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.
The Ontario government has indicated its intention to negotiate individual mandate agreements with each of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions and to amend funding formulas to focus resources on what each institution does best. These actions signal the government’s desire to pursue a policy of greater institutional differentiation within the Ontario public postsecondary system. The purpose of this paper is to advance the conversation by examining differences among Ontario’s 24 colleges on key variables related to programmatic diversity and participation in degree granting.
This study aimed to better understand campus mental health culture and student mental health coping strategies, and to identify the mental health needs of students as well as gaps in mental health services within postsecondary education. A videovoice method was used to identify and document health-related issues and advocate for change. Forty-one interviews were conducted with campus stakeholders at five universities. Five themes involving mental
health emerged from the campus interviews: the stigma of mental illness; campus culture related to mental health; mental health services available and barriers to mental health services on campus; accommodations for students’ mental health needs; and student mental health coping strategies. A documentary was developed to advocate for better mental health.
We conclude that although Canadian campuses are raising awareness about mental health issues, there is not enough mental health infrastructure support on campuses; in particular, accessibility to campus mental health resources needs improvement.
PowePoint presentation.
A total of 61,696 full-time applicants to Ontario colleges opted-in to participate in the 2015
UCAS™:
59,568 English-speaking applicants and 2,128 French-speaking applicants at the time of survey
administration.
• Academica Group provided unique web links as well as the invitation email text to the Ontario
College Application Service (OCAS). OCAS then sent the survey invitation email to college
applicants. Applicant contact information was not shared with Academica Group at any point in the
process.
• The survey was in-field from March 12 to April 21, 2015. Reminder emails were sent on March
24 and April 8 to those who had not yet responded. Respondents who completed the survey were
entered into a draw to win over $5,000 in prizes.
• 14,331 college respondents completed the survey (13,661 English and 670 French) providing an
overall
response rate of 23%.
• This sample size provides results at the 95% confidence level of plus or minus 0.39
percentage points.
• Respondent data was weighted by gender and language to reflect the original population
invited to
participate.
A Q&A with Peter Cornish of Memorial University on the Stepped Care model, which he hopes will get everyone on campus to be part of the support system for those dealing with mental health issues.
In 2014, Peter Cornish helped the Student Wellness and Counselling Centre at Memorial University launch the Stepped
Care program. With this model, the level of intensity of care is matched to the complexity of the condition. When someone
says they are stressed, or they are not feeling happy, then society tends to say, “Okay, go see a psychologist,” said Dr.
Cornish, who is director of the counselling centre. However, not everyone needs to see a therapist all of the time. The Stepped
Care model brings in many other “low intensity” options for the patient that are readily available in the community, but which
we’re often not making use of. University Affairs sat down with Dr. Cornish to find out more about the Stepped Care model and
why universities should consider it.
ADMINISTRATION AND CONTROL.—Under the Canadian Constitution, education is the responsibility of the provincial governments. There is no single, national school system; each of the provinces grapples with the problem in its own way. Yet the similarities among the provincial school systems are more striking than the differences. In every province education is administered by a Minister of the Crown, advised and aided by a group of employed experts. The chief of these is usually
styled deputy minister or superintendent of education. In every province except the smallest (Prince Edward Island), the provincial contribution to educational budgets is much less than the amount derived from local taxes on real property; in all provinces the degree of provincial control of education is high, especially over such items as the training and certification of teachers, curricula, standards, and supervision. Every province requires school attendance to the age of fourteen, some to the age of sixteen. Although junior high schools or intermediate schools are found in many urban centers, the usual pattern is the familiar 8-4 arrangement. Quebec has a seven-year elementary school and two of the provinces have five-year secondary schools.
When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former colleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?
If the Myers-Briggs assessment didn't do it, Susan Cain’s Quiet certainly did. The word “introvert” has become
common parlance. People now correct themselves if caught using the word “shy.” Cain has helped to develop
nuance and sensitivity around introversion (e.g., introverts don’t hate people, we need alone time to recharge, we
are great thinkers). But has higher education recognized the significance of this personality theory in order to better
support introverted students’ learning and success?
