One of the sadder conversations I have had in my 15 years of writing about academic careers is, unfortunately, a common one. It usually happens when I’m at a workshop or a conference and people approach me who are enduring a rocky patch in graduate school, on the job hunt, or on the tenure track. At some point I will ask them, "How are you using your dissertation to move your career forward?"
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.
The first initiative of its kind in an Ontario University
The Nipissing University Promise Program will support you through all aspects of the University journey. Newly admitted and transfer students with less than 30 transfer credits enrolled in the Promise Program will have an advisor to help navigate each step of your academic and co-curricular involvement at Nipissing — the transition into academic studies, life on campus as a Laker, and career development.
What is the NU Promise?
Nipissing invites you to return, tuition free, for up to 30 additional credits* if 6 months after completing your 4-year undergraduate degree program with a 70% GPA and all required elements of the program, you have not secured career-related employment.
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.
The university as workplace has been imaginatively described by many observers of higher education: at any one university we might find Sanskrit scholars, accountants, glass blowers, philosophers and curators of pregnant hamsters (Henry Wriston, Academic Procession: Reflections of a College President, 1959). However, the quaintness of these occupations (barring the accountants) belies the full reality of the working university in that it fails to include all members of the campus community.
The Wounded Leader: How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis (2002), a recently published book by Richard Ackerman and Pat Maslin-Ostrowski, asks educational leaders to reflect on personal and profound questions - ones they are not likely to have been asked in a formal interview or performance evaluation. Ackerman, co-director of the International Network of Principals’ Centers and Associate Professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Graduate School of Education, and Maslin- Ostrowski, an Associate Professor of educational
leadership at Florida Atlantic University, have spent the past seven years asking school leaders about “wounding” or “crisis” experiences in their leadership practice, and how they make sense of this wounding in terms of
their personal and professional lives.
Project-Based Learning
This challenging time provides an opportunity for students to work on real-world problems
they see every day.
Amid a pandemic, educators are trying to figure out how to make sure that kids are socially in tune, emotionally intact, and cognitively engaged. Moreover, we’re all attempting to figure out how to do this across a plethora of mediums, including computer screens, video cameras streaming into classrooms, and engaging students face-to-face albeit across shields, masks, and plexiglass.
Still, there is an opportunity here to give students a chance to discuss the challenges of their own environment, the barrage of news they face daily, and the core content they need for long-term success. One of the best options to meet these demands is for students to engage in rigorous problem- or project-based learning (PBL)—an approach that ensures students develop high rigor and experience high relevance by solving problems or
completing tasks in a remote or face-to-face environment.
Studying for a doctoral degree can be a lonely, dispiriting experience. You huddle in the library during yet another weekend away from loved ones, frantically searching the basement for an ancient tome that you desperately need to finish your literature
review. Life appears to devolve into a numbing monotony punctuated by paralyzing moments of stress and the occasional minor success. When you reach the all but dissertation (ABD) stage, your waking hours seem to endlessly revolve around a few mundane tasksread, write, edituntil you have successfully completed your oral defense. During the bleakest hours, well before the end is in sight, when your money, health, and resolve are at a collective nadir, it can feel like your path is too long and you are making no progress. Suffering through these moments of tremendous self-doubt, it can feel like there are too many obstacles and not enough support to finish this long, solitary, tortuous journey.
Professionalism, elucidates the philanthropic dimension of the contemporary faculty career. In this volume, scholars address the notion that in addition to teaching, research, and service, contributing to the public good by way of philanthropy is inherent in the fabric of the academic professorial career and as such, they advocate for its recognition as a dimension of faculty work.
When people first think of professorial philanthropy, they may conjure images of faculty engaging in activities such as community service. Shaker takes a different stance, focusing on the element of the faculty role that serves the public good in its broadest form. Therefore, to illustrate this paradigm shift, Shaker reflects on her graduate advisor’s philanthropic actions from which she benefited, including mentorship sessions, motivational meetings, one-on-one writing time, access to
personal office space, introduction to personal contacts, and gifted books. Employing her personal experience as a springboard, Shaker argues that the faculty profession is “grounded in a responsibility to contribute to the public good. The expectation to meet society’s needs for an educated citizenry and societal requirements to advance and disseminate knowledge lend a philanthropic component to the act of being a faculty member” (p. 11). Thus, Shaker asserts that the faculty profession is anchored in the responsibility to growing demands of research productivity and increased pressure for student accountability, calls to both preserve and recognize the importance of faculty philanthropy.
