I have been wanting to write about tired teaching for some time now. Concerns about burnout are what’s motivating me. Teachers can reach a place where teaching does nothing for them or their students. They don’t just wake up one morning and find themselves burned out; they’ve moved there gradually, and it’s a journey that often starts with tired teaching.
There’s nothing on the subject in my big file of articles and resources. I can’t remember having read about it, and I’m not sure how much we even talk about it. We do talk about being tired. Teaching is relentless. It happens every day, several times a week—or potentially 24/7 if it’s online. And it’s demanding. There’s so much more than the actual teaching. There’s considerable planning involved before each class. Plus, we need to spend time with students—those who want to talk, those needing
help, and those with questions or, sometimes, complaints. There are assignments to grade and feedback to provide—
all carrying the expectation of a quick turnaround. With multiple courses to teach, we do get tired, but I think we regularly confuse physical fatigue with the more serious emotional tiredness that comes from a heavy workload of always being there, always giving, and always juggling multiple balls in the air.
In the first year on the job, a college president may feel pressure to put out a glossy five-year-plan or begin an ambitious capital campaign. But a new report by the Aspen Institute’s Task Force on the Future of the College Presidency lays out a model for what a productive first year should look like — and it doesn’t mention either of those big-ticket items.
Attrition from Canadian graduate programs is a point of concern on a societal, institutional, and individual level. To improve retention in graduate school, a better understanding of what leads to withdrawal needs to be reached. This paper uses logistic regression and discrete-time survival analysis with time-varying covariates to analyze data from the Youth in Transition Survey. The pre-entry attributes identified in Tinto’s (1993) model of attrition are exam-ined to help uncover who is most likely to withdraw from graduate school. A good academic background is shown to be the strongest predictor of entering graduate school. Upon entry, demographic and background characteristics, such as being married and having children, are associated with a reduced likelihood of completing. Policy recommendations at the department and in-stitution level are provided as well as directions for future research.
As the administrators in charge of orientation for new students in our graduate school, we were naturally apprehensive about welcoming them to a virtual campus this fall. Several months into the pandemic, everyone is suffering from “Zoom fatigue.” Glitches, awkwardness, boring content — by now, we’ve all experienced the bad side of videoconferencing. But with our campus staying virtual, our new-student orientation had to be online, too.
Using a cross-case analysis of online, on-campus and online university teacher preparation courses, this study critically examines the constraints and affordances of online teacher education in preparing teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLO) urban schools. The results of the study indicate that while there was no significant difference between online and on-campus courses in terms of teacher acquisition of knowledge related to CLO instruction and assessment, questions remain about whether online teacher preparation can promote critical self-reflection, culturally responsive teaching practices, and collaboration within schools, when teacher learning is not supported and situated in schools and communities in an ongoing and structured way.
Keywords
teacher education, urban education, linguistically responsive pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, language education, identity, teacher beliefs
Many universities have implemented campus-based initiatives addressing students’ mental health with the goal of promoting well-being. One such initiative is the newly developed Counsellor-in-Residence (CIR) program at the University of Calgary, which targets students’ mental health by providing residence- based counselling services and mental health programming. In this
process evaluation, students completed three waves of data collection conducted over the academic year. Each wave measured students’ mental health literacy, using the Mental Health Literacy Scale (O’Connor & Casey, 2015), and resiliency, using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-25 (Connor & Davidson, 2003). Males reported lower mental health literacy than females (p < .001), and international students reported lower mental health literacy than domestic students (p < .001). No differences in resilience levels were found between groups. These findings suggest that male and international students experience additional barriers to accessing campus-based mental health services. Implications for residence-based mental health programming that target male and international students are discussed.
Higher education enrolment rates across the world have soared in recent years, but there is little evidence of celebration.
In the UK, September’s news that nearly 50 per cent of English under-30s are now entering higher education for the first time in the £9,000 fee era was quickly overshadowed by figures obtained by the MP David Lammy revealing that 13 University of Oxford colleges made no offers at all to black students between 2010 and 2015. Days earlier, the sector’s higher education watchdog, the Office for Fair Access (Offa), had called for universities to make “fundamental changes” in pursuit of the “further, faster progress we badly need to see”.
Have you heard comments like this about online learning courses from faculty colleagues or students?
“I am not sure what we are supposed to do when...”
“There is no interaction, no feeling of belonging, no presence – I didn’t want to read an encyclopedia, I wanted to
learn!”
“I hated this course. PowerPoints, a disembodied voice at the end of the phone lecturing…”
Even well intentioned designs can go wrong.
Some online courses are poorly thought through and designed and do not reflect what we know about adult learning,
student engagement and learning outcomes, the importance of interaction and feedback and the need for presence. In fact, a number of courses are designed as replicas of classroom courses rather than as courses purposely designed for an online learning environment: what works in a classroom may or may not work online.
This article proposes a methodology for measuring institutional diversity and applies it to Ontario’s university sector. This study first used hierarchical cluster analysis, which suggested there has been very little change in diver- sity between 1994 and 2010 as universities were clustered in three groups for both years. However, by adapting Birnbaum’s (1983) diversity matrix
meth- odology to Ontario’s university sector, the author appears to have found a decrease in systemic diversity (differences in the type of institution and size of institution; Birnbaum, 1983) and climate diversity (differences in campus environment and culture; Birnbaum, 1983) between 1994 and 2010. Policy implications resulting from this study are also considered.
Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Ten million square kilometers stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans. While Canada’s wilderness is vast and diverse, most people in the country live in urban and suburban settings in regions
with dense populations.
I ended last academic year on a high induced by the pride from watching my students graduate and the appreciation communicated via hugs, selfies, gifts and cards. Yet while academic accomplishments like graduation are visible to most folks, other acts are seemingly smaller and often only noticed by students and the faculty members who supported them.
It is the structurally and institutionally marginalized students whose successes often require substantial emotional labor on the part of faculty and staff members. Experience shows that these students feel most comfortable with those of us who are also minoritized, as well as those of us who teach about injustice and communicate solidarity in the classroom.
Love him or hate him, there’s lots to say about Donald Trump. But how should instructors handle class discussions about the new president, if they allow them at all? An assistant professor of public and strategic communication at American University established with his students a set of ground rules for talking about Trump, which he says may be useful to colleagues elsewhere as they engage with policy and other issues.
Baylor University’s newly named president, Linda A. Livingstone, has had a long career in higher education. But there’s one position that’s not on her résumé: provost.
Increasingly, that’s not an unusual step to skip, according to a report, released on Wednesday, that analyzed 840 college presidents’ CVs. While serving as provost was once a clear steppingstone on the way to the president’s office, many deans are now moving straight into the top job, according to the report, which was issued by Deloitte’s Center for Higher Education Excellence and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for 21st Century Universities.
This paper challenges conventional wisdom about the drivers of international community at the individual level. Presenting
new data and a novel natural experiment approach to the study of cross-border contact and international community,
it tests some of the key microfoundations of international relations theory about how a sense of shared international community may arise and evolve among individuals. The hypotheses are tested using survey data from a large sample (n = 571)
of American study abroad students in a range of universities across a treatment and a control group. Surprisingly, findings
do not support the main hypothesis that cross-border contact fosters a sense of shared international community. However,
the second hypothesis drawn from the liberal paradigm, suggesting that cross-border contact lowers threat perceptions, is
strongly supported. The “Huntingtonian” hypothesis that cross-border contact heightens nationalism also garners wide
support. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for theory and future research, especially the potential
of rethinking the drivers of international community at the individual level to rely less on a sense of shared identity and
essential sameness, and more on a feeling of “enlightened nationalism” and appreciation for difference.
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.
When a person goes to the doctor, it is good to be examined by a professional who can creatively approach diagnosing and developing solutions to physical ailments. When a jetliner is facing a challenging flight situation, it is comforting to know your plane is being piloted by a creative team that will find a way to guide you gently and safely to the ground.
Throughout the summer, I have often found myself in discussions about international students. During these discussions I have constantly heard about the “benefits” these individuals bring to Canadian universities described as “unique perspectives in class discussions” or “a significant economic impact.” This is true – international students do provide immeasurable benefits; however, they also face significant barriers while attending our institutions. We need to start shifting our focus from the benefits these students bring, to ways that we can help them succeed while they are attending our institutions.
A university education can provide an individual with greater employment options, higher income potential, and improved health and quality of life, yet young persons from rural areas remain less likely to attend university than their urban counterparts. This study explores the perceived personal, social, and cultural factors that might create barriers for young persons from rural areas. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 individuals living in rural areas in Alberta, aged 18 to 23 years, who had not attended univer-sity. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, we identified 11 major themes, which were then organized into a conceptual model to illustrate the interacting nature of these factors and their influence on a person’s decision to pursue a university education. An examination of this model and its associ-ated themes may help reveal the possible barriers young persons from rural areas experience when deciding whether or not to attend university.
Une formation universitaire peut permettre aux individus d’avoir un plus grand nombre d’options d’emploi et de meilleurs salaires, en plus d’améliorer leur santé et leur qualité de vie. Malheureusement, les jeunes des milieux ruraux demeurent moins enclins à fréquenter l’université que leurs homologues citadins. Cette étude se penche sur les facteurs personnels et socioculturels perçus qui pourraient ériger des barrières limitant l’accès universitaire aux jeunes adultes des milieux ruraux. Une étude basée sur des entrevues semi-structurées a été réalisée auprès de 17 individus âgés de 18 à 23 ans habitant en milieu rural albertain et n’ayant pas fréquenté l’université. Avec l’analyse interprétative de phénomène, nous avons répertorié 11 thèmes majeurs, que nous avons regroupés en un modèle conceptuel afin d’illustrer la nature des interactions entre ces facteurs et leur influence sur la décision des personnes d’entamer des études universitaires. L’examen du modèle et des thèmes associés pourrait révéler les barrières possibles auxquelles font face les jeunes adultes issus de milieux ruraux lorsque vient le temps de choisir d’étudier ou non à l’université.
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.
As a professor for nearly 15 years, I have advised more doctoral students than I care to count. I’ve had my fair share of national award winners, those who gave up and vanished, and countless students in between. I have referred them to books, manuals, articles, and advice columns that provide no shortage of step-by-step guidance on how to embark upon the pinnacle of their studies — the doctoral dissertation