Background/Context: The increasing number of districts implementing mentoring and induction programs suggests that policymakers are aware of the need to increase the support available to new teachers. The argument underlying many of these programs is based, at least partly, on assumptions about beginning teachers’ emotional responses to their work. Yet while considerable research has studied the effects of induction programs, few researchers have rigorously collected data on how beginning teachers’ affective experiences seem to impact their career plans.
Speaking to an audience at Western University last week, Prime Minister Trudeau earned a round of appreciative applause by referring to it as the “Harvard of Canada.” It’s a harmless enough conceit: “Harvard of the North” t-shirts are sold at university souvenir shops across Canada. But of course, there is no Canadian equivalent of Harvard, with its prestige, limited enrollment and its $60,000 tuition. And really, it’s just as well.
When it is remarked that Canada does not have a university with the international stature of a Harvard or an Oxford, it is usually with an air of wistful regret. Or perhaps it’s used as another example of how Canadians are in thrall to the “tall poppy syndrome”: a tendency to disparage the achievements of those who have excelled. And sometimes the lack of an elite university is seen as evidence of how Canadians under-appreciate the benefits of higher education.
Most students are encouraged to seek help to combat stress, but international students who are burning out fear
that asking for help may lead to deportation.
Adolfo Ruiz, 21, is from Venezuela and studying in B.C. After months of intensive study, working part-time and living
in a cramped room, he hit a wall emotionally.
"You are just crying your guts out and you are not able to talk," Ruiz said. "It was like a total, mental emotional
the breakdown for me."
But Ruiz said he was afraid to ask for help. "If you mess up once, then your record is totally stained for the rest of
your life," he said.
As an international student hoping to stay on in Canada, Ruiz feared that any public sign of weakness could hurt his
chances
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.
When Harvard University announced Lawrence S. Bacow as its president-in-waiting on Sunday, the institution focused heavily on his illustrious academic history, past presidential experience at Tufts University and family story as the son of immigrants.
Less discussed was Bacow’s age. He’s 66, about four years older than the average college president. If he stays at Harvard for 10 years -- the tenure he has previously said is about right for a president -- he will be stepping down in his mid-70s.
Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses’ How Real is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology is a refreshing read on the significance of understanding race not as biology, but as a sociocultural construct that operates as power. The word “refreshing” is apropos because it achieves what has been challenging for many of us educators: the writers painstakingly explain and show how race has been and continues to be constructed through culture. And they do it in clear language—a true feat considering the complexity of the topic and the fact that this is the first book to take up the project of a “biocultural approach” to explaining the racial construct. With respect to the biocultural approach, the authors argue, “Race is very much culturally and socially real, and has had and continues to have real consequences, both social and biological” (p. xvi). While offering a perspective on race that connects biology and cultural anthropology, they debunk in great detail the enduring myth of race as biological by presenting key research studies in an accessible manner.
One of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s most popular massive open online courses is adding a feature not seen in any of its other humanities MOOCs: instructors grading essays.
Learners in Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness, which started on Monday, now have the option to have their essays graded and reviewed by real, flesh-and-blood philosophers -- in this first case, one of MIT’s own graduate students. The goal, according to MIT, is twofold: to give learners from all over the world an introduction to basic philosophical topics and -- for those who pay $300 for an identity-verified certificate -- an opportunity to improve their written argumentation skills and to experiment with new employment opportunities for philosophers.
Background: Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parentteacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the
expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching.
Internationalization processes are at the fore of university strategic plans on a global scale. However, the work of internationalization is being performed through the connections between many actors at different policy levels. Our purpose here is to ask, what is happening with internationalization of higher education at the Canadian national policy level? To do so, we suggest that we must look at policies at the national level not as individual entities but rather as these policies exist in relation to each other. We examine three recent policy statements from different organizations at the national level in Canada: a federal governmental agency, a pan-Canadian provincial organization and a national educational association. Our approach involved mapping the actors, knowledges and spaces that are discursively produced through these texts and engaging a relational approach to policy analysis that questions what comes to be assembled as these policies co-exist in the national landscape.
A seasoned educator shares four ideas for supporting students who have suffered emotional trauma.
This section contains policy, procedures and guidance used by Immigration, Refugees andCitizenship Canada staff. It is posted on the Department’s website as a courtesy to stakeholders.