Abstract
Most empirical analyses of the diversity of higher education systems use categorical variables, which shape the extent of diversity found. This study examines continuous variables of institutions’ enrolment size and proportions of postgraduate, fulltime and international students to find the extent of variation amongst doctoral granting and all higher education institutions in the UK, US and Australia. The study finds that there is less variety amongst all higher education institutions in the UK than in Australia, which in turn has much less variety than the US. This suggests that the extent of government involvement in higher education isn’t so important for institutional variety as the form which it takes. More tentatively, the paper suggests that the more limited the range of institutions for which government funding is available the stronger government involvement is needed to have variety among the limited range of institutions for which government financial support is available.
This report critically reviews the literature on learning styles and examines in detail 13 of the most influential models. The report concludes that it matters fundamentally which instrument is chosen. The implications for teaching and learning in post-16 learning
are serious and should be of concern to learners, teachers and trainers, managers, researchers and inspectors.
Rae Report (2005) recommendation:«…develop a
First-Generation Strategy that involves early outreach to students and ongoing supports to ensure success while they are enrolled».
Abstract
This survey study measured the association between risk and protective factors of anxiety and its implications on the
academic performance of 1,053 students at a four-year, public post-secondary institution in southwestern Ontario. Logistic
regression analyses revealed 13 significant variables at the univariable level, while the multivariable model yielded seven
significant factors. Students who felt hopeless significantly increased their odds of reporting anxiety adversely affecting
their academic performance, while being able to manage daily responsibilities was the only protective factor against anxiety
impacting students’ educational attainment. By planning, designing, and implementing proactive programs focusing on these
predictor variables, such interventions can equip students against the debilitative influence of anxiety on their academic
success.
Keywords: anxiety, academic performance, post-secondary students, student wellness, risk factors, protective factors
Background/Context: The literature on emotional and social intelligence, based on the the-oretical constructs of several authors, identifies self-awareness as a core skill for leadership development. However, there is very little research or theory on how one might develop a ped-agogy of self-awareness for leaders.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study describes an innovative leadership development program in self-awareness in the Summer Principals Academy at Teachers College. It describes both the theoretical and practical pedagogy of self-awareness training. What follows is a description of that pedagogy and some preliminary research results based on the journals and feedback of 45 students who completed the program in 2006.
"Administration" is a cold word. Yet — whether our many campus critics believe it or not — most full-time administrators have very deep feelings about the work they do. I was no exception. I got into the racket as an advocate for doctoral students in English, and I approached all my administrative work as a calling.
So let’s start with the big picture. What is the purpose of schools in our society? Why do societies invest so many resources into educating their young? Yes, we teach so that students will learn, but to what end? What is the point? Of what benefit and to whom is a well-educated public? These kind questions have to do with the philosophy of education. (A philosophy is a set of principles based on one’s values and beliefs that are used to guide one's behavior.) These kinds of questions greatly affect how we educate students yet, they do not get asked nearly enough. Below is a list of possible reasons for educating young humans. You will most likely find that it is hard to select just one; instead, there seems to be a variety of reasons or purposes.
Background/Context: Based on archival material, the following paper analyzes the political strategies of the early OECD stakeholders in transforming schooling from a cultural to a technological system and how they were in need of standardizing different existing patterns of thoughts or institutional behaviors in the member countries. The European standardization process observable in the early 1960s, triggered by the OECD, affected the organization of the educational policies on a ministerial level designed to influence the national school systems according to a specific ideology.
Near the beginning of a new study on racial attitudes and college attainment, the authors note the story of Desiree
Martinez, who attended a high school in a low-income part of Los Angeles and longed to enrol at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She confided her ambitions to a teacher. The teacher frowned and said, “I don’t know why
counselors push students into these schools they’re not ready for … Students only get their hearts broken when
they don’t get into those schools, and the students that do get in come back as dropouts.”
We have all been there.
Midnight before an exam in the university library trying to memorize the key concepts of a semester’s worth of work. We write the exam. We leave the room. The concepts leave our mind. The cycle continues: record, memorize, forget. In doing so, we lose something essential to education: critical thought. What happened to challenging assumptions and questioning concepts? What about open-ended questions? What about no-answer scenarios? These notions serve as the core of the Liberal Arts and, yet, most existing courses fail to develop these skills.
In 2004, the Lumina Foundation for Education approved a generous grant to support validation research to explore and document the validity of the Community College Student Report (CCSR), add to the higher education field’s understanding of student engagement, and help to identify research or institutional practices that require further attention. The study was conducted in three strands that linked Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) respondents with external data sources: (1) data from the Florida Department of Education; (2) data from the Achieving the Dream project; and (3) student record databases maintained at community colleges that have participated in the CCSSE survey and are either Hispanic-Serving Institutions or members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). All participating students had participated in the 2002, 2003, or 2004 administrations of the Community College Student Report, CCSSE’s survey instrument.