Awareness contexts are useful concepts in symbolic interactionist research, which focusses on how everyday realities are constructed. To provide a fresh perspective on governance in Canada’s colleges, I sorted vignettes in interview data collected from administrators and faculty into four types of contexts originally derived from observation of interaction between physicians and patients around bad news. These theoretical categories were introduced by Glaser and Strauss in their 1965 book Awareness of Dying. Applying this lens revealed a “closed awareness” context around college fund-raising and a “mutual suspicion” context in administrator-faculty interaction around student success policy. Examples of “mutual pretense” included feigned administrator-faculty cooperation around changing college missions and faculty workload formulas. “Open awareness” or dialogue, however, occurred where professional bodies or unions intervened. Sorting by awareness contexts reveals similarities between doctor-patient and administrator-faculty interactions. For example, just as doctors feared that delivering bad news to patients might precipitate “mayhem” in the hospital, college administrators may fear that openness around divisive topics might precipitate “mayhem” in college management.
Canada’s average or, in some cases, below-average performance in the OECD’s latest survey of adult skills (known as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)) sparked some observers to call the quality of Canada’s education systems into question. The reason: the results appeared to contradict the prevailing notion that our education systems are among the best in the world.
Dominique Oliver-Dares remembers being a first-year undergraduate student at Dalhousie University, looking around at the other students in her “humongous” introductory classes and seeing only a handful of Black students like her spread out around the room. “It was very isolating,” she recalls. “Sometimes your fellow students either know each other from somewhere else, or they might just feel more comfortable to make friends with the other students that look like them. I couldn’t engage in conversations as easily.”
Carol Dweck is a psychology professor at Stanford University whose ideas on education have swept through schools. She insists that children who have a “growth mindset”, a belief that through effort they can overcome problems and improve their own abilities, perform radically better in class – and in life.
In a TED talk that has so far garnered more than 4 million views online, she shares inspiring tales of pupils in tough,
inner-city areas who have zoomed ahead after being trained to believe that their talents are not fixed.
IT HAS become a truism that we live in an age of rapid and profound change. The growth of freedom of thought, the use of the scientific method, the advance of the industrial revolution, the rise of political and economic democracy, and the everwidening applications of technology— culminating in the atomic age—are recasting the thoughts and actions of men into strange new patterns.
TORONTO -- Ontario's minister of post-secondary education says he's concerned that two publicly-funded Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don't allow women.
On Wednesday, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi said decisions on the operation of a campus, including student composition, are up to each college's board of governors.
But late Thursday, after a lot of criticism on social media about the male-only campuses, the minister had a change of heart about Ontario colleges teaching courses that deliberately exclude women.
Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions
than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the
social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to
their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.
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.
his research project was conducted upon the unceded and un-surrendered territories of the Coast Salish people, including the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo—what is now known as the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia (BC).1 If we are to work towards communities of care, to truly dismantle rape culture on university campuses and within our wider communities, we must recognize the broader structure of settler colonialism within which sexualized and gender-based violence occurs. Sexualized and gender-based violence are inherently embedded within settler colonialism, and function as an exertion of power that disproportionally affects people of color, Indigenous women, trans, non-gender conforming, and Two-spirit folks, and people with disabilities. As Sarah Hunt elucidates, “rape culture and racism are indeed deeply intertwined, shaping [campuses] in ways that decrease safety for Indigenous students, faculty and staff, particularly women, Two-spirit, trans and queer people.”2 Recognizing who s most affected by violence is essential in creating robust and inclusive policy and initiatives that support survivors and prevent violence.
This paper draws upon research surrounding sexualized violence and prevention work, relevant provincial legislation, as well as information gathered from a collaboration with the Anti-Violence Project (AVP) at the University of Victoria. We would like to sincerely thank AVP for sharing their knowledge with us and for the critical prevention and support work that they conduct. From this research, we recommend that the provincial government mandate and fund a comprehensive survivor centred Action Plan to improve and embolden existing policy.
This paper exploits data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to shed light on the link between measured cognitive skills (proficiency), (formal) educational attainment and labour market outcomes. After presenting descriptive statistics on the degree of dispersion in the distributions of proficiency and wages, the paper shows that the cross-country correlation between these two dimensions of inequality is very low and, if anything, negative. As a next step, the paper provides estimates of the impact of both proficiency and formal education at different parts of the distribution of earnings. Formal education is found to have a larger impact on inequality, given that returns to education are in general much higher at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. The profile of returns to proficiency, by contrary, is much flatter. This is consistent with the idea that PIAAC measures rather general skills, while at the top end of the distribution the labour market rewards specialised knowledge that is necessarily acquired through tertiary and graduate education. Finally, a decomposition exercise shows that composition effects are able to explain a very limited amount of the observed cross-country differences in wage inequality. This suggests that economic institutions, by shaping the way personal characteristics are rewarded in the labour market, are the main
determinants of wage inequality.
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.