me was that in a city and country as diverse Toronto and Canada, there are not more Black medical students. Throughout the day it was evident how the
representation of Black students at university reflected the poor outcomes for Black students in the education system throughout the Greater Toronto Area.
STATEMENT OF COMMITMENT
1. All members of the University of Toronto (“the University”) community should have the ability to study, work, and live in a campus environment free from Sexual Violence, including Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment.
2. Sexual Violence is a serious issue that undermines the health, well-being, and security of individuals, communities, and society. Addressing the causes and consequences of Sexual Violence requires the deliberate and collective efforts of governments, institutions, and citizens.
3. The University is committed to making available programs and resources to educate its community on the prevention of and response to Sexual Violence.
4. The University is committed to responding to and addressing incidents and complaints of Sexual Violence involving its students, staff and faculty, and to ensuring that those members of the community who are affected by Sexual Violence receive support.
5. The University recognizes that Sexual Violence can occur between individuals regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or relationship status.
6. The University recognizes the intersection of Sexual Violence with discrimination and harassment, including but not limited to the grounds set out in the Ontario Human Rights Code. The University recognizes that individuals from historically marginalized communities may be disproportionately affected by Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence.
7. Sexual Violence can be committed against any person and is an issue that requires an inclusive response. The University recognizes that Sexual Violence is overwhelmingly committed against women, and in particular women who experience the intersection of multiple identities such as, but not limited to, indigenous women, women with disabilities, and racialized women. Additionally, the University recognizes that those whose gender identity or gender expression does not conform to historical gender norms are also at increased risk of Sexual Violence.
8. The University recognizes that individuals who have experienced Sexual Violence experience a range of effects that can profoundly affect their lives.
As a Biomedical Sciences major, I completed the two required “Physics for the Life Sciences” courses during the first year of my undergrad, and never considered those concepts again. Until now. I’m doing my doctorate in cardiovascular science, and the physics of blood flow has become an important element of my experiments. The little I remember from those two courses is far from sufficient for my current project. I’m now trying to teach myself the basics of fluid dynamics so I can properly understand and explain my own project.