Early in my career, I struggled to say no. I was asked to serve on committee after committee, to evaluate fistfuls of manuscripts and grants, and to perform dozens of other tasks, large and small. I said yes willy-nilly — often because of genuine interest, but other times out of a sense of guilt or obligation, and sometimes out of fear of reprisal if I refused.
But as I advanced in my career, the requests snowballed. Agreeing to do all of them — or even half of them — became mpossible. I needed to figure out when to say no, and how to do it artfully. Five principles have helped me learn what to say, and what not to say.
Volunteer someone else — strategically. Often when people ask you to do something, they don’t actually need you to do it. They just need the task done. Even more urgently, they need to complete the task of obtaining a commitment from someone to do it. At the moment of the "ask," they likely do not view you as the holder of unique talents or the only person who could possibly do this work. More likely, they see you as a potential checked box on their own to-do list.
In the past year, national discussions about glass ceilings in politics and in the board room, and sexist news coverage of the Olympics, have brought the subject of gender equity to the forefront of the American consciousness in compelling ways. Higher-education institutions are no strangers to the issue, as they struggle to meet their own aggressive gender-equity goals.
With women making up only about 26 percent of all college and university presidents, there’s a lot of ground to cover. But in the Minnesota State system, we think we may have identified the secret sauce. The recent addition of seven new presidents has resulted in almost 50 percent of our presidents’ being female — 14 out of 30.
In addition, the presidents of all the colleges and universities have elected four women to represent them on the executive committee of the Minnesota State Leadership Council, a body consisting of all the campus presidents as well as the chancellor’s cabinet.
New analysis offers more evidence against the reliability of student evaluations of teaching, at least for
their use in personnel decisions.
There is nothing new in the role popular culture plays in issues of young people and identity. Few people reading this chapter did not, at some point, present their identities or claim their affiliations through displays of popular culture content or preferences. Beatles or Rolling Stones? Tupac or Biggie? Star Wars or Star Trek? Halo or World of Warcraft? Sex in the City or Grey’s Anatomy? We have all argued, shared, reminisced, disdained, or delighted in performing our identities through popular culture and using it to gauge potential friends or possible adversaries.
In contemporary higher education there is a growing demand for academ-ics to increase their publication output. This requirement raises the question of how institutions can best support a sustainable academic writing culture, which is needed to challenge the assumption that all academics know how to write for publication. This case study examines two models used in a Faculty of Education to support writing groups for academic staff. From the analysis of reflective journals, interviews, and field notes, we identified four factors that influence the success of writing groups, as well as six conditions that sup-port the development of sustainable academic writing. We have learned from the study that the success of a writing group is predicated on a collaborative practice that blends relational, communal, and institutional forms of sustain-ability in a purposeful, engaged, and reflexive way.
After struggling for months to receive the accommodations she was entitled to, one student shares her story as a lesson for university administrators, faculty members and front-line staff.
I intend to never grade another paper.
At the height of my adjunct "career" teaching writing, world religions, and general humanities courses, I taught up to 12 courses a year at three different institutions in the Houston area. I juggled about 400 students a year in my courses, and each student wrote three to five papers. Do the math — that’s a lot of grading.
I worked that oxymoronic full-time adjunct load for a decade — in addition to teaching a few continuing-ed courses just for kicks and extra income. In short, I taught more students and graded more papers in a decade than most of my full-time colleagues at the same university would teach in their entire careers.
For a while, I was sort of an adjunct guru. I self-published a book called How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An ntrepreneurial Strategy Manual and ended up writing a monthly advice column on The Adjunct Track for The Chronicle. I also provided coaching to other non-tenure-track instructors to help them figure out ways to work the system and squeeze as much money out of it as possible. The idea was to come as close as they could to an income that honored their knowledge and credentials — or to at least not have to wait tables on nonteaching days to make ends meet.
I did well financially. I made my mortgage every month and managed to save a little. But I shoveled my share of hate mail from people who said I was justifying an exploitative system when, really, all I was trying to do was find a way to survive (maybe even thrive for a few moments) within it.
In 2008, University of Manitoba professors Stephen Downes and George Siemens taught a course on learning theory that was attended by about 25 paying students in class and by another 2,300 students online for free. Colleague Dave Cormier at the University of Prince Edward Island dubbed the experiment a “massive open online course,” or MOOC.
ew report on transfer of struggling students from universities to community colleges finds students benefit from moving in nontraditional direction.